Computer Future Technology Trends in Instructional Technology: One of the most interesting trends to watch in 2007 is the continued democratizing power of the Web. You can see it everywhere. One of America's finest institutions of learning, Yale University, is posting its curriculum online for anyone to freely access. Education, broadly distributed, for free. It's great for our collective global intelligence. And Yale is not the only one - Stanford University, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, and others are participating in the Google Library Project to provide the entirety of their library's contents to everyone, everywhere via the Web.

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By Jonathan Schwartz
One of the most interesting trends to watch in 2007 is the continued democratizing power of the Web. You can see it everywhere. One of America's finest institutions of learning, Yale University, is posting its curriculum online for anyone to freely access. Education, broadly distributed, for free. It's great for our collective global intelligence.

And Yale is not the only one - Stanford University, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, and others are participating in the Google Library Project to provide the entirety of their library's contents to everyone, everywhere via the Web.

Whether or not you are interested in online education, what's really happening here is that these universities are reaching new "audiences" - students and academics in this case. Who's going to take these courses? Those who couldn't afford to attend, or are located in far regions of the globe, or maybe just didn't have the grades. Either way, what's important is that the universities aren't cannibalizing their existing student population, but expanding it (and their reputations) - to billions of people through the Internet.