After watching Jon Ippolito’s lecture I learned that even after all these years, we still have same unresolved issues. We still worry about not being able to have enough money for education and information that is important and should be accessible for everyone always requires us to pay for it first.
Ippolito brings up this great point that schools don’t share information as easily as they should because they expect to be paid handsomely. Since not every person was born with a silver spoon in their mouth, not all of us are able to pay for every bit of information we find. I think that education is absolutely essential for every person and should be more accessible to those who just cant’t pay for it. Considering the fact that many artists and poets are self taught, one might argue that education is not for jus anyone. Plenty of people today think that they simply don’t need to pay thousands of dollars for something they can “somehow” learn on their own. But from my personal experience of watching some of my friends struggle with their lives, I can certainly say they regret their choice of giving up after high school. They are forced to work double shifts and forget about social life in order to be able to pay for food and rent. Also I believe that if there were outlets for people to get information they need, then higher number of people would want to get a degree from the university after having taken their general courses.
In fact, there are some websites that we can find today that provide everyone with free information and classes. Coursera is a great website for anyone to learn whatever it is they are interested in, it ever has classes in different languages. Of course you can’t get a degree or a credit from taking those free classes but you can absolutely find useful information you need.
I also think that it is a brilliant idea to have people share their creations and leave it open for others to use. Creative Commons organization makes it possible for so many people to work together from different parts of the world. I find this fascinating that no one thought about it before. Now because of this organization people are able to reuse/recycle and most importantly improve other people’s work. I do realize that it might be presumptuous to take credit for someone else’s hard work but people who share their work with the whole world, expect it to be used well and with purpose. I believe that when I use even a little part of someone’s idea/art piece/writing I should make it idiosyncratic and speak in my voice. And if I don’t then I should give this person credit for creating something so well structured and thought out that it can’t be replicated.