About three weeks ago, Bill Gates attended the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, and made some 'contentious' statements about the future of education, predicting the web as the future of learning and other such fairly sensible soothsayings. Now the dust has settled, let's consider his comments.

So, he sees the traditional face-to-face learning environment on its way out does he? What does he know? Well, quite a lot actually, and early adopting universities who have debased and modularised their courses can give the I-told-you-so shake of the head to the poorer/more traditional institutions.

The central idea of Gates's assertion isn't really reinventing the wheel; it's the scale and rate of decline that Gates predicts which could cause the shock, and while it doesn't spell certain disaster it does and should definitely cause alarm, especially coming from such an esteemed thought leader. It just means that traditionalists will be forced into maintaining technological parity with their industry peers.

Knowledge is a commodity and an asset, and if the highest quality of learning is moved online to make an Ivy League-standard education available to the masses, that's a good thing, surely?

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Garnering the endorsement of the world's most famous computer whizz kid has done no harm to elearning advocates and social media pariahs. More about this in our social learning month, which kicks off next Wednesday.