Ha! Nice one, Francis. Yes, it will be interesting to see where all this "open knowledge" leads.
I've been following a lot of the debates over the restrictions on access to papers created by the various academic publishers. Momentum is definitely building towards a freeing up of published papers - as the current business model seems no longer sustainable.
I have wondered about the papers that may be referrenced in the Coursera materials. If the free (of cost) ethos also extends to published data, then they can only reference papers in free access journals - otherwise it will be a problem for those online participants without academic accounts (ie. Athens, Shiiboleth). That also includes me - since the new year I no longer have my Hudds Uni Athens & Shiboleth accounts (although I can keep the email address - which is actually run by Microsoft).
David ________________________________________ From: manchester-bounces@lists.fsfe.org [manchester-bounces@lists.fsfe.org] on behalf of Francis Southern [francis.southern@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk] Sent: 07 March 2012 16:56 To: manchester Subject: Re: [FSFE-Manc] Free Cryptography Course
On 07/03/12 16:28, D.Bolton U0970268 wrote:
Francis, you might be interested in seeing the materials on the Natural Language Processing course. May be worth signing up just for them (its all free). https://www.coursera.org/nlp/auth/welcome
David
I was thinking about sending a message about this, but you beat me to it.
I've already signed up for natural language processing, probabilistic graphical models and analysis of algorithms. Of course, due to time constraints I won't be able to continue them all for long, but I'll pick the one I'm having most fun with. I did the same last semester when they ran artificial intelligence, machine learning and databases (ML was the one I finished). The course was good, but by the end of it I didn't really feel like I actually understood machine learning; perhaps my expectations were too high. ;-) It forced me to do some Octave programming though, which was good.
I think that some of them this semester might be a bit more challenging, lots of them seem to expect programming experience and stuff, so we'll see...
I'd be very interested to hear about anyone else's experiences though, because there are far too many fun courses there for one person to take them all!
Also, I think this `free/open content' kind of stuff is fascinating and I've been following it for a couple of years (cf: OpenCourseWare, Khan Academy, Wikipedia and the Open University, even Arxiv) and I wonder where it'll go. But, I'll save you an idealistic rant and get back to my work. :-)
Francis
_______________________________________________ Manchester mailing list Manchester@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/manchester