Thu, 08 Mar 2007
Attending MIT
Today was my first day of attending classes at MIT... Ok, so not really. It is however probably as close as I'll ever get to attending unfortunately—although I did manage to visit the campus a couple of times during my trip to Cambridge last year.
On to the actual story...
While I've been aware of MIT's Open CourseWare initiative for some time I have not looked too deeply into what they have on offer. I can't remember how I ended up there today but while on the site I thought I'd have a look at what courses are available under the banner of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. There are many papers available on the web site but there does seem to be a wide range in terms of the quality and depth of the materials online. In terms of the papers I was interested in, only 6.002 Circuits and Electronics, Fall 2000 seems to feature lecture videos and comprehensive notes.
For much of my life I have had an interest in electronics but I've also felt I've never had a strong grounding in the basics. None of the material (books, web sites) I've looked at lately have particularly grabbed me so I wondered if watching some lecture videos might help—I know, what kind of geek am I? Oh, wait, one of the geeky kind I guess. :-)
I've just finished watching the first of twenty-five lectures—this one entitled "Introduction and Lumped Circuit Abstraction" presented by Professor Anant Agarwal (direct video and notes links). The lecture video was enjoyable, reasonable quality and the content was laugh-out-loud funny in places—yes, really:
- "I could do this all day, it's so much fun." (While waving a hair-dryer over a thermistor.) ~32m40s
- "If I really believe in my own BS anything's a lumped element—so here's a pickle." (This demo is kinda cute.) ~36m52s
A real live MIT pickle
The text for the course "Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits" seems to be available in New Zealand for $135.00.
I'd probably prefer a non-RealVideo video source but overall this first experience has been pretty good—time will tell if I make the time to view the rest of the lectures. When you think about the content MIT has put online even in its current basic form it's really quite impressive—makes me wonder what I'd have done with it in my high school years.
This internet thing may yet amount to something...
Posted at: 04:55 | category: / | | Comments ()