Web technology is about to change how we learn

It's a tragedy how little impact software has had on (formal) education - decades of hype, promising trials (PLATO, Logo, Smalltalk) eventuated no profound innovation ... only peripheral benefits (note-taking, paper-writing, class projects ...) Mostly because you need to be an educator to know what educators need - and you're too busy.

Opportunities for informal, self-directed education, OTOH, are constantly improving. The number of well-developed reference sites online shows no sign of letting up. Great for the already-educated. But for K-12 ... still a wasteland.

I would argue it already has. I, for one, would have gone to college had I not been able to use the internet to access the information I needed in order to learn the skills I needed for my chosen career. True, lots of skills can be learned by reading books, talking to people, going out and learning by doing, etc but the internet makes most of that process much more efficient, which changes the cost/benefit ratio of higher education significantly already.