I really enjoyed the conversation with Amy. There is no question that we are in the very early stages of how IT is revolutionizing education by allowing ‘off-site’ participation through communication.
One of the beneficial impacts of this technology is that you don’t need large physical ‘bricks & mortar’ classrooms to teach. That physical infrastructure is very expensive to build & maintain, Herding everyone to one location so they can learn is likely not a sustainable model.

I was on the Board of a major university some years ago, and I was startled to discover that there were hundreds of millions of dollars of ‘deferred building maintenance’ that the institution was struggling to fund. As a result, funding for essential learning tools was suffering.
In a recent article, prof. Shoshana Zuboff of Harvard talks about how the new notion of ‘distributed capitalism’ using digital technology may resuce us from costly and outdated old industry structures. The article gives an example of how this can be applied to get the exploding cost of health care under control. I think the same challenge applies to the existing education model with its increasing expensive infrastructure.
So what Amy is talking about and what Cisco is demonstrating every day with the Academy learning model is helping to define a more efficient and responsive learning model that points to an exciting future.