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Many people have questioned the possibility of the coming rapid advancement in technologies reaching into the very poor populations of the world.
This would include educational opportunities.
I think you may change your minds if you read the following excerpt form 'The Singularity Is Near" on how technology will be able to reach everyone on the planet and give them the best education possible.
It's a bit long but once we get close to the Singularity you'll be able to absorb it instantly.
For now consider it an old-fashioned reading chore with knowledge as the reward.
"Most education in the world today, including in the wealthier communities, is not much changed from the model offered by the monastic schools of fourteenth-century Europe. Schools remain highly centralized institutions built upon the scarce resources of buildings and teachers. The quality of education also varies enormously, depending on the wealth of the local community (the American tradition of funding education from property taxes clearly exacerbates this inequality), thus contributing to the have/have not divide.
As with all of our other institutions we will ultimately move toward a decentralized educational system in which every person will have ready access to the highest-quality knowledge and instruction. We are now in the early stages of this transformation, but already the advent of the availability of vast knowledge on the Web, useful search engines, high-quality open Web courseware, and increasingly effective computer-assisted instruction are providing widespread and inexpensive access to education.
Most major universities now provide extensive courses online, many of which are free. MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative has been a leader in this effort. MIT offers nine hundred of its courses—half of all its course offerings—for free on the Web.56 These have already had a major impact on education around the world. For example, Brigitte Bouissou writes, "As a math teacher in France, I want to thank MIT ... for [these] very lucid lectures, which are a great help for preparing my own classes." Sajid Latif, an educator in Pakistan, has integrated the MIT OCW courses into his own curriculum. His Pakistani students regularly attend virtually-MIT classes as a substantial part of their education.57 MIT intends to have everyone of its courses online and open source (that is, free of charge for noncommercial use) by 2007.
The U.S. Army already conducts all of its nonphysical training using Web-based instruction. The accessible, inexpensive, and increasingly high-quality courseware available on the Web is also fueling a trend toward homeschooling.
The cost of the infrastructure for high-quality audiovisual Internet-based communication is continuing to fall rapidly, at a rate of about 50 percent per year, as we discussed in chapter 2. By the end of the decade it will be feasible for underdeveloped regions of the world to provide very inexpensive access to high-quality instruction for all grade levels from preschool to doctoral studies. Access to education will no longer be restricted by the lack of availability of trained teachers in each town and village.
As computer-assisted instruction (CAl) becomes more intelligent the ability to individualize the learning experience for each student will greatly improve. New generations of educational software are capable of modeling the
strengths and weaknesses of each student and developing strategies to focus on the problem area of each learner. A company that I founded, Kurzweil Educational Systems, provides software that is used in tens of thousands of schools by students with reading disabilities to access ordinary printed materials and improve their reading skills.58
Because of current bandwidth limitations and the lack of effective three-dimensional displays, the virtual environment provided today through routine Web access does not yet fully compete with "being there," but that will change. In the early part of the second decade of this century visual-auditory virtual-reality environments will be full immersion, very high resolution, and very convincing. Most colleges will follow MIT's lead, and students will increasingly attend classes virtually. Virtual environments will provide high-quality virtual laboratories where experiments can be conducted in chemistry, nuclear physics, or any other scientific field. Students will be able to interact with a virtual Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Edison or even to become a virtual Thomas Jefferson. Classes will be available for all grade levels in many languages. The devices needed to enter these high-quality, high-resolution virtual classrooms will be ubiquitous and affordable even in third world countries. Students at any age, from toddlers to adults, will be able to access the best education in the world at any time and from any place.
The nature of education will change once again when we merge with nonbiological intelligence. We will then have the ability to download knowledge and skills, at least into the nonbiological portion of our intelligence. Our machines do this routinely today. If you want to give your laptop state-of-the-art skills in speech or character recognition, language translation, or Internet searching, your computer has only to quickly download the right patterns (the software).
We don't yet have comparable communication ports in our biological brains to quickly download the interneuronal connection and neurotransmitter patterns that represent our learning. That is one of many profound limitations of the biological paradigm we now use for our thinking, a limitation we will overcome in the Singularity."
This would include educational opportunities.
I think you may change your minds if you read the following excerpt form 'The Singularity Is Near" on how technology will be able to reach everyone on the planet and give them the best education possible.
It's a bit long but once we get close to the Singularity you'll be able to absorb it instantly.
For now consider it an old-fashioned reading chore with knowledge as the reward.
"Most education in the world today, including in the wealthier communities, is not much changed from the model offered by the monastic schools of fourteenth-century Europe. Schools remain highly centralized institutions built upon the scarce resources of buildings and teachers. The quality of education also varies enormously, depending on the wealth of the local community (the American tradition of funding education from property taxes clearly exacerbates this inequality), thus contributing to the have/have not divide.
As with all of our other institutions we will ultimately move toward a decentralized educational system in which every person will have ready access to the highest-quality knowledge and instruction. We are now in the early stages of this transformation, but already the advent of the availability of vast knowledge on the Web, useful search engines, high-quality open Web courseware, and increasingly effective computer-assisted instruction are providing widespread and inexpensive access to education.
Most major universities now provide extensive courses online, many of which are free. MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative has been a leader in this effort. MIT offers nine hundred of its courses—half of all its course offerings—for free on the Web.56 These have already had a major impact on education around the world. For example, Brigitte Bouissou writes, "As a math teacher in France, I want to thank MIT ... for [these] very lucid lectures, which are a great help for preparing my own classes." Sajid Latif, an educator in Pakistan, has integrated the MIT OCW courses into his own curriculum. His Pakistani students regularly attend virtually-MIT classes as a substantial part of their education.57 MIT intends to have everyone of its courses online and open source (that is, free of charge for noncommercial use) by 2007.
The U.S. Army already conducts all of its nonphysical training using Web-based instruction. The accessible, inexpensive, and increasingly high-quality courseware available on the Web is also fueling a trend toward homeschooling.
The cost of the infrastructure for high-quality audiovisual Internet-based communication is continuing to fall rapidly, at a rate of about 50 percent per year, as we discussed in chapter 2. By the end of the decade it will be feasible for underdeveloped regions of the world to provide very inexpensive access to high-quality instruction for all grade levels from preschool to doctoral studies. Access to education will no longer be restricted by the lack of availability of trained teachers in each town and village.
As computer-assisted instruction (CAl) becomes more intelligent the ability to individualize the learning experience for each student will greatly improve. New generations of educational software are capable of modeling the
strengths and weaknesses of each student and developing strategies to focus on the problem area of each learner. A company that I founded, Kurzweil Educational Systems, provides software that is used in tens of thousands of schools by students with reading disabilities to access ordinary printed materials and improve their reading skills.58
Because of current bandwidth limitations and the lack of effective three-dimensional displays, the virtual environment provided today through routine Web access does not yet fully compete with "being there," but that will change. In the early part of the second decade of this century visual-auditory virtual-reality environments will be full immersion, very high resolution, and very convincing. Most colleges will follow MIT's lead, and students will increasingly attend classes virtually. Virtual environments will provide high-quality virtual laboratories where experiments can be conducted in chemistry, nuclear physics, or any other scientific field. Students will be able to interact with a virtual Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Edison or even to become a virtual Thomas Jefferson. Classes will be available for all grade levels in many languages. The devices needed to enter these high-quality, high-resolution virtual classrooms will be ubiquitous and affordable even in third world countries. Students at any age, from toddlers to adults, will be able to access the best education in the world at any time and from any place.
The nature of education will change once again when we merge with nonbiological intelligence. We will then have the ability to download knowledge and skills, at least into the nonbiological portion of our intelligence. Our machines do this routinely today. If you want to give your laptop state-of-the-art skills in speech or character recognition, language translation, or Internet searching, your computer has only to quickly download the right patterns (the software).
We don't yet have comparable communication ports in our biological brains to quickly download the interneuronal connection and neurotransmitter patterns that represent our learning. That is one of many profound limitations of the biological paradigm we now use for our thinking, a limitation we will overcome in the Singularity."