Building Civilization

The World Wide Web is arguably the greatest medium of communication humanity has ever developed; however, is there any great communication going on? Beyond games, shopping, dating, etc., behind mass advertising and revenue maximizing exists an Internet with a more remarkable purpose.

Ubiquity of the Internet in Education

At the turn of the millennium, nearly 95% of youths reported using the Internet for school research; over two thirds used the Internet as their primary source for material. And these numbers are only getting larger. Now, ten years later, this trend has seemed to come of age, and the impact of the Internet on education is undeniable. Seemingly far removed from its origins as an inter-university network, the world wide web can be considered to be returning to its roots. Higher education has finally caught up to and embraced the ubiquity of the internet. It now seems like a far stretch from the 2001 finding that only about half of students had used a Website specifically set up for a particular class. Now, students will be hard pressed to avoid one.

Higher Education Online

The importance of the Internet in higher education is undeniable, not only in helping supplement available material, but also in substituting for it. Online databases such as JSTOR provides thousands of scholarly articles for academics and students conducting research for projects or papers. This free resource, available to most students in higher education represents the universal acknowledgment of the value of sharing information in education. Such free and reliable information sharing is invaluable to the goal of higher education. However, in the last decade, the internet redefined higher education in an entirely different and equally substantial way. One of the most prominent of these resources, released in 2007 by Apple is iTunes U. Expanding the media sharing model to beyond internal networks, Apple’s iTunes U provides universities with the infrastructure to share content with the entire world. Currently, nearly 400 world class universities distribute course content publicly on iTunes U. Whether one wishes to download lectures on psychology from Cornell or brain imaging from Carnegie Mellon University, iTunes U provides university level content available to anybody anywhere.

Expanding the Model

Such innovations are not, however, limited to higher education. In 2006, MIT graduate Salman Khan began his mission to of providing free educational videos directed for students from kindergarten to 12^th grade, covering mathematics, sciences, and the humanities. Now five years later, the Khan academy has over 2700 instructional videos accessed over 90 millions times. The Khan Academy’s goal is to provide “free world-class education to anyone anywhere.” The Academy uses a ground breaking approach that combines intuitive subject building and extensive data collection to track student progress and apprehension. The mechanics of the curriculum focuses on acknowledging actual progress as well as providing a big picture of what the student is learning.

The Khan Academy is not the only example of free, open source education available. Another service, Open Culture, founded in 2006, seeks to provide “high-quality cultural and educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community.” Open Culture provides free audiobooks, online course, movies, language lessons, and ebooks. Whether one wants to watch A Fistful of Dollars, find an introductory German lesson, or take a course on Ancient Greek History, Open Culture provides the resources to do so all for free and all easily accessed online.

Redefining Literacy

While online education has been breaking out in many new and innovative paths, so too have some of the most fundamental mediums through the world wide web. As a mechanism for the dissemination of knowledge, printed text is still an important resource. However, one of the most common problems with printed media is their difficulty of access. The service reCaptcha seeks to change this in an innovated and convenient manner. reCaptcha is a version of the Captcha programs meant to distinguish human users from computer generated responses used to ensure security and authenticity. The purpose of reCaptcha is to take that mundane authentication and verification task and turn it into useful computer power. This system works by asking the user to translate scanned text from books into normal text. Since this task is inherently difficult for computers, the human brain is much more efficient. The goal of the reCaptcha is to develop a system for helping to translate many copies of books that still exist only in print format into computer-understandable text. These texts thus become catalogue-able and searchable through services such as Project Guttenberg and Google Books. This project represents yet another example of how the world wide web is helping to revolutionize how learning and education occurs in modern culture.

Yet another example similar to reCaptcha is Duolingo. Here, instead of translating print media into text, however, Duolingo’s purpose is to translate between different language. Currently, the internet has a great deal of diverse content from many different languages, but often each source is not available in any language other than its original content. Duolingo seeks to change this by gathering the effort of the human intelligence and problem solving. Structured as a language course for people who want to learn a new language, Duolingo works by crowd sourcing translations amongst the participants. Its goal is that through the cumulative efforts of these students, the vast majority of online content can be made readily available for many more languages other than their original one.

From the Ground Up

More recently, projects have begun to focus on even more rudimentary but equally vital subjects. One particular example is the Global Village Construction Set from Open Source Ecology. The Global Village Construction Set project seeks to provide free blueprints for the forty machines necessary to build a self-sustaining civilization from the ground up. Machines such as tractors, drills, and brick makers are made from easy to follow designs that can be made on limited resources. By making these blueprints free and openly available, to project hopes to give smaller, developing economies more economic and financial stability and independence while also reducing material waste.

Where Can We Go From Here?

In the last fifty years, the internet has managed to revolutionize more about our society than arguably any other invention of our time. With it has come the revolution of countless methods and products of day to day livelihood, from communication to commerce to politics. While each instance is an important part of life in the twenty first century, it seems as though its full potential has only begun to present itself. No longer is the World Wide Web a thing of frivolity or novelty. It is, very fittingly, a way of life. Thus, it seems necessary that in this new way of life some of our most basic, yet most important institutions progress along side it. Fortunately, if anything, our society has demonstrated its willingness to adapt and adopt this new medium in some of its most important contexts. The restricting of the educational model to focus on convenience, accessibility, interactivity, and portability Only now in its relative infancy the possibilities are near limitless. Online education provides a model for infinitely scalable and accessible education to millions if not billions of people who would have never had such an opportunity. While we are a ways away from fully supplanting a traditional education, we are certainly at the point of bolstering the ability of a community from the ground up, from tilling the land to lessons on advanced organic chemistry.

Works Cited:

"The Internet and Education: Findings of the Pew Internet & American Life Project" Pew Internet & American Life Project.

iTunes U. Apple Inc.

JSTOR. "About."

Khan Academy. "About."

Open Culture. "FAQ"

Duolingo.

"Digitizing Books One Word at a Time." reCaptcha.

Open Source Equality.