Last week I looked at the explosion in online learning and the benefits it can provide to those dogs who can still learn new tricks. As Trevor, a reader, pointed out: “I don’t think any article on this topic would be complete without mentioning the fantastic Khan Academy.”He’s right. The Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org) is a one-man tour de force of teaching.The not-for-profit site was started by Salman Khan, who started doing the videos as a way to tutor his cousins remotely. As more people became interested in his lessons he quit his day job as a hedge fund analyst in Boston to run the site full time, mainly on donations.He now has 1,600 videos on site as part of his mission to provide a “free world-class education to anyone, anywhere”. Most are on mathematics, from the basic concepts through to differential equations. The lessons run between 10 to 20 minutes each and feature Khan explaining clearly the concepts using an online blackboard.Volunteers have begun to translate the videos into other languages and the subject matter also covers topics such as finance, history, chemistry and physics.* * *The Mubarak regime in Egypt attempted to close down the internet as a means of preventing the revolution from happening. After five days, when protestors bypassed the shutdown, the system was restarted. Hosni Mubarak ended up losing his job last week as Egyptian President after the masses continued to call for him to step down.Blocking internet for five days cost Egypt about $90 million, cutting off domestic and international high-tech firms from international operations, according to an estimate by the OECD.Now the big debate in the media is over whether the largely peaceful uprising in Egypt and the downfall of a dictator marked the advent of ‘revolution 2.0’, or a “social media revolution”, as proclaimed by Wael Ghonim.He is the Google employee who helped keep the protests going through his Facebook page, which attracted thousands of followers. Of course, spending 11 days in detention and living to tell his tale before the crowd also got him a great deal of attention. On television Ghonim attributes the resilience and organisation of the protestors to Facebook.Others say this emphasis on the medium, the internet, is overstated. Civil disobedience and protest, violent or not, has happened throughout history.“People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented,” writes Malcolm Gladwell in a recent New Yorker article.“They did it before the internet came along . . . People with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each other. How they choose to do it is less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place.”Well, both arguments are valid, without neutralising each other. The medium can be the message. Of course, revolutions occur, and governments are overthrown or not. People find a way to communicate. But while the causes of the revolution are the dismal state of Egypt’s economy and a corrupt and repressive government, one can still argue the Internet was another important factor in Mubarak’s downfall.Protestors brought down Mubarak but they were able to use traditional social networks and internet ones to quickly communicate their cause and encourage others to rally with them. The initial spark seems to be the page Ghonim put up to honour the death of Khaled Said, a 28-year-old who was allegedly beaten to death by Egyptian police. Said was apparently caught filming the police making a drug deal.The fact that the Egyptian authorities tried to cut the internet shows what a powerful force they considered it to be. Probably, access to the internet also helped people gain inspiration from the non-violent protest movements of Martin Luther King and Gandhi. They were also getting used to a steady diet of news from other sources, which did not match the picture they were presented by state media.They were primed partially by the internet, which was not a necessary cause, as is said in philosophy, but certainly a sufficient one.Send any comments to elamin.ahmed[AT]gmail.com.