From The Chronicle of Higher Education
In the green dorm at the University of Vermont, students can teach other students in “guilds” devoted to sewing, canning, composting, beekeeping, and other skills. L. Pearson King, a junior environmental-studies major, taught his peers how to carve spoons in a woodworking guild last year. “It’s kind of trivial, but it’s also cathartic and kind of fun,” he says of the project, and the students in his group were immensely proud of their work. “To be active in the creation of an item forms a completely different relationship with that item.”
… and it’ll radically alter how we view education. Specifically work force development training. If you can print anything yourself why do we need factories full of workers?
I first heard the term feral scholar from Stan Goff sometime in 2004 or 2005. My wife and I helped Stan set up his website stangoff.com and later worked with De Alexander to move it and launch feralscholar.org. It’s an amazing site full of really smart people discussing issues like war, food, and feminism. I encourage you to check it out. This site feralscholar.com is inspired by Stan and his writings yet will be different. I registered the dot com domain with his blessing. I’ll be writing and linking on this blog to explore the different ways we learn. My primary motivation is creating a resource for people to teach themselves.
Another startup working on changing how we get an education online.
Sebastian Thrun Aims to Revolutionize University Education With Udacity
This past August fellow Singularity Hub writer Aaron Saenz wrote about Udacity, the online university created by Stanford artificial intelligence professor and Google autonomous vehicle leader, Sebastian Thrun. At the time Thrun was gearing up to teach his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course to a class of 200 at Stanford. But why teach 200 when you can teach 1,000…or 160,000? With Udacity, Thrun and fellow AI giant Peter Norvig created an online version of the course, and anyone that wanted to enroll could – for free. The homework assignments and exams would be the same as the ones given to the Stanford students, and they would be graded in the same way so online enrollees could see how they stacked up to some of the brightest students in the world. It was to be a grand experiment in education.
OpenCulture.com has a large list of free course from many universities here http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses.
Get free online courses from the world’s leading universities. This collection includes over 250 free courses in the liberal arts and sciences. Download these audio & video courses straight to your computer or mp3 player.
The OpenCourseWare Consortium website contains a large list of free courses offered by Universities all over the world. Topics include Agriculture, Art, Computer Science, Religion, History, Law, Business, and much more.
The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.
An OpenCourseWare(OCW) is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials for colleges and universities. These materials are organized as courses, and often include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content.
The Wittenham Hill Cider Portal is a huge collection of knowledge about fermented apples.
This portal takes you to a whole load of information about small-scale cider making. Here you can learn how to grow cider apples, how to process them into cider juice, how to ferment it into hard cider, and how to bottle and store the cider. Later, you can learn how to tweak the process to make it just what you want – dry or sweet, fizzy or flat. There’s sections on unfermented apple juice and on cider vinegar too. There’s even a bit of history – these fellows are from the17th century!
