From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Jan 10 2002 - 05:56:12 MST
On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 10:44:29PM -0800, Samantha Atkins wrote:
>
>
> Brian D Williams wrote:
>
> >I've been pondering the basic question of educationing the masses
> >of the currently uneducated.
> >
> >My favorite paradigm is Neal Stephanson's "Diamond Age" or "A young
> >Ladies Illustrated Primer".
> >
> >What if instead of waiting for the hardware, we were to attempt to
> >immplement this in software, via the WWW. The anyone could access
> >it via an appropriately equipped Internet connection/device.
> >
> >The initial version could be in english, but readily translatable.
>
> Except the "content providers" would sue us into oblivion.
So you think the only content worth using in education is something
already present and made by somebody else? I got the impression that
this idea was about *creating* an educational service, not "borrowing"
somebody else's (especially since none fit the basic idea here).
Of course, the current battle over IP can be damaging even to this kind
of service - witness attempts to include digital rights management into
everything digital, which would severely limit the flexibility of new
electronics and quite possibly force even equipment for poorer countries
to conform to legal and economic structures entirely different from
their own (this is actually a great argument against such attempts!).
But it is not the most serious problem to implement something like this.
For that I would nominate lack of people, money and pedagogical
knowledge.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 13:37:33 MST