the future of education?
We are living in a great time to be alive. Cliche? Yes. True? Absolutely, and it’s getting better by the minute - with media distribution costs being next to zero there has never been a better time to be alive as a life long learner.
With education initiatives like the OpenCourseWare Consortium which include MIT OpenCourseWare - which has opened up their course material online, free. As a machinery enthusiast this is brilliant, MIT has one of the best Mechanical Engineering programs in the world. Connexions is a collaborative project made up of knowledge modules that can be used to make a custom course, also free.
This week TED launched their new website based around their conference talks. Released under the Creative Commons licence, giving free access to their otherwise unavailable talks. TED is an annual conference held in Monterrey California, with talks by some of “the worlds greatest thinkers and doers”, attending the conference is by invite only. LIFT has done the same, albeit the content is technology specific.
Where does this leave us? In a great position to accelerate the learning process. Couple this with mass collaboration we will see accelerated development of original thought, science, technology, and products. I look forward to the next years in the growth of accessible high quality materials such as those listed above. Revolution anyone?
Here is Richard Baraniuk with his talk on open source education and Connexions at TED 2006:
Thanks for the shout out about the new TED.com. Richard was incredibly inspiring as a speaker at TED, and we seemed to have struck a nerve by stumbling upon this powerful idea of giving away all our talks. We are very excited about the notion of free knowledge and inspiration for all, and how people can access “master classes” of speakers as inspiring as Richard. Stay tuned for fresh TEDTalks every week.
Sincerely,
Tom Rielly
TED Conferences