I was stumbling around the Internet (productively, not just randomly) when I found a blog post directing me to Academic Earth, and my mind has been blown.

Basically, it’s a place which puts university lectures (mostly American, from what I’ve seen) online. Full, entire lectures. At the moment I’m making my way through CS50 stuff (introduction to computer science). A lot of this stuff is what I learnt back in college, but I’m still learning an incredible amount of stuff.

I’ve only really watch CS50 lectures so far but, what first hit me was how different they are from how English lectures are laid out. There’s definitely a two way relationship between the students and lecturer, rather than just the lecturer talking (and me getting yelled at for even putting my hand up, or someone taking a drink of water). Some of these kids have never even done computer related courses before (much like some of the people on my course at the moment), but Malan managed to explain scope, functions, and arrays in one lecture. There are still people in my class that don’t understand it after having two hour lab sessions on each one.

I’ve fallen a little in love with David Malan, and he’ll probably go down in my life’s history as the guy that’s taught me C, and taught it me well. I like listening to him! I’ve sat through all of these, and he’s not lost me once (well, there was that short period when he was explain merge sorting).

I’m about to start lecture 14. I’m waiting for it to buffer (net dies around this time of night), and decided to go look at the CS50 website expecting the problem sets, quizzes, and general hand outs to all be restricted to Harvard students, but they’re not. They’re completely downloadable by anyone. Even most of the software is freeware.

I’m clearly missing out on the human interaction; I can’t ask questions I want to ask as I’m watching, nor ask him to clarify (not that I need him to). But really, this is amazing for not paying  a penny…