Information as currency – is this a two-way street?
At least three notable universities, Harvard, Yale and Stanford are pushing the envelope in higher education by offering their “product” for free. This is wonderful news, but I can’t help but wonder – what are they getting out of this? If this model is anything like we’ve seen in the past, the currency is information. But how will they use it? We’ve seen information-as-currency model work for tech companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon. The warm fuzzy feeling many of us get when we think about them is an intricate ruse to court and keep us so we’ll keep feeding them information about