New insights into Udacity, its learning and business models, and Thrun's thinking

This 3 July 40 minute interview by Jason Calcanis with Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun is, how shall I say? very "West Coast", even setting aside the advertisements.

I found myself feeling greater empathy with the interviewee than the interviewer, though you do have to admire Calcanis's interview technique, apart from his tendency to interrupt a bit too much.

Thrun has a very clear vision; his heart is in the right place; and he has understood in a deep and serious way how online learning, done on a really big scale, and organised and supported in the right way, can and will change things for the better. The kinds of changes that Thrun envisages (to models for learning, to what it means to be a teacher, to the educational establishment) will -- if they are done right -- be worth it from the point of view of learners and the world at large. But if you were now setting out on a career as a teacher, especially in post-compulsory education, wouldn't you have to take seriously Thrun's points about the fall in the proportion of the workforce in the developed world involved in farming, once modern mechanised methods took hold?

[By way of a counter-argument, see Jordan Weisman's Why the Internet Isn't Going to End College As We Know It in The Atlantic, via Mark Guzdial.]