Offline learning: tools of the trade

20 years ago in 2005, a movement called “One Laptop per Child” (OLPC) was born at MIT. Its aim? Hand an affordable (sub $100 laptop) to every child on earth. The laptop that they produced, the OLPC XO1 was meant to be mass produced, cheap, rugged, and use so little electricity it could be powered completely by a hand crank. Kofi Annan, then UN secretary-general took quick notice, bringing the initiative international acclaim and funding.

20 years later, I think we’ve learned that not every child needs a laptop. But OLPC planted the seeds of a movement. Wikipedia offers its pages for download, and even created software called Kiwix to allow users to browse all of Wikipedia for a (now small) footprint of about 10GB. Similarly, Khan Academy and other sites started popping up, offering courses for K-12 education. Universities started offering their course materials and recording lectures so that people could learn any topic they wanted to asynchronously and from the comfort of their home.

I was a big proponent of using technology as a tool for education. I went through all the Khan Academy modules I could and went through courses offered at universities like MIT, Stanford, and Harvard. It was great like getting a golden ticket, to a higher quality education.

I still think the internet is a useful tool for education, but in the past 20 years, the internet has become a tool to divert our attention for profit. It is no longer the text-based browse a bit tool of yesteryear, but rather, a more attention seeking medium meant to glue us to our screens for engagement. This isn’t in the users best interests.

One way I’ve found to help with this is to limit my internet consumption by moving to a polling model. Instead of visiting my favorite sites constantly, I’ll just use their RSS feeds to get updates, and when I have no more updates to read, that’s it for the day. My RSS feed doesn’t even get updates every day, so it’ll be more of a once a week thing.

Taking that to its extreme is downloading everything for offline usage. Sometimes I’ll be out on the town, or traveling, and data is patchy. In that case, If I want to be productive, I need my content to be available, preferably on both my phone and my computer, in a way that doesn’t compromise the quality of what I’m trying to enjoy.

To that end, I’ve been iterating on my own “Offline OS”: a set of files I keep on my laptop and backed up, organized and searchable through a web browser. Even if a web browser isn’t connected to the internet, it is a remarkably useful piece of technology – it can serve HTML files that can perform search in a local search index on disk, so anything can be found in milliseconds. I keep my music, podcasts, lectures, notes, papers, bookmarks, recipes and more in this format. I sync this with my phone, so with just one command I can browse my content offline on my laptop or my phone, whichever is more convenient.

In my case, I have a lot of lecture videos, so my content on disk is about 400GB, which can’t fit on my phone. To do so, I don’t sync any video files to my phone, since website content and documents aren’t that heavy.

Personal computing has come a long way: you can save high quality resources on disk for the cost of almost nothing. In fact, the dream everyone having a computer for $100 is taken for granted these days that we don’t even talk about it. A used computer with decent enough specs (a quick search on ebay turned up a computer with a processor @3.2GHz w/ 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD) goes for about $25, or about 4 hours of minimum wage in America. If not, there are plenty of cheap or even free computers with similar or better specs to get from your local recycler of computers.

The tools to learn anything you want are out there now for a very low price. All that’s left is to find the motivation to learn.

And that might be the hardest thing of all.