Week 1 - Blog Posting #2 - Learning 2.0

The way we are educating our students needs to take a whole new dimension. We are currently educating our students in a world that is changing rapidly. This video speaks to that ever-changing learning community.

I feel that the way we learn is going to become more and more collaborative and go beyond our classrooms. I recently came across an article that mentions the learning community called Academic Earth ,which I feel demonstrates the learning of the future. Academic Earth is a website that combines lectures available from Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale. Many subjects are available including English, Mathematics, History, and Religion. These are Ivy League educations that are available to anyone who would like to access them without the large price tag. The available video lectures can be embedded into other sites like your blogs and wikis. The lectures are sorted by subject, University, instructor, and playlist which makes searching for your specific topic very user friendly. The playlists are “thematic collections of lectures” selected by their editors. For example, they have a “First Day of Freshman” year playlist that includes 4 lectures and a “Wars Throughout History” playlist that includes 7 lectures. The article also has a link to a previous article that you may find interesting where they talk about getting a free college education online.

Now, you can’t talk about free education without talking about iTunesU. Apple makes life easier for us all, yet again, with this collaboration of online schools. I have included two videos below that really explain iTunesU, and the amount of information that is available to students. ITunesU can be a great tool both inside and outside the classroom with lectures in many different subjects on many different educational levels. The best part about iTunesU is that it is free and you do not even need an iPod. Simply download iTunes on to your computer, create and account, and you can access iTunesU. Many of the lessons on iTunesU also include downloadable content such as worksheets, lesson plans, and many other supplemental materials. ITunesU could certainly be the future of education in accessing textbooks and other educational materials.