Last week, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote with evangelical zeal about the arrival of Massive Online Open Courses, the free courses from top institutions available to students anywhere in the world. Not only would MOOCs be a huge industry in five years, he said, but financially strapped community colleges could use the online lectures while their own professors could work "face-to-face" with students. Friedman has been wrong before with this kind of technology related over-earnestness - In 1999, he wrote about how easy it would be for mom-and-pop online stores to compete with Amazon. ...