Autonomous Learning, a Prezintation, in which student's produce something unusual

Let's talk about learning resources.  We're in the 2013, and if there is something you want to learn, and you have even the most thin connection to the Internet, you have no excuse not to be learning.  I'll get back to this point. For starters, here is a a presentation put together with the online software Prezi:

Autonomous Learning

Things to know about this presentation, while this is an effective presentation, the accompanying notes are largely digested information from the scholarly articles listed on the "That's All Folks!" Circle.  Pictures have links to their origins at the bottom of the circle.  Except for the brains, those are MRI scans of my brain as interpreted through the open source brain imaging software Afni.

Here are the links and descriptions of the Internet resources discussed.  

Khan Academy is good for almost all intro level courses, many higher level courses, and even for experts, offers good review and practice in the form of sample problems in fields ranging from maths to history and more.

Investopedia succinctly and expertly explains even the most complex economic concepts with the use of simple and captivating visual aids.  While mostly for business students, there are very few people in the world who wouldn't benefit from knowing a few money related concepts.

Beeminder.  HOLY CRAP.  THERE ARE NO WORDS. Have you ever had a problem motivating yourself to exercise? Do your homework? Perhaps you do them but you don't make progress on the time scale you want.  Use Beeminder. Not convinced? Watch the video on thier web site for a better sumary and sales pitch.

Coursera. I can either spend 3 days listing for you all the universities that publish their professional grade learning material, like MIT open course-ware, or Stanford's competing project... Or I can point you to Coursera. The place where all they do is compile that in a simple to search database. Now go learn yourselves some biochemistry.

Stumble-upon is usually viewed as a waste of time, and honestly it's usually used for that.  What people generally don't think about, is that it has a search engine format.  Think about it.  Hundreds of thousands of people, day in day out, crawling across the entire Internet separating the chaff from the wheat.  At worst, you'll be entertained, at best, you'll find academic level material that is fascinating and useful.

Wikipedia. Normally I'd say "DUH", but most people don't use wikipedia to it's maximum potential, even when they think they are. Don't be a tourist, go behind the curtain and have a look what's really going on, read the discussion page every article has one, and if it doesn't, you need to start it.  

TED speaks for itself, literally.  While it may not be in a standard academic format, I challenge you to find a more reputable source for information.  If you've been living under a rock, go watch at least 5 videos. You'll feel like someone dry cleaned your mind.

While "Instead of TV" isn't exactly going to help you in a specific course, stimulating learning in different fields is always a good idea. You can't know too much and learning in one field helps in every other field.

Now for the stuff we didn't have time for.

-Help the world and get smarter with Free Rice.

-Want to harness the worlds strongest, smartest collective intelligence for personal learning? Well... if you insist. UREDDIT.

-"Remember that website?", "where did I see that?",  "I read it online back when I was a teenager..." sound like a problem you're having? Don't worry. The internet never actually deletes ANYTHING EVER. Find that thing with this thing: The Way Back Machine

-wikinotes is wikipedia except specifically for Your course, yes, yours. 

-Think Wolfram Alpha is just for maths? Think again. Ask it questions about cigarettes, your thesis question, caffeine, ask it what the weather was like on the day you were born. (rain and overcast with an average of 3 degrees for me. No lightning sadly.)

-The Baron

PS.

1) Prezi is based on google chromes "chrome frame" technology, and works best in the chrome web brouwser.

2) For linux users, getting a copy of afni is as easy as typing "sudo apt-get install afni" in your terminal.  It's coded mostly in python.

3) If you're in SEL149, leave a comment, it's a bit like signing a guest book.