One of Wikipedia’s co-founders, Larry Sanger, is making noise about the need to make online learning more available to K-12 grade children all over the world. Writing on his “Citizendium Blog,” Mr. Sanger offers a petition that everyone in the world is invited to sign, and send to a philanthropist. If you don’t happen to know who your local major philanthropist is, you may have trouble figuring out what to do with this. If you do, however, you can use the petition to add your voice to Sanger’s call the people donating money to improve education should seize the “low hanging fruit” by funding the transfer of textbooks and educational videos into high-quality, easy to use digital formats so that kids all over the world can have equal access to information. While there is free educational content available online today, Sanger says, most of it “lacks either detail or high quality.” Copyright owners may not agree with his assertion that rich philanthropists can digitize any content they want without asking anyone’s permission, but his passionate call for making the best information available to all school kids worldwide sounds pretty good. One can’t help but notice his comment that other things than a lack of digital content may, at times, be to blame for the sorry state of American K-12 education: “Perhaps it has to do with teachers being low-paid, or parents not being involved, or something else. We do not offer an answer to that.” Read Citizendium Blog & petition here

It’s very refreshing to see a college take the lead in disseminating knowledge over the web in new and exciting ways - especially when so many colleges and universities still have websites that look like the were designed, well, maybe during the Hoover administration. MIT’s “techtv” is still in beta, but you can already go there and view academic videos that range from weird to wonderful. Subjects go from “rat whisker micromotions” to “MIT students build a disco dance floor from scratch.” You can’t get a degree from MIT through this venue, but kudos to the school for democratizing knowldege. vist the MIT video site

Check out a great educational resource we found online: Oculture has an incredible listing of podcasts, videos and other materials on every subject you can imagine. It’s all free! Visit our online degrees site and scroll down to “highlights of the blog” in the right column for more info.

The New York Times ran a front-page story on physics professor Walter Lewin, whose energized science lectures, offered free to the world by M.I.T., have made him world-wide phenomenon. That’s rare for someone in physics! The truth is that it’s quite difficult to get to Lewin’s lectures on the M.I.T. website, but because they’re posted on YouTube, they’re easily accessible to all of us. As a non-scientist, I find some of them a bit hard to understand. There are also some issues with the video quality on many, resulting in a “big bang” moment in some of his demonstrations where the live class reacts but you don’t see very well on video. He is, however, extraordinarily engaging. Here’s a fantastic lecture I think anyone could understand, where the good professor shows how to make a powerful battery out of some cans that drip water into each other. Truly amazing:

If you’re into learning science for the sake of learning itself, here’s a great site that links to tons of videos, lectures and other downloads about biology, physics, chemistry, math and more.