Education
Sebastian Fiedler has written a couple of interesting posts on learning and self-organization, the first of which is calledSeblogging: Is self-organization in learning always the problem of somebody else?.
It reminded me that the value of university - certainly as I saw it - was (at least) 50% social, but there's a yin/yang catch.
The yin for me is breadth: while I enjoyed my course, and learnt a lot from it, being in a group of like-minded, almost certainly pretentious(!), but definitely curious peers who could knock the edges off your ideas (and prejudices) - and being able to do so regularly, face to face - was fantastic.
And the yang is depth: while I loved bandying around ideas and learning new things from my friends, I suspect our conversations would have very quickly "centrifuged" had it not been for the traditional discipline of bookwork/lecture/seminar and essay.
In that sort of arena, with a sensible balance of social and academic, I suspect an autodidact could flourish. Out of that arena, the main difficulty (again I suspect) is not the work or the content, but just having to hunt hard, really hard, for a community of sharp-minded peers from such varied backgrounds.
Could that balance be reached with e.g. blogs instead of face to face? Does blogging etc. match the value of pub and coffee-machine-in-the-library chats about topics of interest? It may come close, but the answer, for me, is no. Not now, I think, and certainly not when I was nineteen.
Anyway, Sebastian's posts are good stuff and well worth the time. [Sebastian - I tried leaving this on your blog but I couldn't get the comments to work]