If you just want a bunch of interesting links, jump to Status Quo. You may be interested in my other thoughts too, though.

The Cornerstones

The first computer I ever sat in front of was an old Amstrad PC with monochrome display. I first accessed the internet with a 56k dial up modem (which happened years after getting in touch with computers) and as far as I remember, it was astonishing.

As you may have noticed computers evolved slightly since then. Today you get quad core processors, tiny flash memory sticks that can store more information than the hard disk drives most of us started with and of course much faster internet access. The technological progress that has been made significantly impacts the way we are interacting with modern pieces of technology, e.g. computers. We can now film ourselves or do screen recordings and put them somewhere on the internet so others can easily access them.

In fact nowadays there’s so much information out there that you need some really big search engine to dig through the masses of bits and bytes to find what you are searching for. The same applies for videos. Services like YouTube make it trivial to put videos up, watch them and make them accessible to the world.

The Value of Knowledge

It is a fact that knowledge and proper education leads to wealth (not speaking of money or expensive cars). Our goal therefore must be that everybody who wants it, gets the chance to learn. We must not deny proper education to some people just because they got no money. In such cases we should rather aim to support them. You can send food and clothes to people in need, sure. You don’t want them to starve. But at the same time you need to make sure that access to knowledge is provided as well, in order to allow those people to become independent of you.

The Prerequisites

The obvious question is: How do you best provide access to information and knowledge long-term?
My answer is: Teach people the prerequisites so they can take care of their education on their own.

The major problem was that you just cannot cheaply get a whole library up somewhere, filled with recent books of high quality. With todays technological advances however, you can! Just provide fast enough internet access and teach how to use it.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? “People who cannot afford food and clothes cannot afford computers and internet access either!“ I hear you say. That is true. That’s why organizations such as Linux4Afrika were founded. That’s another reason for Ubuntus existence. There’s a bunch of things involved, but we are on the right track. (Another obvious thing is the need to understand the language most of the information is available in. So go and learn English if you havn’t already. It’s just so important.)

Status Quo

Assuming you fulfil the necessary requirements you already have access to quite a few good resources on the net.
(Disclaimer: The following list is by no means complete. If you know a good service for this list, please drop a comment!)

• Wikipedia – I guess I don’t need to explain.
• Google Tech Talks is a brilliant channel on YouTube containing hundreds (913, at the time of writing) of videos on technological topics.
• The Stanford University launched a service called Stanford Engineering Everywhere, containing filmed lectures with good quality. (E.g. “Introduction to Computer Science“, “Artificial Intelligence“, “Linear Systems and Optimization“)
• ShowMeDo is a service providing tutorial videos on popular technological topics.

I personally love learning things I think are interesting. When I was told that Stanford University now also make some of their lectures available online I felt the urgent need to write a posting about it and thought it was a good opportunity to outline the importance of such services and the availability of broadband internet access.
(Thanks Canonical for inspiring me with respect to the title of this post.)