Technology, America’s Opportunity

I ran across a piece of news-gossip about the iPad recently that I thought was interesting. The story is that Apple’s iPad iBooks store will carry the entire Gutenberg Project for free download.  {Story found here} For those of you who don’t know what Gutenberg Project it is a user-content-generated website that has over 30,000 electronic books for free download, essentially anything of note that is public domain has been converted and entered into their database.  All of these books will now be part of the Apple catalog. That is awesome.

I am fascinated by technology. I love the fact that I am a participant and observer of one of the greatest ages in human history: The Technology Age.

The potential {and the actual} is pretty fantastic. I see technology as the freedom of information, the opportunity for collaboration, cooperation, competition… as almost instant market feedback, as crowd-sourcing, technology taps the infinite resources of local knowledge and leverages it to be useful to millions.

The educational opportunities are what fascinate me the most, and I will be posting more about it.  I have been reading an amazing book on the history of self education entitled The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750-1990 by Joseph Kett. My interest in liberal arts education dovetails with my research in mutual aid societies in this book.  For hundreds of years Americans have been hungry for ways to improve themselves, for ways to create micro-communities of learners. Technology is making that more and more possible. Wikipedia, About.com, Suite101, Instructables and countless blogs are the modern versions of yesteryears literary societies, the cultural sources of self improvement.