President Obama announced today an initiative to make e-books widely available to lower income students. This is coupled with efforts to get Internet access to 99% of homes by 2018, the push to get library cards for all students, and the private sector drive (Apple) to get tablets into schools of low income neighborhoods. Of course, the degree to which these programs succeed in improving the baseline education of students in the United States will depend heavily on how the books are actually used in classes and how easily students can access them. But this set of conjoined initiatives seems like a real, tangible step towards using technology to improve lives. And, importantly for a democracy, it is a real, tangible step towards democratizing information.
Patrick O'Kelley 