Sad News and Learning "the Three Rs"...

Just found out yesterday about Katie Reider's passing.  If you're the praying type, please say a prayer for her family; they've had a rough year to say the least.

While I have no intentions of returning to college anytime soon (as I don't even know what manner of degree I would aim for), I have spent some time looking for free classes.  Essentially, it's like auditing a class - there are no credits or assignments, but you do get access to lectures.

Some colleges - including MIT and Notre Dame - are part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, but the OCW classes tend to be text-based with no audio or video lectures.  While that may be great for some, I prefer to engage in more than words on a screen.  So I was excited to find a couple of colleges that offer up audio (and, in some cases, video) lectures on demand.

One is Covenant Theological Seminary, which offers a variety of class lectures in MP3 format via CovenantWorldwide.org.  On the other side of the spectrum is UC Berkeley, which offers MP3 downloads as well as streaming video of selected classes at the webcast.berkeley website.  I've already downloaded one of the Covenant classes to my new MP3 player (only 2 GB, but still pretty sweet), and I'm looking through the Berkeley classes to figure out which one I want to go through.  Just because I'm not in college doesn't mean I can't learn, and besides, free is a good deal.