The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #103013   Message #3498561
Posted By: JohnInKansas
03-Apr-13 - 09:38 PM
Thread Name: Folklore: MIT course FREE-Anglo-American Folkmusic
Subject: RE: Folklore: MIT course FREE-Anglo-American Folkmusic
Recent further news on "online education" that might be of interest here:

Internet takes education to new level: Will universities make the grade?

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By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

More and more universities have made a place for the Internet in today's educational offerings, but will universities still have a place in tomorrow's educational environment?
"We're about to undergo a tectonic transformation in education," Caltech astrophysicist George Djorgovski, a pioneer in scientific applications for virtual worlds, told me on Wednesday. "This is the start of an 'S' curve, and universities will be unrecognizable in a decade or two."

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The article is rather long, and tends somewhat to glowing adspeak, but the interesting part may be links to about two dozen "podcasts" on a variety of subjects, along with links to where one might get future such stuff, including SecondLife, Twitter, and IRC.

I'm sure we have some here who will want to hear what they say about:

Sean Carroll and Matt Strassler on physics' X Files

and maybe:

Ig Nobel's Marc Abrahams on weird science in 2012

or:

SETI Institute's Seth Shostak about aliens and UFOs

I'm not sure anyone here will care about:

Shawn Lawrence Otto on science and politics

but there's also:

Ig Nobel impresario Marc Abrahams on silly science in 2011

and quite a bunch more.

Some of the other stuff in current links might actually teach you something if you have more narrow interests, but you'll have to take a look at the top link to see all of what's offered, and a few might just want to look at one way somebody's trying to do this kind of educating.

Note that the links I included here are a bit variable in how directly the get to something. Be scientific, and find the solutions where necessary.

John