What's most interesting and beautiful about the concept of free, open education is that people that would not have access to a college education can now have it. I'm talking about people that are the poorest of the poor who would never see a university let alone be able to attend one. A lot of folks on here are talking about certification...certification doesn't matter, rather creating wealth matters! We're on YC Hacker News right now, I'm sure everybody has read Paul Graham's "How To Create Wealth" essay (http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html). A person with a college degree or higher is useless to society if they can't produce something with it. However, somebody with little or zero formal education that can create something world changing IS valuable! Just giving people access to information allows them to change their world and create wealth. Some of you may have heard of William Kamkwamba (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kamkwamba) who created a windmill that could generate electricity just after seeing a picture of a windmill on the cover of a book written in a language he couldn't read. I saw an interview with him on "The Daily Show" where he joked that when he had the opportunity to access the Internet for the first time, he typed "windmill" into Google and was like "where was this when I was trying to build that damn windmill?!". People like him can do so much just with a picture -- imagine if he had access to science and math lectures from an amazing university like Stanford.
We have finally reached that point (or are at least damn close to it) where virtually every person on the planet, no matter how poor, will have access to a computer and the Internet. That is all a person needs to access these resources. I'm sure everybody has been following the Raspberry Pi, a full-fledged computer with video output for $25 - and it's only going to get cheaper. People like Thruun and Khan are dead-on. The only way to get people out of poverty is by empowering them with knowledge and education. In my opinion, the work these folks are doing are the seeds of a coming worldwide renaissance where poverty and ignorance will be eliminated.
We have finally reached that point (or are at least damn close to it) where virtually every person on the planet, no matter how poor, will have access to a computer and the Internet. That is all a person needs to access these resources. I'm sure everybody has been following the Raspberry Pi, a full-fledged computer with video output for $25 - and it's only going to get cheaper. People like Thruun and Khan are dead-on. The only way to get people out of poverty is by empowering them with knowledge and education. In my opinion, the work these folks are doing are the seeds of a coming worldwide renaissance where poverty and ignorance will be eliminated.