...and the rate of change continues to accelerate

This is why I feel so damn optimistic for the human race in spite of the incredible damage wrought by our political and business "leaders".

The Wikipedia project now has a WikiMedia commons project where all kinds of media can be shared, and Wikibooks where oodles of textbooks are shared, Wiktionary which is a multiligual dictionary, Wikiquote which is a compendium of quotes, Wikispecies a directory of life on Earth, Wikinews free and open news, and now they are beginning a Wikiversity (the proposal is here and you can vote on it).

The net has lots of free online textbooks, dictionaries, news sources, etc., so what is so special about these? You can edit and add to the pages. This is revolutionary. They are applying what has been learned from Wikipedia (the fastest growing encyclopedia in the world) to other realms of human knowledge. This is truly exciting stuff.

(Incidentally, a glimpse into the power of these projects is if you reload each of those addresses above without the "en." prefix. Each takes you to an index into different language versions of the respective sites.)