Free Education--for the asking!

I learned the niftiest thing yesterday. I got an advertising flyer from Real Simple magazine, telling me how much I needed to subscribe, how my life was incomplete without this subscription. Until they lower their prices, as much as I'd like to get it, my life shall remain without completion. At any rate, part of their sales pitch was to send handy little brochures of tips. For example, one detailed how to clean practically anything in five minutes or less. One featured organizational tips. And one -- well, I can't actually remember what its pitch was. I do remember that on the back was a list of things you could do for free--free samples from Oil of Olay, free paperback book swapping, things like that.

One of them was an offer to take free classes at MIT. Of course I made a beeline for that one. I went to the site and sure enough, there are tons of classes in many different divisions. Now, I can't quite figure out if you can actually attend some sort of online class, ala University of Phoenix, but you can download the complete course for anything listed. This include the lectures, class notes, various papers and presentations from the students...everything. So of course I spent a long time last night going through and downloading class after class. I think I ended up with something like fifteen classes, and that with judiciously trimming it to just the classes that I really, really want to take. A good two thirds of them are anthropological, of course, but there are a couple of lit courses, a French course, a history or two, and a smattering of science and psychology.

Now my computer is full of higher education. All I have to do is figure out how I can actually access it! Once I "take" all of these classes, I can put them on my grad school applications! "Yes, I took MIT's seminar in ethnography and fieldwork, and I had a little time to kill, so I also fit in a class on psycholinguistics and the little course on modularity, domain-specificity, and the organization of knowledge. Next up? Geodynamics, Philosophy of Love in the Western world, and either romantic poetry or toy product design. I hate to pin myself down."

Seriously, this may be one of the coolest things ever. I would prefer to have some kind of interaction, but perhaps I can talk my friends into doing the same classes and we can just email or call each other and have remote classes or something.

I just like learning so, and I hate having to narrow it down to one area when I want to learn something in at least fourteen different fields. This will do nicely for the time being.

If you're interested: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm