Tony Brewer

I want to learn so many things, and I have had the wonderful opportunity to learn so much already. Some of the costs of learning are financial – the cost of books and tuition fees, which apparently are rising somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 percent or so this year in my neck of the woods. There are also the costs of time, and time is a factor that really costs me these days.

There are the hours in classes and seminars, and travel time that comes to mind. With the price of gas and me free time almost non existent these costs are getting out of hand. Add to that the rising cost of tuition and the fact that more and more books and other materials are certainly going to need to be purchased, and I realize that my utopian dream of free education for the masses is getting further away, even as some technology and institutions are offering free learning via video seminars. The free open courseware from MIT, Stanford and the like is a giant leap towards the education that I have dreamed about for so long.

Costs are kept down, as there is no need to travel , saving that valuable time and money spent on fuel and travel, and the education is from top notch professors. The big question in my mind is how we are going to get the books to be as good and cheaper or free. There is much debate about this in some circles and not enough debate in the bigger circles as far as I am concerned. I would love to see students have access to free text books with the best knowledge. Of course there are writers who want to get paid, and less importantly, but more vocally the publishing houses will try to subvert this. I’m sure there will be (or maybe already has been) PR from them about the quality of books going down with this, but the opposite may be true if you look at what wikipedia can become.

More on this later.