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Well, what do intelligent people watch on TV? The Learning Channel hasn't been about learning in a decade. Same for Discovery. The "news" networks are atrocious. CSPAN is pointless. CSPAN2 on the weekends is good, but that's BookTV so why not just read? Charlie Rose is on past my bed time.

I like the Daily Show and Colbert, but let's be honest that's not exactly smart TV. Smarter than average, but still a guilty pleasure.

If you want to watch something smart, skip the TV entirely and check out Academic Earth. Why can't we have a cable network this good?

Khan Academy has a good series of ten-minute instructional videos about the theory of chemistry and organic chemistry, starting from first principles, this would be a good place to start.

http://www.khanacademy.org/#chemistry
http://www.khanacademy.org/#organic-chemistry

There are many online university lectures, which might be a little too advanced for a 10 year old, but they available anyway:
http://www.academicearth.org/subjects/chemistry
http://www.youtube.com/ (Search for long >20 minute videos)
https://www.coursera.org/ (Doesn't offer chemistry yet, but may do in the future)

I myself missed out a large part of my formal education and as a result became mostly self-taught. Being homeschooled means you don't have any deadlines or exams to worry about. The core thing to maintain is curiosity (the willingness to ask questions) and the confidence ans skills to go about answering them for yourself. Google is your biggest friend!

The approach is very different from structured learning. Pick a question, a project or a task. Jump in at the deep end, google the question directly, even its is rather advanced. The explanation will probably be full of alien words and concepts that you don't fully understand and simply raise up an even bigger pile of questions. So pick the first of these new questions, and keep drilling down until you have a good enough understanding of each word or concept that you can start to make sense of the original answer to the original question. Rather than trying to cover a pre-defined syllabus in sequential order and to a given timetable, you are aiming to drill down to whatever level of detail is needed in order to have the clarity required to answer the question you are interested in. It seems slow at first, but by the time you have fully answered your first proper question, you will have already covered half the syllabus. Age then becomes irrelevant and as long as you keep asking questions, you never stop learning.

Sugata Mitra has an interesting take on the power of simply giving children the tools to teach themselves:
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

As the parents and the grandparents are not confident in teaching the subject, maybe you should turn the tables, set the 10 year kid the challenge of teaching the grandparents how do "French Cooking" (as it was once known).

I never attended high-school (I went to vocational school and then started my engineering studies) so I never got to study those interesting-sounding subjects like psychology and philosophy. Now that all the most famous universities have been putting their introductory courses online, I've watched quite a few of them.

When I was watching Introduction to Psychology (Prof. Paul Bloom, Yale, extremely interesting and entertaining way to spend some 20-odd hours) I thought "Hell, I could actually do more than watch these lectures. I think I'll actually buy the book and read the recommended chapters!".

The course book costed something like 150+ dollars, which I thought was astounding but that actually wasn't the showstopper for me (I have a job and am quite prone to buying stuff on a whim in my sleep-deprivation induced mania). What made me pissed off was that they (=every store I could find by googling the book) didn't sell an electronic version of the book. What made me more pissed was that they clearly had electronic version: If I were to buy the physical book, I would get the PDF on CD with the book. There simply was no way of buying just the PDF (I would have been willing to accept DRM, to pay the full price, whatever... I just didn't want to wait a week, spend a phonecall arguing with customs officers, pay another 30 bucks for shipping, another 30 bucks of import taxes, etc. as is usually the case when I order stuff online).

In the end, I was annoyed that the stores selling the book could have made my life easier but had chosen not to, so I didn't buy the book. However, open courses like these cause large amounts of people like me to consider buying books that we never would have otherwise bought. If the industry can implement minor reforms to approach us a bit, I'm sure there's a lot of potential for more profit.

I've actually been taking their intro level programming class. http://academicearth.org/courses/introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming I have tried to learn programming a few times before through sites like cprogramming.com, but there's just so much jargon to wade through. This course has made it much easier to grasp some of the fundamentals. I will say though, it isn't perfect. If I get stuck on a problem and Google can't help I have to post to a forum and wait for a few days, trading information back and forth with someone who knows what they're doing. Also, there's no answer key for assignments.

Zinga will still attract talent, but the contracts will have thicker prose about termination and vesting conditions, so it will be much harder to pull this stunt a second time. But perhaps at this stage of growth they are beyond that.

I watched Politics, Strategy, and Game Theory last night, which talks about Grim Trigger and the conditions under which, in iterated prisoner's dilemma, you care more about the future than defecting in the present moment.

It's a competent lecture with no great pizzazz.

Here's a fairly nice piece by an undergraduate I stumbled upon brushing up on Grim Trigger: Debunking the Prisoner(slashcode fuckup)s Dilemma on Robert Axelrod(slashcode fuckup)s Emergence of Cooperation among Egoists and why cooperation is a lot more common than the shallow analysis would have you believe.

I really wonder what payoff matrix he constructed to author that blog under no fixed identity. I found a Tweet referencing the site by the apparent author with one or two clues about his circumstance.

The punishment for Zynga in future iterations are employment contracts with a lot less room to wiggle if they screw up future hires. The reward in the present iteration is yanking back a substantial chunk of the entire company.

If the quiet vestors really aren't showing up and pulling their weight, it doesn't seem great to let them get away with that either. I don't think Zynga's presumption is that they can't fight this, but more like "the effort involved will be a shock to their lazy asses" so they are likely to settle without going ten rounds.

I am always surprised to see the heavy usage of blackboard at places like Stanford, MIT (check http://www.academicearth.org./ Even some of the later successes, like the Khan Academy or Paddy Hirsch's financial market mini-lectures, are primarily relying on blackboard centered teaching methods. One may disagree, but I still think analog-alike blackboard based teaching is still the best, compared to power-point based lectures.

Overall, I consider technology is merely "a tool" to get information faster and crunch numbers faster. Still, education or any other intellectual pursuit is down to heavy-use-of-brain, discipline, and hard work/perseverance. And yes, I do not deny, having good teachers is always a plus.

You can watch a very nice series of lectures on game theory from Yale at http://www.academicearth.org/courses/game-theory
You can also download that same set of lectures from http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/game-theory/

I watched the whole thing and really enjoyed it.

Or don't check it out with iTunes. http://academicearth.org/

I've got to give it to Standford and MIT (and all of the other schools who have contributed to open courseware). They have done a service to everyone.

Well, assuming he doesn't have anything else going on during the run-up to that hearing, he could check out the open courseware for Stanford's into comp sci course, which is taught in Java. not that he's likely to be reading this, or that lawyers are interested in turning the judge into a programmer.

There is an interesting video course on philosophy of death from Yale.
http://academicearth.org/courses/death

For pre-U education to brush up your knowledge, there's Khan Academy to teach you everything from primary school to even college.

For formal university level education, you can get many of them free directly from university. MIT Open Courseware is one of the well known examples. You can find a list of them at Open Culture. Google Code University is a less known but great site that helps you start and search on your online education journey.

There are also video lecture collection sites that contain lecture recordings from various universities, such as Academic Earth and Video Lectures.

You may also interested in less formal technology videos such as BestTechVideos and Google Tech Talks.

You can download a lot of ebooks from the web. Here is an example list you can found on Delicious.

In case if you are only interested in web design, IMHO the best way to learn design and multimedia is go to a real college. But anyway, there are tons of resources for web design too. Delicious is a must have search tool for you to get started.

I'd love to provide more links that I have but I'm short of time. But as always, Google is your best friend!

I have gone through those at MIT, just for fun. I also found that Khan Academy was really interesting and perhaps is easier for some. Strang at MIT is awesome and also the courses at Yale are good.
UCLA has some great courses too.
science and magic was very informative. It doesn't hurt that some of the profs are also quite entertaining.OR science and magic on youtube

But if you really want a touchscreen device on the cheap there are touch screen kits for most popular notebooks, just search on ebay. There are also touchscreen monitors bellow the 200 bucks, these can be hooked up to the existing desktop in the classroom and serve just right.

I would advice you not to set high hopes for resistive touchscreens, they tend to reduce the lcd brightness and contrast while incresing reflections and diffusing the image, if your really really want this implemented try before you buy.

As a former participant at such contests, here are some sites that helped me along the way:
- Study Introduction to Algorithms, now at third edition: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11866 (This is one of the best books in the field and one I personally read, that's why I'm recommending it. There are of course other books that I don't know of.)
- Check out courses for computer science from different universities: http://academicearth.org/
- USACO has a training path witch gives you problems to solve and increase in difficulty as you go along
- Competition sites like topcoder.com also have educational content beside the weekly algorithmic contests: http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=Static&d1=tutorials&d2=alg_index

And most importantly, solve lots and lots of problems. Beside USACO and topcoder, here are some ACM like online judges:
- http://uva.onlinejudge.org/ (some are easy, others are easy if you get the idea and some of the last ones are hard)
- http://www.spoj.pl/ (most are hard!)

Bonus: If you're romanian, you should really check http://infoarena.ro/ It's the biggest online community in computer science with articles, problems, helpful guys.

Hope this helps!

Introduction to Computer Science using Java by Bradley Kjell

Introduction to Computer Science in Java by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne.

A Balanced Introduction to Computer Science by Dr. David Reed

video
Introduction to Computer Science I by David J. Malan, Harvard

The babies will gaze and smile towards what they find attractive, and ignore what they don't find attractive.

Yes, I have recently learned smiles and attention are the things we can "measure" when dealing with babies; there is an amazing course from Yale available online: http://academicearth.org/courses/introduction-to-psychology. Check out lecture #5, that's where the professor explains in more details what you described in your message.

One question - how do we know it is beauty babies smile at? What if it is something else, and we mistakenly attribute it to the wrong feature?

I sort of agree with what the professor is saying. Already, lectures are available online (including the very awesome, Hulu-like site, Academic Earth), and the use of iTunes to distribute lectures is already taking place.

Despite the usefulness of these technologies, I only think these things expand the reach of the classroom, but I definitely don't think that classrooms are going anywhere anytime soon. The use of websites and iTunes to reach people is no real difference than what books have done for a very long time. The people who are going to take time to watch the videos would have read the books.

Additionally, I *highly* disagree with the idea that "today's colleges are typically tethered, isolated, generic, and closed." I went to an engineering university, and the amount of technical stuff going on there was absolutely awesome. All you had to do was attend one of the many seminars, working groups, or even a classroom to see amazing work that students were doing. Being around other students also spurred my own ideas towards various projects.

Last of all, I'd argue that the teaching received in the classrooms really is very little about the college experience. Sure, someone may be able to "learn" a lot about physics from a podcast, but he or she is going to have little real-world experience. This, to me, was the most valuable experience I received from my college career.

Basically, I think these technologies will help reach more people, but they aren't going to make the current world obsolete.