Since finishing school and university, I have found that I miss the formal learning side of those years. Luckily though, I have access to the internet, and with that a plethora of interesting tools; courses, podcasts and interesting articles to keep the brain busy and working.
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I get the daily newsletter in my inbox every morning and it is a fabulous bit of e-kit, with often plenty of thought provoking discussion and perspectives to keep my mental juices flowing.
2. The Economist Easily my favourite weekly magazine, it also has a robust online counterpart with good articles, forums for discussion and lively debates galore. Oh, and it isn’t just about economics.
3. TED If you haven’t discovered TED, you haven’t truly lived on the internet.
4. Khan Academy Videos on everything and anything. Fabulous, and very informative…and many mates at uni used this to learn their courses.
5. Vocabulary.com A fun way to learn new words, and very comprehensive! I have an issue with retaining all the new words I learn, but adding something to the vocab every week is probably a way to go.
Vocabulary.com is the easiest, most intelligent way to improve your vocabulary. It combines an adaptive learning system (The Challenge) with the world’s fastest dictionary (The Dictionary) so that you can more quickly and more efficiently learn words.
6. NPR Podcasts An amazing resource for the richest plethora of podcasts imaginable. Good ones include How to do everything, Stuff you missed in History Class and Freakonomics Radio.
7. Sociological Images They say: Sociological Images is designed to encourage all kinds of people to exercise and develop their sociological imagination by presenting brief sociological discussions of compelling and timely imagery that spans the breadth of sociological inquiry. I say: This is the whole “critical thinking” part of English class I loved.
8. Sporacle Mentally stimulating procrastination through quizzes!
9. MIT’s open courseware As MIT are so awesome, they let you access all their knowledge. For free. You can download the study material, the lectures, the videos and learn it all yourself. Go!
10. Coursera.org
We are a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students.
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This website is gold. Fabulous resource for anything…I’ve signed up to a few courses that begin in January so I am looking forward to it!
So there are some tools that can keep the little grey cells stimulated…what about you? Do you find anything particularly useful?