Big Pickles

So there is this professor who has come up with a technique to keep his students vigorously engaged in otherwise dry and tedious subject matter. Each lecture contains a lie, and the students are challenged to find it. It's more than just an attention-getting device, it also provides valuable practice in questioning and verifying everything you hear.

As one commenter is quick to point out, the professor would really have to know his stuff for this to work. Most of my teachers--especially in high school--made enough honest mistakes that their lectures would never stand up to this kind of scrutiny. So I guess the technique forced him to pay extra close attention as well.

What a neat idea.

Labels: education

MIT is offering a ton of free courses online. You can't get credit for them, and you won't have access to faculty or anything like that, but anyone is free to download the syllabus, lecture notes, assignments, and exams. No registration required.

If you were really motivated you could get the rough equivalent of an MIT education for a fraction of the cost! I guess you would still have to buy all your books, though.

UPDATE: Turns out OpenCourseWare is not limited to MIT, but actually consists of a consortium of several outstanding universities, such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame, ...and UVSC.

Labels: education, general