Once well-organized, with advanced software tools, I expect Internet forums to drive advances in education and technology.
I agree, but I expect it will take a fair amount of work. The Internet tools available today are staggeringly impressive compared to those we used in its infancy, before it was marketed to the masses; however, the more advances we make, the more we find out that we need to know.
Also we have to think not about forums, but about the entirety of the web. These are very simple bulletin boards, but there are numerous very different fora that need to be unified. We're still not where we need to be.
Most people just come to the net and learn what they learn and think, well this is the way it should be done!
Can you open a can with a hunting knife? Certainly you can! Done it many times! Vast improvement over using a rock or a screw driver! Imagine you've never seen a can opener. A hunting knife seems like the ultimate tool for opening cans, until someone shows you a P-38.
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http://www.georgia-outfitters.com/page52.shtml )
There are many axes of interest, many ways to communicate, many ways of addressing those types of communication. Success along one axis does not necessarily translate to success along another. Example: Youtube. Brilliant idea, successfully marketed. But it's actually a basic tool. Ideally, one should not see YT. It should be hidden away behind some other interface. I don't know what that interface looks like, but I know it needs to be different. It needs a tool to fit over the top of it. YT is probably not inclined to build this; outsiders may have some legal issues in building on top of YT.
YT, Bulletin boards (what the OP calls internet discussion forums), wikis, twits, blogs, vlogs, rss feeds, chats - right now it's a random mess with very weak linkages. (That's actually kind of good for now, because it allows each feature to evolve rapidly independently.)
Currently, the vast majority of YT videos are a waste of bandwidth. (That's not quite true. They're a waste for most viewers, not for all viewers.) Same for blogs, and so forth. Even if you're looking in a very narrow domain, searching for the good stuff is irritating. Example: Until recently, if you tried to look up thermodynamics and evolution and you would have had to wade through an interminable amount of utter stupidity to get to anybody who actually knew what they heck they were talking about. (That's not true any more - I just checked and the top sites are from people who actually know the stuff. Don't know what happened there, but you get the idea.)
YT is a basic level tool that COULD in principle BE built upon - and probably eventually will. If not, there will be some competitor that will replace it - eventually. So I'm not really talking about YT, but the function that YT serves - sharing and discussing videos.
I'm not saying YT or discussion fora or anything else is bad. I'm saying they're in their toddlerhood. Kinda like the internet chat programs of 25 or 30 years ago - very primitive stuff, but they were the precursors of what we have today.
