So I stumbled upon the Project 10 to the 100th page on the Internet. Pretty much the call has gone out from Google for people to come up with ideas to change the world, the more people changed, the better.
This of course, is a difficult task. So what separates well off people from not so well off people. While money helps, poor people become rich and rich people become poor all the time. Then I realised it was education that made people more organised in their thought, and wealth always flows from the disorganised to the organised.
So the idea is getting education to the masses. I’ve seen some other ideas floating around like a Google College. Neat idea, but this requires people to have access to the Internet, and Broadband access for video. But what about those people who don’t have the Internet, or a computer? What way can we disseminate education to the masses?
Verbal isn’t very scalable, and there’s language issues. Paper is more scalable, but has a production cost (the paper itself), and isn’t easily changeable, scalable, searchable, or transmittable.
Turns out there are 3.3 billion mobile phones out there. And odds are they all have TXT Messaging (or SMS). Since this is digital, it’s scalable, transformable (from language to language), has really low production costs (compared to paper), and is easily changeable, searchable, and transmittable.
There are limitations to SMS. It’s only alphanumeric, limited to around 160 Latin characters per SMS, and no one’s ever done this before. So how can we do it?
- Mini-Knols: Obviously we’re not trying to replicate a college degree. We are trying to communicate discrete bite sized peices of knowledge. For example, explaining how NPK works in fertilizers, so a farmer in China knows the best way to fertilize their crops;
- Automated test taking: If 3.3 billion people are using the system, the less human intervention the better. When courses are created, tests that can be automatically marked by a computer are preferred. Multiple choice questions can be used to a great extent to examine fine grained concepts.
- Anyone can create a course: The success of Wikipedia is through people creating content. This content is reviewed by others for correctness, and the same process needs to apply here.
- Sponsored: There is still a cost to this system, and while Wikipedia can survive with donations, it doesn’t have to pay TXT messaging costs per page view. Sponsors could either have a TXT message at the start of a course, the end of a course, or be written into a course.
I’m sure there other people have more ideas, and I’d be more than willing to help.