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When I was in Sydney last year, I ran into some folks at an XML conference that were pushing the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology's then-new all-online certificate and degree programs. The program seems pretty solid, and the University is a hotbed of XML work. They have since been marketing to me pretty hard, and both my conversations with them and the materials portray it as a no-bullshit all-web-based program for BS, MS, and PhD in technical fields. Check it out the online program here.

While it seems all well and good, can anyone who has actually attended a program there comment on it? RMIT seems more serious than the current wave of schools using the shovelware method of developing online course offerings. Is it as good as it appears?

Readers have been quick to point out the "been there, done that" aspect - and I definitely concur; from either a conceptual or a technological viewpoint, there's nothing new here, check out Nomic, MUDs such as Shattered World, and countless others.

However... I'm dismayed at the knee-jerk "this is a scam" reflex. The reference to "former Yugoslav citizens" is particularly interesting in the context of recent events in that region; I can well understand the desire to create "from scratch" a nation based on hopefully saner principles.

For the skeptical and/or cynical, Greg Egan's novel Distress has an interesting digression at one point about how an 'artifical' nation, in the novel the island Stateless, is more likely to succeed in ensuring that democratic ideals flourish than an 'accidental' nation formed by the tortuous contingencies of history and geography; the people who move there want it to succeed.

Granted, the "Algorithm of the Social System" bit sounds silly and gimmicky, but hey, to succeed on the Internet you need a minimum of that. Meanwhile, I urge readers to judge the experiment on its own merits; its proclaimed intentions are, IMHO, beyond reproach.