I cannot agree with this enough. I am a teacher (at an international school in Tokyo). Way back when I was a student teacher in the US, we had parent/teacher night. I had one class which was a strong academic class with about 15 students. I had another class with 40 low academic students. For the class with 15 students, the parent/teacher night was full with parents - basically 100% of the students had a parent show up. For the class with 40 students only about 15 parents showed up - basically about 25% of the students had a parent show. This shows the relative importance of education for each group (of course, I'm sure some parents couldn't make it due to working at that time). There is only so much teachers and schools can do - education and values start at home.

All of the discussion going on about teaching programming in schools is a great new/old trend. Like many posters here, I learned basic programming skills years ago in middle / high school. But then that all changed somewhere along the line.

School technology courses began to focus on turning students into secretaries - students learn Microsoft Office. If you're lucky, they'll teach design skills (PhotoShop, etc.) The other trend these days is about using Web 2.0 to enable collaboration, which is not bad in and of itself, but misses the mark. That's where programming comes (back) in.

There are a lot of great free resources out there. I have taught programming using Scratch to third graders, Microsoft SmallBasic to fifth graders, and JavaScript to ninth graders. There is also GameMaker, which has a free lite version that allows for drag-n-drop game programming. Microsoft also has Kodu, which let's kids make 3D games with a drag-n-drop interface.

A few months ago I gave a TEDxTokyo presentation on the subject (excuse the shameless plug), which you may find interesting, possibly even entertaining...

I can't agree with this more - programming is one of the key literacies of the 21st century. Programming is as vital a subject to teach as music, art, or poetry. The skills gained by learning programming are applicable in almost any domain - skills such as analysis, abstract representation, and logic.

I recently gave a presentation at TEDxTokyoTeachers on this exact subject entitled "The Guitar and the Smart Phone". In it, I use the guitar as a metaphor (analogy?) for the way we are using computers in education and why that approach falls short of teaching the skills students need for the 21st century.

They should follow the state of Kentucky's lead and migrate everyone over to Live@edu, Microsoft's free cloud-based email, file storage, messenger and web app, system for schools. Kentucky was able to migrate 700,000 accounts over to Live@edu in the course of a weekend. (Ref: http://msftedublogger.wordpress.com/2010/06/03/state-of-kentucky-rolls-out-liveedu-to-700000-users/)

My school has been using Live@edu since the beginning of the year and it has been an unqualified success. Everthing is web-based (although you can use Outlook or another mail client if you prefer), which means it it also cross-platform. Mail is synced between all of a user's devices. It's pretty slick. The SkyDrive storage offers 25 GB of storage and is HTML5 based (but uses Silverlight on Windows).

Did I mention it's free?

The original question is a false dichotomy; the question isn't whether or not college should go online or not. The question is under what circumstances is the application of information technology and integration of online access and collaboration to the university education process appropriate and to what degree?

I am the Moodle Coordinator for the University of the People, a completely online tuition-free university. We have students from 119 countries learning in a collaborative fashion through online discussion forums, downloadable resources, and assignments including peer-assessed work and online quizzes, exams, and projects.

The mission of the university is to provide "universal access to quality, online post-secondary education to qualified students". Without the online component (through the open-source Moodle LMS), the university could not hope to fulfill this mission without charging a large tution and pricing most of the world's population out of the market. All coursework is online, and from my own perusal of the course materials, I find the curriculum to be challenging.

While this model will not and should not completely replace the traditional university, it is a viable model for providing a quality education, particularly to those who would not otherwise have the opportunity for financial or other reasons. For example, the university has a number of students from Haiti who, due to the 2010 earthquake, would have no other options.

I agree with several other posters who state that there is something to be gained from the interaction with professors, students, and others in the university community. That, of course, does not preclude posting resources online, creating discussion forums, and having students collaborate through the Internet. As an undergraduate (at Penn State) I had several undergraduate courses with 300+ students - my largest had over 1000. The professors in these courses mostly lectured; why couldn't the lecture be posted online and the quizzes, exams, and papers be submitted online? Not to mention there were students who did not attend class, but rather purchased the notes from one of the note-taking companies on campus. What's the difference?

A strong argument could easily be made that the blended approach is best; the workplace is increasingly becoming more diffuse and more and more collaboration is done between remote locations; in my case I live in Japan and collaborate with my university colleagues in the US and Israel and with intructors and students from around the world. The modern university education needs to adapt to and reflect this reality.

On a side note, it would be great if more world-class unveristies and colleges put their coursework online for all to see like MIT is doing with its OpenCourseware project.

The statements above reflect my own personal opinions; I do not speak for or represent the University of the People in any way, shape, or form.

For those of you interested, here is more information on the University of the People.
Wikipedia
Inside Higher Ed

I just started using BlueGriffon, a free and open source WYSIWYG web editor that is available for Linux, Windows, and MacOSX.

It's lineage is as follows:

Netscape Composer -> NVU -> Kompozer -> Blue Griffon

It's been around in one form or another since 1997, so I'm thinking it won't go anywhere.

"I've got a shotgun, a rifle, and a four-wheel drive. A country boy can survive." - Hank Jr.