free university lectures - computer science, mathematics, physics, chemistry Whether your goal is to earn a promotion, graduate at the top of your class, or just accelerate your life, lectures can help get you there. Our archives of lectures cover a huge range of topics and have all been handpicked and carefully designed by experienced instructors throughout the world who are dedicated to helping you take the next step toward meeting your career goals. Lifelong learns can turn their free time turn into self-improvement time. The online lectures on this list are more than lecture notes or a slideshow on a topic -- they were designed for audiences like you, with carefully sequenced themes and topics taught by veteran educators, and often with additional resources for your own independent study. The lectures are available to anybody, completely free of charge. Lecture courses are a valid and vital learning tool, and may be one of the best methods of learning available.
Seven Civil War stories your teacher never told you 111 Lessons Life Taught Us Sometimes thinking about your life and sorting out what you have learned is just as important as tackling a new venture. That’s what our new sister site, Everyday Life Lessons, is all about. It’s an online community where people share, rank and discuss life’s greatest lessons. The site challenges you to reflect on your past, dig deep within yourself and answer one simple question: What has life taught you? Think about all the things you would love to tell yourself if you could travel back in time to give your younger self some advice about life. Here’s a sample of 111 life lessons that were recently submitted to the site: Spend more time with those who make you smile and less time with those who you feel pressured to impress.Never tell someone their dreams are impossible. Everyday Life Lessons is updated daily. Photo by: Lauren Macdonald Related 7 Important Life Lessons Everyone Learns the Hard Way “People never learn anything by being told, they have to find out for themselves.” May 11, 2012
Making Teachers Nerdy THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you're not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it's exactly the opposite. --William Gaddis, JR, p. 25 According to C. Perhaps no where is this imagination so exercised than in the sociology of knowledge, which studies the social sources and social consequences of knowledge--how, for instance, social organization shapes both the content and structure of knowledge or how various social, cultural, political conditions shield people from truth. --John Dunne, The Way of All the Earth --Chris Dede. 1988.
Top 10 Common Faults In Human Thought Humans The human mind is a wonderful thing. Cognition, the act or process of thinking, enables us to process vast amounts of information quickly. The Gambler’s fallacy is the tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality, they are not. Reactivity is the tendency of people to act or appear differently when they know that they are being observed. Pareidolia is when random images or sounds are perceived as significant. Interesting Fact: the Rorschach Inkblot test was developed to use pareidolia to tap into people’s mental states. Self-fulfilling Prophecy Self-fulfilling prophecy is engaging in behaviors that obtain results that confirm existing attitudes. Interesting Fact: Economic Recessions are self-fulfilling prophecies. The Halo effect is the tendency for an individual’s positive or negative trait to “spill over” to other areas of their personality in others’ perceptions of them. Escalation of Commitment
10 Mind-Blowing Theories That Will Change Your Perception of the World Reality is not as obvious and simple as we like to think. Some of the things that we accept as true at face value are notoriously wrong. Scientists and philosophers have made every effort to change our common perceptions of it. The 10 examples below will show you what I mean. 1. Great glaciation is the theory of the final state that our universe is heading toward. 2. Solipsism is a philosophical theory, which asserts that nothing exists but the individual’s consciousness. Don’t you believe me? As a result, which parts of existence can we not doubt? 3. George Berkeley, the father of Idealism, argued that everything exists as an idea in someone’s mind. The idea being that if the stone really only exists in his imagination, he could not have kicked it with his eyes closed. 4. Everybody has heard of Plato. In addition to this stunning statement, Plato, being a monist, said that everything is made of a single substance. 5. 6. Enternalism is the exact opposite of presentism. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Why Education Without Creativity Isn't Enough Phaneesh Murthy, CEO of Indian outsourcing company iGate Patni. | Photo by Ritam Banerjee Last April, when sharing a stage at Facebook with CEO Mark Zuckerberg, President Obama summed up the conventional wisdom on what's needed to shape American minds for the global marketplace. "We've got to do such a better job when it comes to STEM education," he said. "That's how we're going to stay competitive for the future." If you want the truth, talk to the competition. "In India, it takes engineers two to three years to recover from the damage of the education system." Murthy will tell you that the outsourcing industry is not some unstoppable force: It's hitting real limits. As a short-term solution, iGate Patni is hiring grads who majored in other disciplines, including math and physics. Yet this kind of corporate training can only move the needle so far. In today's job market, midlevel jobs are being eliminated, moving workers to either high- or low-end employment. Or don't.
Sciences A view of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew while traveling to the Moon on December 7, 1972. Africa, Madagascar, and the Arabian Peninsula are visible, and you can barely make out the Antarctic, shrouded in the heavy cloud cover in the southern hemisphere. Arching cloud patterns show the presence of weather fronts. Image courtesy of NASA/Apollo 17. I Will Knot!