March 27th, 2008 in Lifestyle

DIY Education: Teach Yourself

Education is touted as the greatest way to get ahead in this world. And, in general, it’s a great strategy. Maybe you have the perfect idea for an invention and you need a little engineering know-how, or maybe you just need to get ahead of the guy in the next cubicle over. No matter what plan you have for getting ahead, odds are a little learning will help. The problem, as I see it, is that education is also an industry. You want a string of fancy letters behind your name? Prepare to pay for it.

While you may need a certificate in order to be a licensed professional of some sort, however, you don’t need to attend an expensive class for many of your other learning needs. There are plenty of stunning examples of people who have gotten ahead based on their self-education — enough that there is a fancy term for them; they’re called autodidacts. Step up and join the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Stanley Kubrick and Frank Zappa.

Resources — Getting Started

The Independent Scholar’s Handbook — PDF: The Canadian Academy of Independent Scholars has made The Independent Scholar’s Handbook available as a free download. It’s a full book (322 pages) of information on how to study on your own, as well as tips on finding resources on the topics you want to study.

The Autodidact Project: Ralph Dumain has put together information about autodidactism — self-education at the Autodidact Project, including a number of study guides.

Resources — Learning Materials

The LifeHack How-To Wiki: Consider starting your self-education right here with LifeHack. There’s even an article on self-education on the wiki that you might find useful.

Fathom: A number of universities, led by Columbia University, have put together a whole host of free resources at Fathom. The information is arranged into courses, making it possible to take short classes from the American Film Institute, the London School of Economics and other prestigious institutes for free.

Wikiversity: While there are some pretty significant gaps in the do-it-yourself courses Wikiversity offers, I’ve found some great resources on science and business subjects — two areas that my college major just didn’t emphasize.

Mentoring and Interviewing: Just sitting down and talking with someone who is more of an expert on a topic than you are can introduce you to new areas of learning that you hadn’t even considered. You can set up formal interviews with experts or have more casual conversations.

iTunes U: Through iTunes, a huge number of schools offer recordings of lectures in every subject. Currently, I’m working through Stanford’s course on the Future of the Internet, and after that, I’m thinking about listening in on an evolutionary biology class.

Your Local Library: Most libraries offer far more learning resources than simple how-to books. My boyfriend is currently working his way through our local library’s collection of Chinese lessons on CD. And if you aren’t familiar with your local library, I recommend PublicLibraries.com — it’s a huge directory of public libraries, mostly U.S. with some international listings.

TheHomeSchoolMom.com: TheHomeSchoolMom.com, along with thousands of other homeschooling websites offer up all sorts of free educational resources from curriculums to texts. While these sites rarely have advanced coverage of a topic, if you’re looking to start with the basics, you’re likely to find exactly what you need.

Project Gutenberg: While there are a number of websites where you can get free e-books, Project Gutenberg is one of the best known, and seems to have one of the widest selections. You may not be able to find many technical works there, but if you’re interested in the classics or history, Project Gutenberg is the place to go.

Staying on Track

Anyone can read a book. Most people can even report back on the pertinent information that book contained. But it can be much harder to synthesize information together from multiple sources, especially if those sources have been picked out without a clear plan of attack. I’ve been known to do this — I pick up random books at the library and start in on new topics with no plan whatsoever. Learn from my mistake — trying to put together ideas on the fly can be extremely difficult.

If you’re starting in on a new topic, it makes sense to make a plan of some sort. Your plan doesn’t need to be much more formal than “I’m going to read the Wikipedia article on Topic X, and then check if the library has any of the books Wikipedia cites.” That much of a plan, though, keeps you from coming up with a book list with fifty books that you won’t be able to finish. (Once again, I speak from experience.)

From there, your self-education can be as simple as reading and taking a few notes. I generally try to write up some sort of report or article on a new topic, just because information seems to stick a bit better when I explain it to someone else. I can just about always find a new home for such a report, as well — a blog post, an article, etc. Occasionally, I even manage to get paid for all that learning I’ve done.

Lastly…

I don’t have anything against formalized learning — I really enjoy lecture-format classes, actually — but if I took all the classes I wanted to, my student loans would be equal to the national debt. Studying on my own has made continuing my education far less expensive and potentially more interesting. I never know what my new learning might suggest for the next topic of study.

WRITER'S BIOGRAPHY

Thursday Bram

Thursday Bram is a freelance journalist of over five years experience. She studied Communications at the University of Tulsa and is currently working on her MA in Communication Design. Her work has focused primarily on entrepreneurial topics. More information about Thursday is available at thursdaybram.com.

ARTICLES BY THIS WRITER »

36 Responses

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

Comments

Fabio says on March 27th, 2008 at 10:52 am

great post!!!
Bobbi says on March 27th, 2008 at 11:52 am

Thank you. I’ve spent my whole early morning allotment of blog reading on this post and the links you provided, specifically the Independent Scholars Handbook. Their discussion of Eric Hoffer was fascinating and deeply encouraging. How fortuitous to have read this post as I’m planning my next life challenges. Again, thanks. Bobbi
James Wang says on March 27th, 2008 at 12:24 pm

This was a fantastic list of resources. I think fathom was the one most interesting to me. For bitesized subjects, like getting a general idea of how lasers work, I like http://www.howstuffworks.com/

Those links above were great!

James Wang
Spenser says on March 27th, 2008 at 12:39 pm

This is great stuff!! Exactly what I’ve been looking for lately, especially for tips on my blog. Have you seen the MIT Open Courseware site? It’s pretty darn informative as well.
aamir says on March 27th, 2008 at 12:48 pm

A very unique file hosting website, that allows you to upload/share and search textual files, such as MS word, PDF, text, MS Excel etc. very helpful resouce for students and researchers, thousands of available documents…
http://www.maifile.com
Ben de Groot says on March 27th, 2008 at 2:13 pm

Great stuff! Thanks for putting together this list of resources and tips.

“but if I took all the classes I wanted to, my student loans would be equal to the national debt.”

That is so true!
Marelisa says on March 27th, 2008 at 2:39 pm

What a great post! Learning should be a life-long endeavor. All great men like Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and, like you mentioned, Benjamin Franklin, taught themselves new things until the very end of their lives. Also, the more that you learn the more that you can see connections between seemingly unrelated topics. By putting together two ideas that no one thought of mixing together before, you can come up with one great, new idea.
Cody says on March 27th, 2008 at 3:52 pm

Don’t you know that you’re nothing if you don’t go to a government sanctioned learning institution. Because gov’t knows all. At least thats what they want you to believe. In my lifetime I would say I have learned nothing first at school except for my math skills, beyond that I always learned it on my own before then, and I took my math farther than schools would before I ever went to college (where I ended up at an art school being forced to take college algebra which was liking going back to 8th grade for me)

So my point, learn it on your own because schools are going to hand out a the pace of the lowest common denominator, which is pretty low now days.
Mindmoo says on March 27th, 2008 at 4:38 pm

Thank you for rounding up all of these resources to help those of us who want to learn on our own. I also would love to go to school for years just to take classes in all of the things I want to learn, but that’s a lot of money. So thanks again for your help!
Hugo says on March 27th, 2008 at 8:25 pm

Very good. I like the picture by the way. Pens and papers are sometimes seriously more powerful than a computer can get!
Lisa Gates says on March 28th, 2008 at 12:08 am

Great post. Thank you for the lifelong resources!
m.c. says on March 30th, 2008 at 11:24 am

Anyone interested in self-education might want to check out some information about “unschooling”, particularly books by John Holt or Grace Lewellyn. Their official focus is on education for kids and teens, but the books are actually great for curious people of any age. Lots of practical starting points for learning how to learn without an institution to guide you, with some interesting philosophy-of-education ideas thrown in. As someone who taught myself math, I give them 900 thumbs up. Seriously, though, they’re totally useful.
Mitch O'Neill says on March 31st, 2008 at 12:25 pm

great article. I’ve just started my DIY education, you can view my progress on my blog
Christian Kirchhoff says on April 1st, 2008 at 5:16 am

Another fine (and huge) ressource of literature and paintings, though only available in german language, is http://www.zeno.org. It provides full-text search and faksimiles.
Jorge says on April 5th, 2008 at 11:27 pm

Thanks for the quick list. I too have the experience of putting an idea together form a lot of different sources in a short amount of time. I’ve learned to synthesize much faster as I’ve learned pretty much how my brain works. Thanks again.
Matt Gibson says on April 19th, 2008 at 8:28 am

Thanks for a timely reminder of iTunes U! I’m now working my way through Harvard Extension School’s XML course…
Mike Greer says on April 26th, 2008 at 7:52 pm

The good news: You’re right. The net is an excellent source of free training and education. The bad news: There is a ton of junk (teasers, inaccurate content, ad-clogged pages, bad pedagogical design) to slog through if you are looking for the good stuff. For the last few months, I’ve been using my experience as an instructional designer to dig up the good stuff and post reviews of some of the best on my blog. I’d like to share a few of my favorite websites that contain consistently good training… not only content that’s rich and authoritative, but also using instructional design features that will help you learn effectively. Here are a few of my favorites:

ALISON: The Free Global Learning Experience — These guys are amazing! Focusing heavily on the E-ICDL (European-International Computer Driving License), you’ll find many well-designed courses (animations, practice, quizzes, feedback, etc.) on IT, using computers, Windows applications, etc. Also courses related to health and safety, typing, business English, basic study skills, using the internet, financial literacy and more. Go to: http://alison.com/AllCourses

BBC Languages — Multi-media language training (French, Spanish, German, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Greek, & more) that is highly interactive, fun, and practical — generally focusing on conversational skills, cultural context, etc. Beautiful graphics, slide shows, etc. Go to: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/

BBC miscellaneous — Multi-media, interactive, broad/deep, & beautiful training on video production, sleep science, how to be a gardener, & lots of other topics. You’ll need to search the BBC site a little to find them, but they are worth looking for. [www.bbc.co.uk] (I have links to several at my blog.)

Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative — Engineering, Statistics, Economics, Chemistry, Biology, Causal & Statistical Reasoning, and more. Professionally designed, top-quality, and interactive. They set the standard for university freebies. Go to: https://oli.web.cmu.edu/jcourse/webui/free.do

Open Yale Courses — The real deal, full-scale, full-semester courses complete with assignments and lectures available in audio or several different video formats. Among the best designed and usable of all the university stuff. Go to: http://open.yale.edu/courses/index.html

FREE (Federal Resources for Educational Excellence) — If you are self-taught (or trying to teach your kids), you can find more than 1500 federally-funded teaching and learning resources at this gateway. Go to: http://free.ed.gov/index.cfm

And here are a few wild, idiosyncratic items that have highly-focused content or are extremely well-designed, or both:
* Golf.com - Loads of how-to videos on golf. Go to: http://www.golf.com/golf/instr.....3,,00.html
* Dan’s Online Motorcycle Repair Course - Motorcycle maintenance with philosophy. Go to:
http://www.dansmc.com/mc_repaircourse.htm
* Drawing Lessons at Drawspace.com - How to draw everything and anything. Go to:
http://www.drawspace.com/
* xyAlgebra and xySolver - Algebra lessons, full, rich, patient, and you can download and use them offline. Go to: http://www.xyalgebra.org/

I could go on and on. (I already have, right?! Sorry.) I encourage everyone to investigate these high-quality items and support the folks who are making them available for us. There are more, as well as full reviews, at my blog, The Best Free Training.