[ExI] Open Learning?

[Bryan Bishop]

On Friday 19 September 2008, Emlyn wrote:
> >> I've been thinking of doing a deal more study recently, for
> >> interest / self-improvement rather than quals. There are some good
> >> materials out there these days from universities, notably
> >
> > I have a few thousand links on many topics in many introductory
> > college courses because of my scowering of the web too .. but not
> > so much the structure that you're looking for.
>
> Yeah, some structure. Lots of free information is awesome, but a bit
> of structure is a lot more, web 2.0, you know?

A good way of learning is to create your own such structures. At least, 
this is what was 'beaten' into me. Works so far.

> A lot of people will read Web 2.0 and vomit a bit in their mouth, but
> I'm coming to think it actually represents something :-)

I prefer Web -1.0.

http://surfraw.alioth.debian.org/

           ______  _     _  ______   _______  ______   _______  _  _  _
          / _____)(_)   (_)(_____ \ (_______)(_____ \ (_______)(_)(_)(_)
         ( (____   _     _  _____) ) _____    _____) ) _______  _  _  _
          \____ \ | |   | ||  __  / |  ___)  |  __  / |  ___  || || || |
          _____) )| |___| || |  \ \ | |      | |  \ \ | |   | || || || |
         (______/  \_____/ |_|   |_||_|      |_|   |_||_|   |_| \_____/
         Surfraw - Shell Users' Revolutionary Front Rage Against the Web

Surfraw provides a fast unix command line interface to a variety of 
popular WWW search engines and other artifacts of power. It reclaims 
google, altavista, babelfish, dejanews, freshmeat, research index, 
slashdot and many others from the false-prophet, pox-infested heathen 
lands of html-forms, placing these wonders where they belong, deep in 
unix heartland, as god loving extensions to the shell. 

Surfraw abstracts the browser away from input. Doing so lets it get on 
with what it's good at. Browsing. Interpretation of linguistic forms is 
handed back to the shell, which is what it, and human beings are good 
at. Combined with netscape-remote or incremental text browsers, such as 
lynx, links or w3m, along with screen a Surfraw liberateur is capable 
of navigating speeds that leave GUI tainted idolaters agape with fear 
and wonder. 

For example: 

         $ surfraw google -results=100 RMS, GNU, which is sinner, which 
is sin?
         $ sr wikipedia surfraw
         $ sr austlii -method=phrase dog like
         $ /usr/lib/surfraw/rhyme -method=perfect Julian

> >> Does anyone know of anything like that happening online anywhere?
> >
> > I try to hold weekly "Wikipeding" meetings on freenode with others.
> > What we do is we go through a subset of Wikipedia as quickly /
> > completely as possible, but it's just as easily applicable to
> > streaming video annotations and so on. I haven't seen other groups
> > doing this quite yet .. but I'm sure they are out there somewhere.
>
> Ooh, is this a closed group?

Hardly. It's in my friggin' signature.

- Bryan
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