Serial Scribblings: Internet offers invaluable education opportunities

Call me a dork, but I love libraries.

Ever since I was young, I have been fascinated by their timeless qualities. During vacations to various cities, public libraries were always top on my sight-seeing list (though, shockingly, not on the lists of the rest of my family).

When I was searching for colleges, the library was always my first stop on campus-regardless of the itinerary detailed during guided tours.

There's something about a library's atmosphere of academic energy, the untold knowledge that each of its shelves contain, and the ability for anybody-regardless of age, gender, or education level-to access its contents that makes me grin every time I enter a library's doors.

So when I received an invitation on Facebook this week to join a group promoting the open education resources movement, the bibliophile in me jumped for joy.

Similar to the media found in libraries, open education resources are entirely free for public use and offer learning opportunities to anyone who has access to a computer; the only "library card" needed is a registration and password.

While the Internet can never fully capture the essence of sitting in a hushed library, it has provided an enormous outpouring of programs designed to provide universal education to users.

While, in my opinion, nothing beats the feel of opening a book and flipping through its pages, there is something enthralling about being able to access literature almost instantly through the computer. Currently, there are a handful of Web sites devoted to the publication and sharing of online books and texts.

The grandfather of these endeavors is Project Gutenberg, which holds goliath numbers of essays, novels, and classic texts-over 25,000 to be exact. Here, users can find a slew of reading material that satisfies the reading requirements of everything from the history of political thought to the birth of psychology.

A similar site, Bartelby, allows its users to read everything from Agatha Christie's "The Mysterious Affair at Styles," to papers published by the fathers of modern science, to the more eclectic essays like Edward Morton's "Remarks on the Subject of Lactation" (you know you're curious).

Universities such as MIT and Yale are also catching the open education resource wave. Both schools publish undergraduate and graduate course materials, including lecture notes, classroom video feeds, exams, and reading assignments, in online forums.

MIT's Open Courseware provides extensive resources for students of every major, giving access to the university's entire curriculum-over 1,800 courses-many of which have translated counterparts in Chinese, Thai, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Yale University currently offers free and open access to seven introductory courses in departments such as astronomy, religious studies, and English, offering users a direct glimpse into the classrooms of a highly regarded institution.

While checking out courses presented on Web sites won't earn a degree equivalent from either MIT or Yale, it can help earn an Ivy League GPA. Sites like OER Commons and Course Hero provide easily accessible and enormously helpful supplements to many courses taught at St. Joe's.

Whether you're looking to learn more in-depth material about a current course, or looking to fill some of those empty spaces in your notebook where you blanked out in class, online education resources can aid any student's needs.

The cherry on top of this academic sundae? Open education forums can save serious cash by offering the same information as those umpteenth-edition textbooks found in bookstores.

Shakespeare once exclaimed, "O this learning, what a thing it is!"-and it's true. Whether found in the musty pages of a well-worn book or the bright screen of a computer, knowledge is power.

While the nerd in me still clings to libraries and the traditional realms of academia, the learning enthusiast knows that education should be available to all who seek it, even those who cannot afford to sit in the classrooms of a university.

It's thrilling, therefore, to see that information and education is now available to more people in more ways than ever.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to head to the library.