TechgnosisWeb Prime

In April 2001, MIT did something revolutionary: They put up the content of hundreds of their classes on the Web, with the intention of placing all of their thousands of courses online over the next few years, and they would make all this material, lectures, class notes, tests, course outlines, available completely for free. Not the degrees, mind you, just the material. The knowledge. And they called it OpenCourseWare. It’s been 2 years since that happened, and Wired has a fascinating article on where the program stands now. From the article:

Lam Vi Quoc negotiates his scooter through Ho Chi Minh City’s relentless stream of pedal traffic and hangs a right down a crowded alley. He climbs the steep wooden stairs of the tiny house he shares with nine family members, passing by his mother, who is stooped on the floor of the second level preparing lunch. He ascends another set of even steeper steps to the third level and settles on a stool at a small desk, pushing aside the rolled-up mat he sleeps on with one of his brothers. To the smell of a chicken roasting on a grill in the alley and the clang of the next-door neighbor’s metalworking operation, Lam turns on his Pentium 4 PC, and soon the screen displays Lecture 2 of Laboratory in Software Engineering, a course taught each semester on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Here,” he says, pointing at the screen. “This is where I got the idea to use decoupling as a way of integrating two programs.”

Goddamn but this sounds s3ksy. Maybe I should take a good look at it, get a head start on the education I plan to get ~ 3 years from now?