Dec 30
take classes at MIT
An MIT initiative called “OpenCourseWare” makes virtually all the school’s courses available online for free - lecture notes, readings, tests and often video lectures… MIT’s initiative is the largest, but the trend is spreading. More than 100 universities worldwide, including Johns Hopkins, Tufts and Notre Dame, have joined MIT in a consortium of schools promoting their own open courseware. You no longer need a Princeton ID to hear the prominent guests who speak regularly on campus, just an Internet connection. This month, Yale announced it would make material from seven popular courses available online, with 30 more to follow.
I’ve downloaded a few free lectures from iTunes U in the past (including the one on existentialism from UC Berkeley), but this is just more good stuff. Every time my brain starts feeling slow or rice-pudding-like due to a lack of academia in my life, I can turn to one of these. I love my books and I have many of them, but having something to listen to or watch triggers a different type of attention and thought-process.
And I hope I’ll be able to afford to return to graduate school in the near future (and it might be after the leave of absence runs out), but there are more pressing life expenses before that even becomes a possibility. My thoughts on it right now are that it’s essentially a very expensive hobby — especially because it wasn’t a degree I was pursuing for career advancement; just for fun.
I can still enjoy my Nancy Pearl librarian action figure, though. And now there’s a Seth Godin action figure.
OK. Now I have to get started on my Sunday. There’s champagne to buy so I don’t show up at my friends’ place empty-handed tomorrow night, and recipes to search for so I can bring food (or ideas for what we can make).
No tag for this post.
