A conversation regarding my final project for #edcmooc with my girlfriend looked a little something like this:

 me:  Yeah - its dragging out SO long - I might finish all of this week's course work this afternoon....which sucks because it's the last week - next week is "Final Project" week -- I have to construct a project resembling my thoughts on the courseworkI was going to focus on Online Education and Poverty
but it seems the course is wanting me to talk more about the nature of human beings v. technology, or alongside technology
or maybe how technology alongside human beings can help to eliminate poverty...
something of the like. 

 Sent at 2:33 PM on Monday

 Amy:  Ohhhh! Interesting! How do you see technology is helping eliminate poverty?
 me:  Well - I see that online education can provide a very real pathway from ignorance to intelligence, which is the greatest force stifling advancement in third world nationswithout proper access to information, and some instruction on how to access and apply this information, most impoverished countries don't stand a chance to ascend the caste system, and remain stuck in poverty

 me:  but information, dispersed through the internet, and becoming cheaper, and available in greater numbers to greater numbers of people, allow individuals to have an extremely powerful tool, one capable of providing access to a organized educational system which is just as mobile and flexible as we are as a speciesthe only problem is, it's relatively new...there isn't much information out there, just lots of questions as to how applicable what we're working with currently is. It's all predictive with very few tangible results
So, I might have to change topics to the more "human v machine or human is machine, or human need machine" topics...

It's true - there isn't much information out there with any hard fact suggesting that eLearning is capable of making a dent in the huge disparity between education and poverty. But there is ALOT of promise, Coursera itself being an example. I might just have to change my topic based on the fact that there's not much for me to make a claim with, unless my claim is simply "Education Effects Poverty Levels".