Open Source and Education

From the article How the Open Source Movement Has Changed Education: 10 Success Stories: “MIT provides just one of the 10 open source educational success stories detailed below. Open source and open access resources have changed how colleges, organizations, instructors, and prospective students use software, operating systems and online documents for educational purposes. And, in most cases, each success story also has served as a springboard to create more open source projects.”

The information exists out there. The challenge is to make it accessible — both physically and mentally. Physical accessibility is a technical problem and therefore requires a bit of hardware and software. It is only a matter of time before technology will be cheap enough that it would not matter whether you are rich or poor — you will have all the information accessible. Mental accessibility is a different matter. Those who don’t have the basic pre-requisite to make sense of the information will be at a disadvantage relative to those who have the skills to use the information. The challenge for India is to provide basic education — reading, writing, arithmetic and reasoning.