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Marginalia

A 12-year-old Pakistani girl Khadija Niazi appeared in the World Economic Forum in Davos held in January 2013. She had spent two years in her home in Lahore completing several Udacity and Coursera courses, including physics and artificial intelligence courses offered by Stanford. One of Coursera's founders Daphne Koller, professor at Stanford, said, 'We don't know where the next Albert Einstein is. Maybe she lives in a small village in Africa.'

The development of the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) brings new stimulus to knowledge dissemination and pedagogy. The Chinese University is riding the wave. It has launched five Coursera courses for a start. Perhaps one day one can earn a college degree by taking the best online courses from the best universities in the world—computing from Stanford, literature from Oxford, economics from Chicago, and Chinese classics of CUHK—and paying only the nominal fee for the certificates of completion. No one knows. But it is only from the crest that you can see the opportunities on the horizon.

Likewise, the view is broader from the summit, and passionate hiker Prof. Lutz-Christian Wolff knows this. Back in the 1980s when the Internet was a far-cry from what it is today, he, a student from Bavaria, saw a wave forming half-way across the world. He talks about Eastern culture and law in 'Thus Spake …'.