The Internet Spectrum
Having yet to post more than a humorous picture on my class blog, I thought I’d compensate by posting about the Yale psychology class I just attended in my paint-streaked sweatpants and tattered Pink Floyd t-shirt. No, this was no University of Phoenix class, the internet’s ubiquitous online university. This was Academic Earth, a new website that offers thousands of free lectures from crem della crem universities… {Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Yale… uh, what’s up Columbia?}
Academic Earth wishes to give “everyone on earth access to a world-class education”. What an idea! Imagine: you have got a half hour to kill before dinner, why not listen to a lecture on astrophysics? Or on linear algebra? The notion of this kind of accessibility to this kind of information is astounding. To me, an educator, a site like this represents a pinnacle of usefulness, the best case scenario in technological advancement, the far end of the internet spectrum which spans vastly in both directions.
Will Academic Earth receive much traffic? We’ll have to see. Google Trends has yet to collect enough data on the site. Could it match or exceed the daily average users in the United States who visit Rotten.com {not hyper-linked purposefully!} who advertises itself, humbly, as “an archive of disturbing illustration”? On average, 4,000 unique users click in daily. I’ll be checking back in on the data. Any predictions?
