Famed Free Information Advocate Pushes For Broad Online Distribution Of K-12 Education Content

One of Wikipedia’s co-founders, Larry Sanger, is making noise about the need to make online learning more available to K-12 grade children all over the world. Writing on his “Citizendium Blog,” Mr. Sanger offers a petition that everyone in the world is invited to sign, and send to a philanthropist. If you don’t happen to know who your local major philanthropist is, you may have trouble figuring out what to do with this. If you do, however, you can use the petition to add your voice to Sanger’s call the people donating money to improve education should seize the “low hanging fruit” by funding the transfer of textbooks and educational videos into high-quality, easy to use digital formats so that kids all over the world can have equal access to information. While there is free educational content available online today, Sanger says, most of it “lacks either detail or high quality.” Copyright owners may not agree with his assertion that rich philanthropists can digitize any content they want without asking anyone’s permission, but his passionate call for making the best information available to all school kids worldwide sounds pretty good. One can’t help but notice his comment that other things than a lack of digital content may, at times, be to blame for the sorry state of American K-12 education: “Perhaps it has to do with teachers being low-paid, or parents not being involved, or something else. We do not offer an answer to that.” Read Citizendium Blog & petition here