When I left USC I was working on the “brains” behind electronic tutoring systems. The idea was that you could build software to help people learn stuff, regardless of what the “stuff” was. You have some curriculum, and you present the curriculum to them, and this super awesome software figures out which pieces of the curriculum to present, and when, and how often, to get them to learn it as quickly as possible.
This seemed to my advisor like a Pretty Good Idea.
So: there’s a lot of talk (among people who talk about such things) about the teeming hordes in Asia and Africa who are fit to slather glue on rubber to build shoes, but who are not fit for any role in the knowledge economy. This fact is the fount of the last bit of comfort for American protectionists: those Chinamen can sit at assembly lines cranking out doodads for us to put into our landfills, but they can’t build the space shuttle. Hell, they can’t even make reasonable restaurant menus.
But what if those teeming hordes *were* prepared, or at least, as prepared as American undergraduates, to participate in the knowledge economy? Wouldn’t that be a frightening prospect? You can already see this happening in certain parts of the third world; Bangalore, for instance, is the Indian Silicon Valley, filled with incredibly smart and industrious people. Even so, the number of MIT-caliber Indian students is infinitesmal compared to the total number of Indians, and this ratio probably matters.
This is starting to go far afield, so here’s the god damn link: this organization is making free textbooks. Many of the textbook authors are college professors who are fed up with how the textboox industry milks students, sets standards and curricula, and decides for huge swathes of the country when they must collectively shell out a zillion dollars to get the latest new edition of Stewart’s Calculus. Some of the textbooks are collaborations between strangers. Some of them are compilations, by third parties, of modules made created by a host of other third parties.
What’s exciting about this, and scary, is that the knowledge is out there. All the knowledge you need to work at Google or MSFT or Lockheed is out there, now, and it’s more out there all the time. The barrier to entry for a Mongolian Horatio Alger story is getting very low: you need a screen, an internet connection, and some free time. And some motivation, yes, some diligence, yes, but I suspect that living in some urban slum wiping your ass with your hand gives you at least as much of those qualities as the doughy life of a suburban couch-potato kid who’s never known any sort of hardship more extreme than having his Playstation privileges revoked.
Of course, a trove of free multi-lingual textbooks is still a goodly distance from any sort of educational utopia, but little by little the tools are being disseminated. Eventually somebody is going to realize my advisor’s technical ambition, described in the first paragraph; eventually you’ll be able to plop down some kid from the rubblefields of Afghanistan and set him loose with a tutoring system (perhaps running on an OLPC or some successor) and after a couple of months he’ll emerge as competent as an undergrad from the University of Minnesota, Morris.
And then what?