Online Self-Education

Many online resources exist out there that can broaden our intellectual realm. I've listed several from different categories that could be interesting to look at! Haven't even tried all of these myself at this point...


Ebooks:  

• Project Gutenberg: a website with around 30,000 books with expired copyrights. It's a vast database with many outdated books, and multiple formats for downloading. 
• ManyBooks.net: Has over 25,465 free ebooks to download. This website is more visually appealing than the first, and has various features such as special collections and a cover image gallery.

Non-Lecture Videos: 

• Hulu News and Information Channel: a friend of mine recommended this site, I have yet to make use of it though. Not only does it have a multitude of popular prime-time shows, but also many educational programs. This channel has full episodes from National Geographic, NOVA, Biography, The History Channel, etc. 
• MoviesFoundOnline.com: has links to the documentaries offered on Google Video, YouTube and other streaming video services. Heard that the video quality is sometimes mediocre though :( 
• PBS Video: many free and full length episodes of different videos, great selection! 

Scholarly Journals: 

• Google Scholar: I've tried this when finding information for projects, pretty satisfied with the results. Has information from articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions.

Video and Audio Lectures: 

• If you haven't heard about TED, it's a conference held every year that brings innovators, inventors, intellectuals and ideas together.  Most talks are approx twenty minutes and cover an incredible range of topics...impossible to spend time on this website and not be inspired! 
• Academic Earth: haven't tried this, but it's an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone the access to a world-class education.” There are entire courses worth of lectures on a huge selection of subjects from some of the world’s top Universities and professors, including Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and MIT.
• iTunesU: within the iTunes store there's a growing library of lectures from some of the world’s top universities. It's simple to locate lectures based on topic and best of all, it is all free. 

Intellectual Reading: 

• The Browser:  this website collects journalism from around the internet which they judge likely to be of lasting value to the general intelligent reader.  Also has a section where they invite experts to recommend the best reading in their given fields of interest.
• Longreads: love the idea. This twitter feed provides links to “long reads” throughout the internet.  If you’re craving something longer than the average blog post, check this site out. You can use it in combination with Instapaper...haven't tried!

How to Keep it All Organized? 

• Instapaper and Evernote are recommended. Instapaper allows you to bookmark and easily save articles for later reading, and Evernote is an application for note taking as well as a database manager. 

Happppppy Reading!