I bought a Rainbow Loom for my daughter a couple of months ago. If you have kids and haven’t been hiding under a rock for the last couple of months, you’ve surely heard of the Rainbow Loom, which is a very interesting plastic contraption where you can create bracelets with small rubber bands.

As expected, she started very nice bracelets, at first simple and single-colored, but with more time and practice the bracelets became more and more complex, with multiple colors, designs, sizes, etc. She made bracelets for all the family… twice :-).

And one day I came home and she was not doing bracelets anymore… she was doing this:

That’s a strawberry, a banana, and a pencil. Where the heck did she learn to do this? One simple answer – YouTube! She also did an angry bird, a sword, and many more things (I’ll be adding more pictures later)

This got me thinking… This is a revolution. Actually not one revolution but many. Sites like Coursera, EdX, and even the “simple” YouTube are the new printing press, passing knowledge to the masses. And anyone can become a teacher. This is a lot better than the printing press because the starting price of publishing a video in YouTube is very low – just a camera and an internet connection. Probably under $100 using a reasonable quality phone. This is the publishing revolution.

And the second revolution is from the consumer side. Anyone can sit in his home, open his computer, and start learning. From mathematics to social sciences to philosophy to… Rainbow Loom. And you can be of any age and of any gender and of any race. Schools are going to need a radical change. Also universities. And this is a good change that was waiting to happen for a long time.

We definitely live in very interesting times.