I just noticed that it has been almost a year since I last posted a blog. That's not very good; all I can do is plead busy-ness with work and with school. I am thankfully in my last class, last semester, and even though no one in my family believes me, I am really done with formal schooling. It's costly and I'm tired of being at the mercy of instructors who can't find fault with my subject matter and end up whacking off points for a single typo or the one occasion I posted a digit instead of writing the number out with letters. From now on my education is free, and on my terms.
It's amazing how much free education is out there. The iTunes store has iTunes University with videos and podcasts from places like Harvard and MIT. I can watch and do the assignments for Harvard's Introduction to Computing class, completely cost free, and during my own free time. No grades of course and no degree, but I'm not interested in accumulating degrees; I want to accumulate knowledge. Lynda.com is a subscription service, but for just $150 a year I have access to online videos and tutorials for a wide variety of subjects; computer programming, digital photography, learn how to use Excel or Adobe Photoshop.....I can watch as many as I want in that one year. Coursera.org offers completely free courses in the sciences, business, finance, economics, information technology, humanities, and more. Coursera classes come from places like Duke, Brown University, UC Irvine, Vanderbilt, the University of Pittsburgh- 33 educational institutions in all. I was rather sad that my alma mater, Lehigh University, was not among the 33, but Lehigh classes can be found at iTunes U.
We have access to peer-reviewed articles via Google Scholar. PubMed offers tons of free articles from the medical field. A lot of journals will put back issues into an online archive; all they ask is for a registration (so they can pepper you with emails, but sometimes it is worth it). For a really small fee, you can subscribe to the New England Journal of Medicine with a Kindle. Journals like that often cost $300 or more for a year's subscription, and yet usually cost less than ten dollars a month on the Kindle. In fact, it is cheaper to get the NEJM on Kindle than it is to get People magazine online!!!
I don't know when I became a nerd. I guess I was one in high school. I certainly didn't feel like one in college, where I worked very, very hard to maintain a B average. I certainly didn't enjoy my four years at Lehigh; I walked away from there with my diploma and hoped I never had to cross the campus ever again (although I did go back there six years ago with Ken and found a much prettier, much more female-friendly place. When I started in 1977, I was in the 7th class that had admitted women). I liked nursing school (I liked the study, not the stress). And when I started online schooling for a BSN in 2002, I found that i really liked the online learning environment. I guess a nerd was born then.
If you want to learn something other than academics, look at YouTube or Pinterest. I have found videos that teach you to knit and crochet, how to tie a scarf, or how to make a certain kind of bun in your hair. YouTube has videos of EVERYTHING (note- when having surgery, do not look on YouTube for information. Watching an ankle fusion a week before I had one was a BAD idea). Some of the videos are of such good quality that I have embedded them into Power Point presentations as visual examples.
So get out there and learn, people!
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