I was at a dinner the other night hosted by MIT’s Shanghai alumni club where the new president of MIT, Neurobiologist Susan Hockfield, gave a very interesting speech how the predominant development trend at MIT over the next decade will be “mashups” of life sciences, technology and business applications.

During the Q&A session President Hockfield mentioned something called “Open Source MIT” – I didn’t know about this but apparently MIT has placed all of their curriculum online (e.g. class notes, etc) for free. They get an average 34,000 new users a month, of which 50% are international users.

This “free access” reminds me of a line from the movie “Good Will Hunting” — I think it was Matt Damon who said, “…you wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”