I Want to go to MIT

… or I can just let MIT come to me.

 For several years now, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has opened up a world of learning through Open Courseware (read: free online courses).  This, I think, is the wave of the future. Soon, all learning will be at your fingertips (as if Google and Wikipedia were not at your beckon already), and schools will be relegated to the backburner. Unless, they too, do an MIT.

The most effective manner of learning has always been when one decides to take responsibility for their own education.  No one textbook, teacher, or school has all the answers. You and you alone must search out the light of knowledge and become a self-learner. What better time to do it than now when the world wide web can take you to places of learning that only a few years ago were reserved for the very privileged few.  You don’t need to dole up $27,000 a year to learn the very same things that an MIT freshman learns anymore.

Right now I’m watching a lecture on Electricity and Magnetism.  A video of an MIT professor streams to my PC. I detect a slight German accent. He looks a bit like Einstein or perhaps Dr. Emmet Brown, the mad scientist from ”Back to the Future”.  I am enthralled.