I am writing this blog post at great pain to my time. As you can see from the title, there is so much to learn, and simply not enough time to learn it all. In the internet era that we live in, everyone is talking about how to get content onto the web, and into people’s hands. However, in this time, we are also seeing a phenomenon that small start ups have been seeing for a while, that is, how to get attention in this mass of conversation. There have been some ideas posed, such as the good ideas will come to the forefront, and content that meets the zeitgeist of the society will be improved. However, what I am talking about right now is a little bit different.
I am talking about academia in the internet. Yes, academia is somewhat competitive, but not in the same way that a start up would be competitive. Academia will have space for multiple papers, and multiple theses that contradict each other. Also, academia in a good state, will keep multiple proofs, even if one of them is not as good as others. However, academia is now feeling the same effects from the internet as start ups felt several years back.
As mentioned in earlier articles, MIT’s OpenCourseWare has been a great resource to learn. There are syllabuses, readings, and lectures, available for many classes. Also, iTunes U capitalized on that revolution. However, the amount of course work that is now on the internet, is rapidly approaching critical mass. Students have had this problem for years, even before the internet. They get out of highschool, where there is at most one or two really good classes per period, or they are just given a schedule of what classes to attend. However, when they go to university, they find themselves with a set of options that appears to be infinite. If it was true that universities offered an infinite amount of classes, than the internet has found a way to go higher than infinity. Now, students that are in university, and manage to narrow down what classes they want to take, now have enough resources to learn the material, to the point where they couldn’t do it if they had 42 hour days. They have their university’s lectures, the course book, online lectures, other books that cover similar content, free online books from reputable sources, online texts from non-reputable sources, and for those that are brave, Freenode’s IRC. And the choices don’t stop there, those are just the ones that I have found to be useful.
With all of these choices, what is a student to do? Well, obviously the need to match two things. They need to do what the professor of their course wants, for in the end, that professor decides what grade the student gets. Then the student must learn the material. For students that can’t read well, or do other things better, can watch or listen to the material. Not only that, but they are able to pause, rewind, and fast forward as necessary.
In the end, there is just a lot of material to view, a lot of options to be used, and a lot of proofs to be digested. Because of that, I will now take my leave, and go back to viewing material which I will use for my education. Have a nice day everyone.
