Is MIT Obsolete?

I spent some time in Gershenfeld's lab while at MIT. He's on to something in that the machinery and know-how needed to engineer a new kind of robot or sensor are ready to spread far and wide.

The title is overly provocative, and brings to mind other discussions, some provoked by PG essays, about the role of universities, the efficacy or applicability to the real world of different levels of education as they're currently taught, the practical difference between a good school and a bad school, whether you should go to grad school, etc. Such discussions tend to bore me.

Suffice it to say that without MIT, there would be no Fab Labs. Even viewing MIT as purely a place to educate students, or purely a place to do research, or purely a place to do engineering, none of which it is, MIT is not in danger of becoming obsolete any time soon, even with its curriculum publicly available and its technological resources becoming less scarce.

What's with the sudden surge of articles about higher education going obsolete? This article isn't even about that. It's that the methods available to help people learn are in a constant state of flux and that MIT is helping lead the way with it's Fab Labs.

From the closing of the article: "The MITs of the world are far from obsolete, but instead of draining brains away from where they are most needed, these institutions can now share not just their knowledge but also their tools, by providing the means to create them. Rather than advanced technological development and education being elite activities bounded by scarce space in classrooms and labs, they can become much more widely accessible and locally integrated, limited only by the most renewable of raw materials: ideas."

I read the whole interesting article before noticing that the author is currently affiliated with MIT.

Sure, the internet has made started to make available the ideas and knowledge of elite institutions. And those institutions will continue to give away more information and higher quality instruction. It might even get to the point where information gotten from a professor during class will be about the same quality of the information gotten from the internet.

But this only helps places like MIT, even in educating the students there. The internet can't compete with real life in surrounding you with competent and experienced people. That's probably why people like PG recommend that you move to Silicon Valley, so that you can surround yourself with successful people who are doing the same things you are. And MIT giving away information only increases their brand, which lets them choose from more people.

So that means that if I go to a place like MIT for grad school, I'll know that I will have surrounded myself with people who are all very knowledgeable about what I will be doing. I probably won't get that to such a great degree if I go to a school with very low standards, and I definitely won't get that if I stay home and study from materials off the internet. It's mostly about the quality and goals of the people you are surrounding yourself with.

No, places like MIT and other research universities will survive because they also are a community of research. Also, most people who are actually using the Fab lab are associated with research institution. I don't really think that the masses will start using fab labs anytime soon but possibly in the future.

The playing field is much more leveled, but few schools actually recognize what subjects are valuable to teach (so many go with the latest hype), Joel put it better in his article:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/article/ThePerilsofJavaSchools...