Scaffolding applications will help beginning students organize their inquiries and reflect on their learning. Soon, there will be billboard-free toll roads, and many of these will have educational value. They will be important to education because most useful education resources take people time to create, operate, maintain, and update, and involve intellectual property that often requires income reward. Some of this time and property will be provided free by public-spirited volunteers, foundations, and companies. But donated resources will always be a small and unstable fringe effort, rarely able to scale up to have a significant impact on education.
Most good education involves irreducible human costs.
Students may be able to communicate with scientists, but not many, so this form of education will not be significant on a national scale. And discussion groups need moderators. In essence, a teacher or similarly knowledgeable person must be available to interact with students and assess their understanding, and that person needs to be compensated. As a result, most resources that can be scaled to reach large numbers of students will cost money that eventually will have to be paid directly by the end user or their schools. On the contrary, we have stumbled onto something that is usually more valuable, asynchronous communication.