Cloud or Slime Mold: The Future of Education

As I've been working to publish my company's first blog posts, I was struck by this prophetic diagram of four industries moving into the virtual cloud:

Now take a look at the top right quadrant:
I had just written about how most people have been "using the cloud for years without noticing" when I realized that's exactly what's been happening here at BGI, without my noticing.

Has anyone else found it odd that we're using Harvard Business School course material, that our lectures, quizzes & assignments float around in this place called Moodle, or that our online textbooks at Flatworld now include video?

In some sense, no kidding, this is an online program we're talking about. It shouldn't be such a surprise.

In another sense, just how much of this would have been possible less than five years ago? I think we've mentioned the term "disruptive technology" in lecture....

I remember the days before YouTube was a verb (when I still thought it was spelled U-Tube) and people used it mostly to post embarrassing or inane videos. Now the Khan Academy is a legitimate teaching tool (okay, so some of this is more present reality than actual prediction).

This examination of cloud-based business opportunities by Dion Hinchcliffe speaks to the radical growth of cloud in recent years.

To get a better sense of what's going on here, I visited another cloud computing phenomenon - Wikipedia - which tells me that "Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of scale similar to a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network." There's a lot more I don't yet understand, but I'm fascinated by this idea of computing, as an extension of our brains, taking on an economy of scale.

And while I don't believe we're to the stage of uploading our entire psyches to a communal database:

We do exhibit some striking resemblance to slime mold which has been shown to leave itself memories in the form of external trails (true story: it takes 10 times longer for a slime mold to find food without access to its "collective database" of slime trails):

Photo Credit: Universitat Pompeu Fabra
www.medicaldaily.com/articles/12598/20121009/brainless-slime-molds-secrete-memories-solve-problems.htm

With some talk of the slime mold as the official BGI mascot, perhaps it's no coincidence that the education system upon which our graduate institute is built biomimics this enigmatic life-form. By outsourcing our knowledge from individuals, to classrooms, to entities beyond the walls of our institution, we're taking advantage of an economy of scale the slime mold discovered ages ago.

And we've been doing it practically without realizing it - how fascinating.