I recently watched a TED talk that blew my socks off. It was by an MIT researcher from their famed Media Lab who wired up his house with video camera's and sound recording and then recorded and analyzed the first few years of his baby sons life.
By analyzing the data he was able to learn some things about how babies learn and how parents adjust their behavior to optimize the learning experience of their child.
This really got me thinking. My son attends a daycare 2 days per week. The daycare has streaming video available to the parents. It would not be much of a stretch to add some cloud storage to that mix and create huge repositories of data that could serve as a source to find out how kids learn from other kids. Extend that analogy to the classroom to find out the most effective teaching methods.
How about the learning of second languages by adults?
How about animal behavior?
How about other social behaviors. World of Warcraft must have awesome data repositories of social interactions from which we could learn a lot.
As we move to an online cloud based world. I think we will actually learn a lot about ourselves empirically from huge data sets of social information.
Facebook > North Africa uprisings > greater self awareness through seemingly useless but entertaining social interaction.
We have only begun to see the power of a database. Google is just the tip of the iceberg.