Try to imagine being an illiterate farmer living in extreme poverty in a remote rural village, without electricity and with very few visits from anyone outside your village. How could you learn to keep your family healthy or grow enough food to feed them?

In 2007, Literacy Bridge was formed to understand this problem and to develop a solution. They designed a simple, durable, and battery-operated audio device called the Talking Book to provide on-demand access to locally relevant knowledge. (more…)

Universities today are under an enormous amount of criticism and pressure: structures and pedagogical models developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, increasingly higher costs and rising demands for an educated work force in a changing and complex world. Minerva’s founder Ben Nelson talks about the origins of some of these problems, but also offers some disruptive ideas in order to change this situation. (more…)