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Extra-Curricular Resources for Students?
rende asks: "With school soon starting or having already started for many, this seems like a timely question. The MIT OpenCourseWare project is looking like a great resource for additional information to supplement my own coursework this year. I was very delighted to find this information freely available online, and wish I would have known about it previously. I would like to ask Slashdot: Are there any other resources, offered by other schools or independent sites, that offer such a robust selection of information that would fit in nicely, with the standard classes of a science related major?"
goatse.cx seems to be a popular education venue
Drop some acid and open your mind.
here
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Sometimes the most impressionable lessons are those that use everyday objects to convey. Have your son team up with his school chums and drag the class wimp into the bathroom. Have Junior shove this kid's face into the toilet while flushing it and point out that the direction in which the water swirls when it goes down is due to the Corriolis Effect. Depending on the age of the children involved, he can go into a deeper discussion of this important rule of nature. If you son's schoolmate does not seem to appreciate the significance of this natural phenomenon, have your child repeat the experiment over and over until the subject grasps the material being presented. It is quite likely that such a dramatic demonstration of the Corriolis Effect will have a much more lasting impression on the student than simply reading about it in an overpriced textbook.
It saddens me to see public schools squander their limited financial resources on internet-enabled computers and graphing calculators. All you really need are simple, everyday objects and a desire to teach! Too often, teachers are overworked and the students must find novel ways to educate each other. This is just one example of how students can share the joy of science with their fellow classmates.
GMD
watch this
is Campus Watch. You should check here to see if any of your possible professors are promoting terrorism or hatred of America, and also report any professors who you suspect of not being completely balanced or injecting their anti-American politics into coursework.
My favorite source of information has always been the library. Not only do you find books on what you might be looking for, but you'll often find the original research paper on a topic.
You might scoff, but librarians will show you where you can find those books and articles online as well.
I often search for information on the internet about topics I didn't fully understand from my textbook/teacher. There isn't really a one site that has it all in any subject. I just google for a topic, and often there is a university course site that comes up with some reading/practice problems. I've found great resources on calculus that way... ... but it works.
Anyways, obvious advice i suppose
MIT's commitment to put all their course material online is unprecedented. Within the ed tech community it got a huge amount of press when it was launched. I'm always surprised to find otherwise computer literate educators who don't know about it. There have been various other efforts, but nothing which comes anywhere near the scope and financial commitment of OpenCourseware.
At the college I go to school, North Lake College in Irving, TX, the head of our UNIX department made this site: http://snap.nlc.dcccd.edu which is material and courses for UNIX. My college has a UNIX Systems Administration degree, and this is the site in which all of the material that we use is posted. I am also looking for projects/ learning experiances to further my education.
As a 20 IT veteran, I am always amazed at how few job candidates do nothing else but course work. I am 100% self taught and easily 95% more knowledgeable than anyone out of school. I spent my teen years doing instead of reading and homework. College and degrees have there palce but they are ONLY a starting point. At home I had a computer and pounded on it 18 hours a day. I did, I learned, I opened my mind. Get the degree but for god's sake apply yourself like crazy.
At UCSD we have full access to Safari IT Books (O'Reilly) http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/ on campus or through a proxy server, they got tech books on lots of the basics, programming, networking etc to help fill in gaps or for quick refrence. Comes in handy,
And as posted earlier google, google, google
The ACM Digital Library saved my ass several times during my undergrad for sure. It was nice being able to look at the actual paper published describing an algorithm or data structure, for example, when trying to complete a programming assignment that involved it.
/16 worth of IP address space was covered under a site license, so your school might also have such an arrangement.
Call me a nerd, but journal articles are still interesting reading just so you can keep up on what's the state of the art, as well as being able to look back on some of the more famous pieces of published work... take Dijkstra's "Goto Considered Harmful," for instance.
Granted, the ACM library may not be free, but I know that my university's entire