Project-based curriculum have been around forever. But this has not be widely adopted within Universities for some very good reasons:

1) Courses can be recycled across programs. For example, you have one calculus course that you use for the business students and the geology students. Once you get rid of book-oriented courses, recycling becomes harder.

2) Project-based learning may be more labor intensive from the teacher point of view. As a university professor, I can "teach" to 1000 students in a given term as long as it is a standard course with linear content and I get some extra help for marking the assignments.

So, the real question Harold is whether your techno-utopia can scale to thousands of students.

Oh! It can. Maybe. The problem is that you get a large chunk of the student population who would never think (even in 2008) of looking up something in Google or... wikipedia.

I hear that in some schools, looking something up on the Web is frowned upon (even in 2008).