It’s ever so easy to get lost in Cyberspace! 🙂 Especially once I venture into the world of books and education. There is so much that is new, fantastic, and revolutionary that I get sooo excited, I forget to clean the house!
Here are a few FINDS that are just THRILLING!!!
Have you heard of the KHAN Academy? No? Then watch this TED Talks clip of Salman Khan right now, and see how much hope there is for your kids to be able to grasp math and science concepts that have eluded them thus far! http://www.khanacademy.org/#browse
The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organisation that, in its own words, “offers a free world-class education for anyone anywhere”. All of the site’s resources are available to anyone – adult or child. What a boon to someone who never got to finish his education because he had to support his family, or because school just wasn’t a safe place to be in! What a blessing to a child who was dubbed “slow” just because he could not grasp the concepts being taught in a style not sympathetic to his own! The Khan Academy’s materials and resources are available to everyone completely free of charge. And they are even being utilised in public schools in the Los Altos school district in California.
Then there is Open Culture http://www.openculture.com/freeaudiobooks where one can download FREE audiobooks and podcasts on a wide range of topics from music, science, technology, and travel, to ideas and culture.
And for budding artists, there is a wealth of great websites like Art Graphica http://www.artgraphica.net/ which offers free online art lessons to artists of various abilities, and this site, which I like because it compiles information on the best sites on art history and history of art http://www.squidoo.com/arthistory-resources. It’s a monster site with loads of information!!!
When you come to think of it, the only true education is self-education, because motivation is the factor that greases the wheels of study. You are most motivated to learn what you want. My daughter is currently reading The Story of the World, and when she got to the part about Mary Queen of Scots, her interest was so piqued by this woman that she immediately went to the library and borrowed three adult books about Mary, and one book on King James. The librarians thought she was borrowing these for me, but I quickly straightened them out. 🙂
I LOVE learning. And I truly enjoy being a conduit for learning. It is a shame that, in most schools today, teachers are hamstrung by bureaucracy and political correctness to the extent that they are unable to freely teach! This is why I’m a big fan of home-education! It keeps alive that flame of interest and excitement in learning that characterised childhood learning in the toddler years when everything was new and waiting to be discovered! When I watched the 20/20 video by John Stossel, called Stupid in America, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx4pN-aiofw, my heart broke for all that childhood potential that will never be realised, and for all the children who will go through life thinking they are dumb when it is the system that has failed them.
How wonderful to know that the Internet has opened up an entire world of possibilities for the motivated seeker/learner, and, that it, in many cases, makes knowledge available for free! Talk about adding social value! I am not a big fan of technology and how it is surely and steadily taking over our lives to the detriment of certain values. But, I have to say that, when technology empowers, educates, and contributes to the GOOD and FOR the good of the world, it gets two thumbs up from me!
Got Me Thinking 