Open Courses

The best thing thing in the internet besides Wikipedia, is the increasingly common practice of putting the content of classes for free in the internet. At the forefront of this effort is MIT. They have been putting a lot of material out there, and not just their world-famous engineering courses. Check it out for your self. ocw.mit.edu


Yale University's Open Courses, while not offering as many classes as MIT, does offer one unique advantage, the course transcripts are provided, so I don't have to watch the lecture, I can just read it, this offers multiple advantages, for once, I can read it a lot faster than I can watch it. It's better for my embarrassingly-short attention span. And I can read it pretty much from anywhere, my phone, laptop, without having to wear headphones or anything like that.

I started out with the New Testament and Old Testament classes, I struggled a bit with the Old Testament stuff, some of it was kind of boring for me. But the New Testament course was fascinating, there are so many things in the New Testament's text that reveals so much about the history of Christianity, and I never noticed it. It's there, in plain sight, you just have to open your Bible and read it. Text Criticism was something new, I just never studied the Bible that way before.

But the class that compels me to write about this is the new course I am looking at, it is called Introduction of Political Philosophy, and it just hit my brain's sweet spot. It deals with the idea of the "Ideal Regime" the questions that are extremely relevant today have been asked for a long time by some great thinkers of the human race, learning about it is an awesome experience. I think that's what learning is supposed to be about. I think this is one of those course that will shape the way I think about politics for the rest of my life.

Well, that's all for now, I am sitting next to a fireplace in a Panera in Schaumburg, it's 6:30 AM, and I am headed for the office, long day of work ahead of me.

Be Good to each other.

J.V.