axter Woods drives 18-wheeler trucks long distance in the US. That means he is on his own for hours on end. So, he installed amplifiers and a digital media player to soften the boredom. Then he discovered Hubert Dreyfus, leading philosophy professor at University of BCalifornia, Berkeley. His lectures were available on iTunes, Apple’s media software. Woods regularly downloads Dreyfus’ lectures, and others too, from iTunes into his media player and listens on the lonely drives. “I’m really in two places at once, ” he told Los Angeles Times which reported the story of several people like the 61-year-old Woods listening to university lectures available for free on the Internet. In another corner of the world, in the dusty and poor township of Soweto, South Africa, Mduduzi Mathe is a happy man. He is the principal of a high school and holds a PhD in maths. But his Class 9 students were abysmally maths-challenged, not surprising because South Africa ranks 139th in number skills.