YouTube EDU is a collection of videos from dozens, if not hundreds, of educational sources, including Stanford, MIT, Purdue University, UNC Chapel Hill, and Harvard Business School.

This looks to be the start of a very useful collection of lectures and informational videos.

found via The MLxperience

MIT has expanded their OpenCourseWare initiative to include science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) for high school students.  Dubbed Highlights for High School (a name that, for me at least, evokes Highlights magazine), their stated purpose is to “inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists”.

This sounds like it will be a great repository for college level students to review this material, as well as a resource for the general public.  Keep this site in mind for future use…

from Open Access News

There is a great overview of the history and current status of the Open CourseWare (OCW) project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Of interest is the discussion on why to spend millions of dollars to provide free access to that which is a core product of the university.  As with many things (news, music, information), the answer to this will be found in some sort of balance.  I suspect that MIT will profit (and not only financially) from this effort in the end, probably many times over.

from Open Access News

From the folks at Google and a team from MIT comes YouOS, an experimental “web operating system” which basically gives you a computer desktop that you access through your web browser.

Why is this significant? This is more than your basic web 2.0 site, or a remotely hosted application: this could mean a change in how we approach public access computers. With stripped down hardware (motherboard, processor, minimal memory, monitor, mouse, keyboard, high-speed internet access) you can have a full-fledged system without needing to maintain the operating system and related software at the computer itself.

Check it out. Sign up for an account and see how it works. Remember that this is not only experimental software, but they are at the alpha stage of development… don’t expect Windows Vista visual quality or Linux stability.

By the way… this may settle the debate going on for the past few years about whether Google has an interest in developing operating systems and competing in that arena.

from OSDir