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Even when one gets beyond the general education lecture hall, lectures will still become unnecessary. True, an upper-division undergrad or grad course may call upon faculty specialized knowledge, but it is not the knowledge alone that make faculty valuable. It is the opportunity students have to interact with faculty. It is human interaction, whether FTF or online, that is labor intensive. The opportunity to work individually or in small groups with faculty or participate in a class small enough to allow for discussion: this is where the value lies in higher education.

So if you were to build a higher education system from the ground up, keeping for the moment disciplinary specializations (the question of discipline is a different matter), the one thing you'd want to retain from the current system is the opportunity for students to interact with faculty-scholars. You can dump the rest of it. The rest is really just there for accounting and management purposes.

For example, one could imagine an English undergraduate program where one could find a repository of educational media dealing with subjects across the discipline which would serve as points of reference for the curriculum. Then you would have faculty who would announce various projects, perhaps developed in collaboration with interested students. Students would enlist in the project, work with faculty, and produce work. There could be student publications and conferences. Eventually there could be a portfolio review, culminating exam, and so on. Obviously the system would need to be a little more complex than that. There would be some introductory projects that would need to be taught that would serve as pre-reqs. Some projects that might serve the purpose of general education. And one would look to faculty to provide a certain level of interaction for students.

what we're seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them.

The Filtering is Done Post Hoc - There's an analogy here with every journalist who has ever looked at the Web and said "Well, it needs an editor." The Web has an editor, it's everybody. In a world where publishing is expensive, the act of publishing is also a statement of quality -- the filter comes before the publication. In a world where publishing is cheap, putting something out there says nothing about its quality. It's what happens after it gets published that matters. If people don't point to it, other people won't read it. But the idea that the filtering is after the publishing is incredibly foreign to journalists.

It's all dependent on human context. This is what we're starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing with a significant break -- by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.