A revolution in progress

We all know the world is changing around us at an impressive pace, but every once in a while I get a momentary glimpse of just how fast things are changing, and it stuns me.

This afternoon I read an online article about the free online courses that are being offered by major universities this fall. (I commented on this in a recent post) Last spring MIT offered an introductory electronics course that drew 154,000 sign-ons, of whom 10,000 took the mid-term exam and 7000 passed the course –7000 !!!!!! For a course that the previous semester had a classroom enrollment of perhaps 30. In the past month or so a number of other top-tier schools – Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Univ of Pennsylvania, Univ of Michigan, etc, etc – have suddenly jumped on the bandwagon. Go to EdX  or Coursera and there are 123 free on-line courses being offered this fall from these top-tier schools.

For some years now The Teaching Company has packaged courses from the nation's top university professors and offered them as videos, audiobooks, MP3 files, and most recently as on-line streaming video for very low prices (I think our extended family has bought just about every one of those courses). And I have two granddaughters who have been home schooled using superb on-line advanced placement chemistry, biology and physics textbooks and courses. But this explosion of FREE on-line courses from the top universities in the world will in short order profoundly change the landscape, especially for bright but poor students worldwide.

Then I started a book one of my daughters gave me for my birthday, Michael Saylor’s The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything. After the first few chapters I got curious about what the latest smart phones can do (I still carry a dumb cell phone), so I looked up (Google is another amazing advance) the specs on a few of the current smart phones like the iPhone 4S and the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx – it blew me away! The embedded cameras are as good as my current dedicated pocket camera. Functions like Siri are mind-blowing. Quad-core processors, the ability to act as a mobile wi-fi hotspot, face recognition phone unlocking (it only unlocks if it recognizes your face)…these are light years away from what these phones looked like just a couple of years ago.

And of course the world has thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of eager young programmers inventing new apps for these phones in the hopes of getting rich. As of the end of 2011 there were about a BILLION smart phones in use worldwide. If 1% of those users buy your $1 app you have earned $10 million – no wonder so many people are writing apps. This has profound implications for the future.

Finally I checked into my (online of course) local newspaper, the Los Alamos Daily Post , where an embedded video in the lead article lets me watch in real time the streaming NASA TV live feed from the NASA control room of the Curiosity Rover Mars Mission, which is about to land on Mars in a few hours. Think of it. Embedded in my newspaper is a real-time video relay (shades of Harry Potter’s moving newspaper pictures) of a robot mission landing on Mars!!!!

The whole experience, covering no more than an hour of my time this afternoon, has made me suddenly and profoundly aware of the dizzying pace at which the world is changing.