I thought the cheating videos were interesting because they demonstrated an argument that I had been developing over the course of the past decade. First, with regard to everyday practices and long-term goals, formal institutions of codified pedagogy, represented by universities, were increasingly in conflict with individuals who were informally self-taught. Second, access to and use of computational media frequently seemed to exacerbate this tension. I thought this situation was particularly unfortunate in the era of socially networked computing, when one would hope that academic and popular forms of instruction would be converging to work in concert, thereby supporting a life-long culture of inquiry, collective intelligence, and distributed research practices. Certainly, the students in the videos were sharing tips and performing online knowledge-networking activities that constituted of a form of real learning, even if such learning would be considered objectionable by their professors who would, understandably, regard the content of the videos as being fundamentally in violation of the scholarly social contract.