The computers were installed as holes in the wall, much in the way people would expect to find a cashpoint, and children quickly learned to teach themselves and then began to pass that knowledge on to others.

“I think we have stumbled across a self-organising system with learning as an emergent behaviour,” said Professor Sugata Mirta of Newcastle University in the UK, at the TED Global (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference.  He said that follow-up experiments suggest that children around the world can learn complex tasks quickly, and with little supervision.

“The children barely went to school, they didn’t know any English, they had never seen a computer before and they didn’t know what the internet was.”  The children quickly figured out how to use the computers and access the internet.  “I repeated the experiment across India and noticed that children will learn to do what they want to learn to do.”

“At the end of it we concluded that groups of children can lean to use computers on their own irrespective of who or where they are,” he said.

Professor Mirta has now formalised lessons from his experiments and has come up with the new concept of SOLE (Self Organised Learning Environments).  These consist of a computer on a bench large enough for four children to sit around it.  He said the learning doesn’t really take place when you give a child their own computer.

He has tested the spaces in the UK and Italy, with similar results, and now believes it should be tested more widely.

The Open CourseWare Movement allows students to find courses online that fit their needs. Because of the large amount of schools currently serving free online classes, students can choose from literally thousands of courses. These aren’t just your every day, run of the mill colleges either! Universities such as MIT, Yale, and Stanford are among those that offer free courses online. Even colleges and universities in different countries such as Japan, Israel, and Spain are participating in the program. Because of this, many courses are offered in languages other than English.

For a college to qualify for the Open CourseWare program, they must offer at least 10 courses free online. The courses must contain everything a student needs, including the reading material (students who use this don’t have to pay for books) for it to be a part of the program. Whether it’s a class taken for fun or to learn something new, it’s a good idea for students to look for classes from universities known particularly for that course or major. This helps ensure that the student will get the best education they can. Different courses are taught in different ways. Many courses have video lectures, just audio, or just course transcripts. It’s important for those looking to take a class through the Open CourseWare program to look for classes that fit their needs such as a video class for those who learn better visually than by reading.

The goal of the Open CourseWare Movement is to get as many colleges and universities to participate as possible so that more people are given the chance to learn online. There are many ways that those who’ve benefited from the Open CourseWare Movement can help such as donating, passing on the word, or just taking a course to better themselves. It is usually a good idea to open a search engine and search for “open courseware” to find universities and colleges that offer these free courses.

The available courses are divided into three categories which are Introduction to Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Linear Systems and Optimization. Of those courses the Computer Science courses are aimed at beginners while the other two categories provide access to advanced courses.

Courses are made up of an introduction, the actual lessons, handouts, assignments, exams and software. The actual lessons are available as videos which can be watched online and as html / pdf transcripts that can be downloaded to the computer.

The video lessons require Microsoft Silverlight which has to be installed to be able to view them. Below is the list of available courses:

Introduction to Computer Science

• Programming Methodology CS106A
• Programming Abstractions CS106B
• Programming Paradigms CS107

Artificial Intelligence

• Introduction to Robotics CS223A
• Natural Language Processing CS224N
• Machine Learning CS229

Linear Systems and Optimization

• The Fourier Transform and its Applications EE261
• Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems EE263
• Convex Optimization I EE364A
• Convex Optimization II EE364B

The lessons can also be viewed at Youtube, iTunes, Vyew or downloaded as wmv or mp4 torrents. There is unfortunately no complete package download of all the lessons and pdf documents. The mp4 torrents have a size of about 650 to 700 Megabytes while the wmv torrents a size of roughly 150 Megabytes.

Let me introduce several tutorial indexing sources whose purpose is to organize and categorize the best of tutorials available online.

Tutorial Center

This one is indeed a center with pretty broad scale of issues dealt with in the wide selection of collected links to tutorials. It’s no use giving examples of categories since you can hardly think of any application that would be left out (at least of the best known ones). Submitted tutorials are examined to make sure only the high quality ones make it to the list.

Tutorial Vault

Tutorialvault’s focused on graphic and coding tutorials which are hand-picked and split into just several main categories, basically those most often sought after like Photoshop, Flash, PHP, CSS ones and a few others. Although Adobe apps apparently lead the chart here, the other categories are nicely filled as well. So far over 2300 pieces and counting.

Tech Screencast

This collection of screencasts only deals with issues related to web development in its heavier form and contains videos providing useful hints about different technologies and programming/scripting languages used to propel websites – RoR, ASP, PHP and more. The number of published screencasts is not that high but their quality seems pretty good to me.

Bonus: Inkscaper’s Dreamland

I couldn’t resist adding this one at the end, although this resource is purely aimed at the OS vector graphics editor Inkscape and graphics made in it. I must admit I haven’t used Inkscape much so far but after seeing what these guys can do in it, I knew I had to give it more attention, perhaps as much as GIMP deserves. Should you be a designer or just someone who deals with graphics in their free time, you definitely don’t wanna pass this valuable screencast.

Shared Talk – Interlingual

This website is simply AWESOME. I’ve only registered recently and had the opportunity to only talk to several people for a short time but so far I’ve loved the way this service works. It aims at throwing people with the same desire of improving their language abilities together and allowing them to quickly and easily establish a communication channel for practicing it. The sweet thing about this service is that the website runs on highly developed Flash mainframe with tabbed interface and the communication with others takes place immediately without the need to install any kind of VoIP software. The only thing required for participation in voice chat is allowing the Flash applet to access the audio HW of your computer (either for current session only or permanently for this website) through a classic Shockwave dialog that appears while the voice channel is being set up. That is, after a quick registration where you fill in your profile and state the languages you know or want to learn plus the approximate level of your knowledge to enable the others to decide whether they feel like talking to you or preferably someone else. There are some additional functions too, like adding people you like to your “Network”, sending and receiving private messages and searching for an ideal language partner to share the experience with.
Featuring 113 languages in all, not only English (though, it is the most common indeed).

Listen and write – English

Frankly, this particular site does not appear too sophisticated at the first sight but the content’s what matters most and that’s what cought my attention in this case. Transcribing dictations in real time is what’s being dealth with here and I should say their system works better than I had expected at the beginning. You can use the embedded player to listen to the whole dictation or rather the other one below it which only plays a short part of it while you’re typing in the words you hear. That’s where it actually starts to be interesting. The system is pretty smart and it checks the typed-in words immediately to either auto-complete them or correct your mistakes in real time. Moreover, it repeats this small chunk of audio over and over until the text written by you matches what’s being said, consequently switching to the following chunk in an automated manner. The level of English in these listening exercises differs which is indicated by a number below each of them, thus making it easier to pick the one matching your abilities. RSS feeds for those exercises are available to keep you up to date as well. Some advanced statistics and features like performance diagrams are available after the registration. With the hope for slightly improving this site’s appearance to make it more catchy, I myself consider it a keeper.

BBC Learning – sole English

I’m consent about the general public being aware of various language courses broadcast by BBC, largely through the TV network. But did you know it offered a well-organized and comprehensive online course as well? With daily updated sources of grammar explanations, emphasized vocabulary in articles, audio/video stories, quizzes and thorough summary of idioms and phrases, it becomes a valuable vault of resources related to English in every way. Grab the RSS feed to have the upcoming lessons delivered as soon as they come out.