learning style

I recently had the opportunity to read a local author's work pre-publication. I'm not a writer, and not one for critical analysis, but the opportunity was (and still is) thrilling. It opened up fields of character analysis that I probably never would have experienced otherwise. Further discussion of characters in other media led to my being exposed to other writers, styles of development, analysis of my own life, and my relationship with my daughter. I often have similar cascades of interest and information.

This particular cascade happened primarily on paper and face-to-face. There's been some online follow-up, but with the ease of that sort of lightening research online follow-up is hard to avoid. Interesting to me is the fact that it could have happened entirely online. Even more interesting to me is the fact that it happened without university intervention.

Weighing the experiences of my institutionalized academic learning against my experiences learning through self plotted courses of inquiry, I'm seeing the scales tipping strongly in favor of self directed inquiry, especially now that the internet serves as lyceum and library. I wonder what Emerson and Thoreau would say about it?