Posts Tagged ‘online education’
“You can never be overdressed or overeducated”*…
So many choices…
Take online courses from the world’s top universities for free. Below, you will find 1,700 free online courses from universities like Yale, MIT, Harvard, Oxford and more. Our site also features collections of Online Certificate Programs and Online Degree & Mini-Degree Programs…
From Open Culture (@openculture), “1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.”
A personal fave: MIT’s “Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey.”
[image above: source]
* Oscar Wilde
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As we hit the e-books, we might recall that it was on this date in 1922 that the United States paid tribute to the man instrumental in the technology that enables on-line education, Alexander Graham Bell…
There were more than 14 million telephones in the United States by the time Alexander Graham Bell died. For one minute on August 4, 1922, they were all silent.
The reason: Bell’s funeral. The American inventor was the first to patent telephone technology in the United States and who founded the Bell Telephone System in 1877. Though Bell wasn’t the only person to invent “the transmission of speech by electrical wires,” writes Randy Alfred for Wired, achieving patent primacy in the United States allowed him to spend his life inventing. Even though the telephone changed the world, Bell didn’t stop there.
Bell died on August 2, 1922, just a few days after his 75th birthday. “As a mark of respect every telephone exchange in the United States and Canada closed for a minute when his funeral began around 6:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time,” Alfred writes.
On the day of the funeral, The New York Times reported that Bell was also honored by advocates for deaf people. “Entirely apart from the monumental achievement of Professor Bell as the inventor of the telephone, his conspicuous work in [sic] behalf of the deaf of this country would alone entitle him to everlasting fame,” said Felix H. Levey, president of the Institution for the Improved Instruction of Deaf Mutes.
In fact, Bell spent much of his income from the telephone on helping deaf people. The same year he founded the Bell Telephone System, 1880, Bell founded the Volta Laboratory. The laboratory, originally called Volta Associates, capitalized on Bell’s work and the work of other sound pioneers. It made money by patenting new innovations for the gramophone and other recorded sound technologies. In 1887, Bell took his share of the money from the sale of gramophone patents and founded the Volta Bureau “as an instrument for the increase and diffusion of knowledge relating to the Deaf,’” writes the National Park Service. Bell and Volta continued to work for deaf rights throughout his life.
Volta Laboratory eventually became Bell Laboratories, which was home to many of the twentieth century’s communication innovations.
Smithsonian
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education”…
Mark Twain’s quip has found an altogether modern kind of expression on the web, where entrepreneurs and enthusiasts have expanded from the how-to space (c.f. Instructables, …for Dummies, et al.) to arenas that were until recently the undisputed province of the traditional educational establishment. Two of your correspondent’s favorites:
Khan Academy is–literally– the brainchild of Salmon Khan, a 33 year-old who has no PhD and has never taught. Khan quit his job as a financial analyst and began to produce short simple videos on the sorts of topics covered in advanced high school and college classes. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reports, Khan has posted over 1400 videos on YouTube, covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance.
Squashed Philosophy is the work of Glyn Hughes: “The books which defined the way we think now.
Their own ideas, in their own words, neatly honed into little half-hour or so reads”… and so they marvelously are.
(TotH to reader PR for the CHE reference.)
As we resolve to improve ourselves, we might recall that today is the birthday of scholar and critic Adrien Baillet; he was born on this date in 1649. While Baillet was on the faculty at the college of Beauvais, served as librarian to François-Chrétien de Lamoignon, and was advocate-general to the Parlement de Paris, he is best remembered as the biographer of René Descartes.
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