I don’t try to stay ahead of the curve, sometimes I just do.  About six years ago I did some science research.  To be exact it was on February 1, 2003 when NASA’s Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere killing all seven crew members (may they rest in peace) and altering my outlook on life forever.

You see NASA and the media continue to say how the foam hit the shuttle, and I know it’s just a matter of semantics, but what actually happened was that the shuttle hit the foam.  Subtle difference I know, yet for me an all too important one. This distinction (and the event) sparked a hidden passion inside of me and a desire to learn more.  It was on this scientific journey, this quest for knowledge, that I encountered Professor Walter Lewin and his lectures on Electricity and Magnetism.

Professor Walter Lewin

What an awesome discovery that was for me.  You see Prof. Lewin’s MIT undergraduate video lectures are free as part of MIT’s OpenCourseWare.  It just goes to show the power of the world wide web and the amazing learning tool it can turn out to be.

Six years later, and Prof. Lewin is all the rage now. He’s a huge hit on iTunes, YouTube and college campuses around the world. Outside of the fact that he is on staff at the prestigious MIT he is also a renowed astronomer.  Even with all of those credentials and his tight schedule, I emailed him a physics question and he responded within a few minutes.  The guy is very cool.  Most of the lectures are extremely funny and if you watch them in sequence, you just might learn something.  I certainly did.

So now I encourage you to look for that hidden passion that’s deep down inside of you and explore it.  Find out all you can (from trusted sources of course).  Surprise yourself and go to the library or go down the aisle in the bookstore that you have never been down before.  Try something new and see where it takes you.

The quest will be so satisfying that you’ll be glad you did. Let me know what you find, and where you find it.

ADDENDUM

This post was originally published in August of 2009 and has become one of the most popular post on this blog.  In September 2009, I discovered a blog called Never Mind the Pedagogy from Markuos. In his post about Academic Earth he shares information about additional free online learning resources and video lectures covering every major university discipline including Professor Lewin. Here’s an excerpt from his post including the list of the video lectures you can watch at the Academic Earth website:

Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world class education’.

Courses and subjects covered include:

Astronomy

Biology

Chemistry

Computer Science

Economics

Engineering

English

Entrepreneurship

History

Law

Mathematics

Medicine

Philosophy

Physics

Political Science

Psychology

Religion

via Academic Earth « Never Mind the Pedagogy.

Me entero por Software Educativo  y herramientas informáticas aplicables a la educación del buen hacer de Walter Lewin, un profesor de física en el MIT, en sus clases. Parece ser que cuando Walter Lewin entra en un aula, ésta se llena de risas y sonrisas y miradas atentas. ¿Que cómo lo hace? Veámoslo en acción:

]]> http://spinoza1111.wordpress.com/2009/05/10/let-us-now-praise-famous-men-prof-walter-lewin/ Sun, 10 May 2009 06:21:27 +0000 spinoza1111 http://spinoza1111.wordpress.com/2009/05/10/let-us-now-praise-famous-men-prof-walter-lewin/

I am reading about physics at MIT Open Courseware. Sure, I took the “hard” physics class at Roosevelt University in 1970 under a great man, who used to be found after classes having a couple of blasts at Jimmy Wong’s across Wabash, but I need to review the basics in order to understand quantum computation.

Prof Walter Lewin is here demonstrating conservation of mechanical energy. He knows the heavy iron ball will not kill him since he has calculated that it must be so (ess muss sein), but he is a brave man in view of quantum theory alone. As a Dutchman, he is in the tradition of Edsger Dijkstra who believed that you could prove things about software.

I sensed at Princeton that below the level of the arrogant superstar, for whose courses students sign-up only to find themselves taught by bitter, twisted, and prematurely aged graduate students, there are adjunct, associate and full professors who have made it their life’s work to teach without necessarily sacrificing research as it says they must in the playbook.

ED Klemke chaired the department of Philosophy at Roosevelt University before it was re-engineered by President Rolf Weil from collective social mobility (“education for freedom”) to individual social mobility (“just watch me”). He left in disgust at Weil’s down-sizing of humanities for the state university of Iowa, and taught undergraduate sections while publishing. But when he was nominated for a lifetime achievement award, it was turned-down, for he had “published too much”.

That is, as far as I can determine, Klemke had refused to stay within neat lines drawn in higher education, lines intended to preserve a class society in which the sons and daughters of the superrich, and selected sons and daughters of the poor, study under professors who publish and their graduate assistants, while students at the state university of Iowa need to study under professors who never have had, nor have written, an original thought.

Walter Lewin of MIT, and in my experience mathematics professor Hale Trotter of Princeton, are dedicated teachers who’ve also published but they are in no sense “public intellectuals” like Chomsky, also at MIT.

Many “public intellectuals”, however, could not explain the basics of their field and one senses, at times, that they are weary (at a certain level of subgenius) of their lives and fields.

An Einstein was happy to talk about basic maths to schoolchildren who wrote to him, but I noticed, when Noam Chomsky was “available for questions” on the old Z Magazine bulletin board system, that people who asked Chomsky about the relationship of his science to his politics, and of both to French theory, were asking for trouble.

This is because Chomsky had had, about ten years prior, the experience basically provincial Americans, provincial in their assumption that they speak for all mankind, have in France, when they meet public intellectuals who believe that they speak for all mankind. Chomsky concluded that Foucault and Lacan were frauds because neither accepted the need to be respectfully silent about scientific results.

On the Z BBS, Chomsky’s questions were channeled by a certain Mike Albert, who’d been a student activist in the 1960s, but seemed at the time to treat Chomsky as some sort of god in a cult of personality, who couldn’t be bothered with real questions but who instead should be permitted to basically repeat Chomsky’s ill-informed, indeed Utopian, political “philosophy”…basically, a naive anarchism of the sort that doesn’t survive holding down a real job in the real world, serving in the military, or raising children without enough money.

Real professors aren’t media superstars. Like Klemke they drop dead in front of real survey classes after years of work in obscurity.

And no, they don’t date their students. I teach six days a week and I notice that precisely because (as I pointed out to friend Stanley Fish) the teacher-student relationship goes back considerably further than the modern arms-length contract, there are erotic elements in teaching which constitute in a world of commodities a thing with aura in Walter Benjamin’s sense, or to put it in my own elegant way, a stick of shitfire with a wick on it. Which is why the casual prof’s assumption in many universities that he has sexual access to his students should be a termination offense even if he’s tenured.

Foucault tried to get Chomsky wise to the fact that anything could be a “capillary”, transmitting power; precisely to the extent that Princeton graduate students felt themselves unmanned by being invited into a priestly caste (with the subconscious association of the priest with the eunuch), they seemed to me to feel the need to transmit the most odious forms of power, as in the Eighties catchphrase template “I’m a/an [insert name of learned profession] and you’re not”. But Chomsky insisted that no, people left to their own devices will happily cooperate like fawns prancing about Arcadia, and the result was that he needed Mike Albert to do his dirty work for him.

Any hint of sexual harassment works homeopathically, because it introduces particles of the belief that the sublimation never existed. Plato may or may not have been “gay”. It’s perfectly possible, as the recent movie “The Forty Year Old Virgin” suggests, that we can sublimate for years, and it’s also possible, as that movie does not suggest, that desublimation, rather than pure pleasure-principle, becomes another Foucauldian category of power. The “Forty Year Old Virgin’s” coworkers in fact brutally socialise him in one reading of the movie, forcing him to shoulder a sort of white man’s burden in which he, like they, compulsively pursue post-feminist women who despise and mock them.

The modern Dr Phil and Ophrah message is that what was “sex” in my youth, what was a lot of fun and without consequences in 1969 when I lost my virginity, is now a “relationship”, and that the male of the species must “work” at this “relationship”. Wow. In my day, the male of the species, if he felt a calling to be a miserable SOB, didn’t get into a “relationship”. He joined the United States Marines or Quigley Seminary in Chicago.

But this “work” is structurally akin to Stalinism in the sense that in Stalinism, the original revolutionary promise of Lenin’s last days, a very brief period of artistic experimentation and NEP markets, was withdrawn in favor of a return to exchange relations, now become nightmarish in that just as you never had enough money saved under the Tsar, it was almost impossible to be the “perfect worker”.

Likewise, in today’s Pop psychology (changes in which are reflective of deeper and more seismic shifts) you’re not “OK”, especially if you’re a heterosexual male. You’ve become the bourgeois or landlord class whether you like it or not.

Over time, these mental structures become a sort of collective farce or dream in which the awakening feels like a new dawn, but then the awakening in turn becomes the New Bullshit. It’s dialectical.

The “sexual liberation” of 1969 (when a terribly nice girl took my virginity on the same night Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon) became sexual harassment of students by teachers. Foucault was in other words prescient, but Chomsky had no idea what he was talking about; Chomsky’s naivety shown by the fact that he gave an interview to Hustler magazine a few years ago without realizing it was a total stroke book.

Academic superstars, like politicians, are in fact often sealed off by their amanuenses and gofers from knowledge. The real work of universities is done by adjuncts, bitter, twisted and prematurely aged graduate students, and full and associate profs who escape the limelight, especially Oprah. She has her sights on Dr. Lewin: one hopes he avoids her show.

If you have an interest in physics or would like to learn what it’s all about, some of its history, and its current cutting-edge theories, Open Culture gives a nice summary of the best online audio and video resources.

At Stanford, we’re putting together a six course sequence called Modern Physics: The Theoretical Minimum. Taught by Leonard Susskind, one of America’s leading physics minds, this course traces the development of modern physics, moving from Newton to Einstein to Black Holes. So far, we’ve made five of the six courses available online (get them here), which amounts to 100 hours of free classroom footage. Hard to beat. (And, in case you’re wondering, the sixth course is being taped right now, and it will be coming online during the months to come.)

Another program that has received a fair amount of attention is Walter Lewin’s series of courses at MIT. As The New York Times has noted, Lewin has long had a cult following at MIT, and now, thanks to his physics courses, he’s achieved a minor degree of fame on the internet. His lectures, delivered with panache, can be found here:

• Physics I: Classical Mechanics – iTunes – Video Download – YouTube
• Physics II: Electricity and Magnetism – iTunes – Video Download – YouTube
• Physics III: Vibrations and Waves – iTunes – Video Download – YouTube

A third course to call your attention to is Richard Muller’s Physics for Future Presidents (Feed – MP3s – YouTube).  The course comes out of UC Berkeley, where it’s an undergraduate favorite. (It’s also the basis of a recent book by the same name.) And the whole point here is to give citizens the scientific knowledge they need to understand critical issues facing our society.

Finally, another course worth reviewing is Fundamentals of Physics, which is taught by Ramamurti Shankar and it’s part of Yale’s Open Course initiative.

All of these physics courses, and many more, can be found in our Free University Course collection.

Found through the iTunes store, and later on http://academicearth.org/

Walter Lewin (MIT, Physics 101)

Open Courseware (aka; FREE KNOWLEDGE!!) from MIT.
And taught by a fellow Dutchie too

Walter Lewin vom MIT zeigt wie man Vorlesungen richtig hält.

mehr von Walter Lewin:
Physik 1 Mechanik
Physik 2 Elektrizität
oder einfach auf Youtube nach “Walter Lewin” suchen.

chris

El profesor de física que verán en el siguiente video es una de esas personas que lo que hacen se lo toman muy en serio… o mejor dicho TODO LO CONTRARIO:

Su nombre es Walter Lewin, da clases en el MIT (ese lugar parece tenerlo todo) y la parte donde lo ven columpiadose colgado de un hilo es parte de su demostración de que el periodo de un péndulo es independiente de la masa que sostenga.

YO QUIERO UN PROFE ASI!!

[Visto en el michoacano]

Podem ver outra entrevista AQUI

Yes, it’s official now. Read this for more information.

Quoted from the same piece of news:

Much of the gloom stemmed from last Friday’s employment report, which showed a loss of 63,000 jobs in February, the second consecutive monthly decline. “My recession call comes from the employment data,” said Stephen Stanley of RBS Greenwich Capital. “It struck me as a recessionary number.”

And also:

The economists also expressed growing concerns that a 2008 recession could be worse than both the 2001 and 1990-91 downturns. They put the odds of a deeper downturn at an average 48%, up from 39% in the previous survey. Mark Nielson of MacroEcon Global Advisors said that “we recognize the previous two recessions were mild and, if a recession does occur, it is likely to be slightly worse than the previous two.”

And watch this video to find out the World’s Most Interesting Physics Professor.

AND I DON’T KNOW WHY I CANNOT REPLY TO COMMENTS.
It always appears as an anonymous comment (when I’m signed into my account!) every single time I try to and the message would be blank. Really weird, I don’t get it.

AGS today was fun! Made quite a few new friends, cried once (I dropped my car keys somewhere in the field and luckily I found it in the end), and I received a cup of love! HAHA okay and I did my homework in the school library today.

I love this sense of achievement/accomplishment/satisfaction!

The kids running and running and running.

This table (All girls!) is the most fun out of the eight! HAHA!

Siqin yeo!

Candid? Haha!

I love Bunny Yeo Si Qin. (Easter is coming!)

I love the Sun. Makes me feel like a sunshine girl.

A random picture of the cupcakes I bought three days ago, just because I’m craving for them right now but I’m too lazy to go out and buy some. The bright side is that I’m consuming less calories, the sad thing is I’ll keep thinking about them.

Super Yummy!!!! (Red Velvet, Coconut, Classic, Mocha)

And also, I’ve been wanting to say this since last week:

“THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL” IS A VERY VERY GOOD MOVIE!
Everyone should watch this movie, because not only is it interesting, it also teaches you a lot about history (Well, some are true while some are not I guess). It’s worth the time and money I promise!

And I’ve been online shopping way too much! Received five packages last week, another three today, and I have two more to collect in the post office. Goodness gracious, I need more self-control.

And not forgetting, HAPPY 18TH BIRTHDAY TO MESA & SENG CHIN! ♥

vejam o resto do blogue AQUI

###

Muitas das vezes o insucesso dos alunos em certas disciplinas deriva em certa parte da falta de formação, motivação e empenho dos professores na exposição da matéria.

Pois bem, o caso que se apresenta a seguir julgo ser um exemplo de pedagogia, que decerto motivará todos os que assistem a aquelas aulas.

Trata-se do professor Walter Lewin do MIT.

As fotos seguintes são indicadoras da dinâmica que orienta as aulas: exemplos reais para demonstrar teorias.

video:

mais videos no youtube:

LINK

link para uma palestra bastante interessante:

How to Make Teaching Come Alive

página de uma das disciplinas que ele lecciona:

LINK

apontamentos teóricos:

LINK

videos das aulas (aqui podem ver toda a acção):

LINK

US News & World Report has a nice trio of articles on online learning this week, including one about Dr. Walter Lewin over at MIT, who has created the world’s best online video lecture series on college physics; the increased use of Web 2.0 and gaming apps in online courses; and the increased use of Second Life for educational purposes.

While Dr. Lewin doesn’t use educational videogames per se, he does engage viewers with online lectures that actively illustrate the concepts covered in the lecture. The series ran about $100,000 to produce, and cover Physics 1, 2, and 3 at MIT. All are free to watch by anyone, and Dr. Lewin has garnered international praise for his work. Other professors now use his lectures in their own courses as well.

The SL article is by Lucia Graves, who wrote an article I discussed in October 2007 on dissecting virtual frogs. Graves interviews Jeremy Kemp over at San Jose State’s SLIS, opening the story with an anecdote of students showing up for class in SL as avatars resembling Jell-O or butterflies (no mention was made of the infamous flying phalli SL is sometimes known for).

SL is becoming something of a phenomenon in college online education. Harvard Law opened a course to SL netizens; Princeton owns an island there; and the state of Louisiana is funding a 5 island initiative studying the value of 3-D virtual interactive environments (VIEs) for education. Merrill Johnson over U. New Orleans asserts that even if the hurricane-prone state loses classrooms to disaster, virtual conference rooms can allow classes to continue.

The remainder of the article is devoted to pros and cons of using SL for education. On the pro side:

Educators say Second Life is an effective teaching tool in part because it provides a social laboratory where role-playing, simulations, exploration, and experimentation can be tried out in a relatively risk-free environment. But perhaps the most touted benefit of Second Life is the opportunity it gives students to interact with people around the world—there are users registered from more than 100 countries. It also allows students to visit places that no longer exist, like a townscape reconstructed to look like Elizabethan England in the late 16th century.

On the con side: behavior issues, including griefing, have resulted in Ohio U. shutting its island down after a virtual gunman shot the place up and Woodbury U. permanently closed its island following unabated student misbehavior. Robert Vernon, over at Indiana, is quoted as indicating SL requires a certain level of proficiency to navigate. Peter Ludlow at U. Toronto notes the lack of affordances in the environment negatively impact teaching. This is a point I made in a paper published last year, BTW.

Finally, Kim Clark writes a nice article entitled “New Answers for E-Learning.”

Some professors and schools are redesigning their courses to take advantage of the Web’s interactive and visual possibilities, adopting some bleeding-edge technologies such as gamelike simulations and digital avatars to make online courses more exciting and more effective than traditional classrooms … A growing number of online courses are requiring students to participate in blogs, wikis, or gamelike simulations.

Clark includes a list of university initiatives that focus on these “gamelike simulations”:

Barbara Christe, who teaches biomedical engineering technology at Indiana University-Purdue University- Indianapolis, uses simulations that allow students to scroll over circuit diagrams to see how changes in current affect resistance, for example. Michigan State University has developed a Jeopardy!-like website, packed with quiz questions that science and math students can answer to see how well they’ve mastered key concepts. The University of Maryland-University College has developed a gamelike simulation of a crime scene for students in its criminalistics class. And a growing number of teachers are experimenting with presenting lectures and information as avatars in Second Life.

Although the quiz show study format is an old way to review multiple choice test items, the simulations seem well suited for online format since students aren’t traveling to a physical lab. Open source simulations may be a good way to incorporate these across a wide spectrum of college classes since it seems that good ones would be rather expensive for each university to create. If not open source, perhaps a version developed elsewhere that prevents each university from re-inventing the wheel, something along the lines of the K-12 simulation-type software for math found at the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives over at Utah State. Finally, the crime scene simulation sounds like something that might be able to delve into higher order thinking, if done right.

References:
Clark, K. (2008, January 21). A new Physics superstar. US News & World Report, p. 48.

Clark, K. (2008, January 21). New answers for e-learning. US News & World Report, pp. 46-49.

Graves, L. (2008, January 21). A second life for higher ed. US News & World Report, pp. 49-50. 

• “At 71, Physics Professor Is a Web Star” <NY Times>
• “MIT Lecturers Top the iTunes U Top Ten” <MIT News>

“The Walter Lewin Lectures on Physics at MIT are legendary. Many have been shown for over six years on UWTV in Seattle, reaching an audience of about four million people. He personally responded to all e-mail requests he received (hundreds per year) from UWTV viewers, who varied in age from 7 to 90. For fifteen years he was on MIT Cable TV helping freshmen with their weekly homework assignments. His programs, which were aired 24 hours per day, were also frequently watched by upper-class students. Lewin is the soul of PIVoT, a video course on Newtonian Mechanics with a total of 53 hours of video clips. Additionally, his 36 lectures on Electricity and Magnetism and 23 lectures on Vibrations and Waves can also be viewed from the course’s web site. Finally, his special lectures given at MIT for science teachers and for middle school students can be viewed on MIT World.” <wiki>

• 8.01 Physics I: Classical Mechanics <home><video lectures>
• 8.02 Physics II: Electricity and Magnetism <home><video lectures>
• 8.03 Physics III: Vibrations and Waves <home><video lectures>

These, and many many more, can be found on MIT’s OpenCourseWare <physics>

MIT on iTunes U <home>

Complete Breakdown of Intuition:

Part One

Part Two

Walter Lewin – profesor la MIT

Multi se intreaba de ce. Uite, de asta

I can’t help but idolize the creators of freeware. This unconditional programmer love provides the creative platforms for others to build their own creations upon.

I can’t say I understand their motivations. When I took an elementary Java class I remember moping my brow for oh so many hours at the screen trying to simulate a dice throw or a card game (Clearly, I’m not one of Bill Gates’ computer literate people). So the willingness of proggers to put out their years of code for free license on the Internet is just plain phenomenal. (Like Mozilla’s Firefox and other mindboggling-ly free open source mac products…a compilation of which you can find here. – I do realize that Firefox makes earnings from its Google Search bar and other means, etc, so maybe it is a bad example, but still there are thousands of other examples of programs for the public.)

Perhaps because it is an art. Songwriters and photographers whore themselves out all over MySpace (myself included). True, simple, elegant programs are a sight to behold.

I’ve been researching the ability to statistically model risk-management in developing countries using copula functions. Copulas, unfortunately, are intense probabilistic functions with interdependent inputs – essentially, they are not listed in the indexes of most mathematics books. So, in the hunt for copulas – and a means by which to model them – I stumbled across a library of “codes” that a team of professors put up for anyone’s use…I hungrily unzipped these files and found massive toolboxes with instructions and readmes and all. So impressive, that someone (a certain Andrew Patton of Oxford University) neatly compiled their artwork and made it user-friendly as well. In the age of ATM bank fees, privatized water supplies, and online newspaper subscriptions…it’s nice to see a proponent of the freeware philosophy. (for the curious, copula codes – although they require MatLab to view, which, unfortunately, is not free.)

Or, for example, Walter Lewin – physics professor at MIT. Lewin’s lectures are vibrant and animated, and, best of all, every single minute of an entire semester’s worth of class time is viewable on the Internet. An MIT education, available to the world. Seriously, if I were ever tasked to teach physics, I’d just have students watch his lectures online. For instance, his demonstration of pendulums (from the 42 minute mark):

To the Walter Lewins and the Andrew Pattons. Thank you.