Google Science Fair 2012

February 23rd, 2012

Google announced the new edition of their now annual Science Fair for 2012. Started last year, it is trying to stimulate the creativity of young people and to foster their natural curiosity and thirst for knowledge. It is a global online science competition for 13-18 year old students and last year it attracted over 10,000 students from 91 countries to submit science experiments.

If you are curious about the things around you (or know somebody who is) and are 13-18 year old, watch the following video, checkout the rules and start your own project to get a world-class prize: a scientific trip to the Galapagos Islands with National Geographic Explorer, unique scholarships and real-life work opportunities in iconic science centers of excellence like CERN in Switzerland. The deadline is April 1st, 2012. Good luck!

Invaluable knowledge resources

March 1st, 2010

Books There are numerous sources of knowledge on the Internet. Among the eLearning resources, specialized reading, focus groups, portals, etc., you can find the topic that is of interest to you and spend a lot of hours reading and watching videos on the subject.

I am also very keen on learning new things and gathering knowledge in various spheres of life. So, I was very excited, when several years ago, one of the most prominent universities in the IT sphere – the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), decided to start an innovative project – to make the courses, taught to MIT students, available online. Since then, many universities have made this step, and as a result, you can now “attend” top universities’ courses from the comfort of your own home, to mix and match content according to your own interests and needs, and to design unique curricula for yourselves.

So here is (hopefully, an ever growing) list of links to the publicly available university courses and other knowledge resources:

Academic Earth [http://www.academicearth.org/]
MIT Open CourseWare (OCW) project [http://ocw.mit.edu]
MIT World [http://mitworld.mit.edu]
UC Berkeley Webcasts [http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php]
Open Yale Courses [http://oyc.yale.edu]
Apple iTunes U [http://www.apple.com/education/mobile-learning]
Research Channel Video Library [http://www.researchchannel.org]
Sceince Stage [http://sciencestage.com]
TeacherTube [http://www.teachertube.com]
TED Talks [http://www.ted.com]
Udemy [http://www.udemy.com]
videolectures.net [http://videolectures.net]
YouTube EDU [http://www.youtube.com/education]
Yovisto [http://www.yovisto.com]
RSA [http://www.thersa.org]
Open CourseWare Consortium [http://www.ocwconsortium.org]

Feel free to propose other valuable resources, that belong to the list. Also, be sure to revisit this article, as it is my intention to keep the list updated as I find other valuable resources.

[Image by svilen001, taken from www.sxc.hu]