It's never been easier to jump-start your skills or develop your creativity at no cost other than your dedication and an internet connection, writes KEVIN CASEY
WEALTHY, powerful people have a saying that they wheel out in times of trouble to make themselves sound resilient. “Never waste a good crisis,” they say. Meanwhile, college fees are on the rise, the euro is in decline, jobs are disappearing while training places are being snapped up fast. It’s easy to speak in cliches when you’re loaded.
On the other hand, it’s never been easier to jump-start your skills or develop your creativity at no cost other than your dedication and an internet connection. In case you’ve been overlooking one of your talents or want to bone-up on a new set of skills, right now there is a low-cost renaissance of education taking shape.
Becoming a born-again renaissance person is a nice little hobby too, especially if you are avoiding the traditional pastimes of burning up cash and credit.
Naturally, the language of the Renaissance is Italian. It's very easy to begin to learn the major languages with free lessons from the BBC at bbc.co.uk/languages. Real-world scenarios and innovative online video confirm the BBC's reputation as a language-learning leader. In fact, the BBC hosts a useful learning portal at bbc.co.uk/learning, linking to a wide range of educational resources from different providers.
Test what you teach yourself with free flash-card quizzes on vocabulary or any subject you're learning at quizlet.com.
If Renaissance poster-boys Leonardo and Galileo were alive today, as well as oil-painting and lute-playing, they’d probably be teaching themselves to “code”. If that sounds like black magic, take some of the mystery out of it by signing up for the free Code Academy lessons.
Assuming zero knowledge, the new Code Academy system quickly advances your computing craft with easy-to-follow interactive tutorials, learning with friends and unlocking achievements to earn badges. While you’re playing your silly games, you actually acquire valued skills such as HTML, CSS and Javascript.
Speaking of magic, you may want to dazzle the kids with a few party tricks or surprise them by solving the Rubik's Cube. Get free step-by-step guides contributed by users from instructables.comto round out your essential life skills such as cocktail making, bicycle repair, paper-craft, stilt-walking, sewing and everything under the sun.
Coincidentally, instructables.comoffers basic astronomy guides too. For more in-depth answers to age-old questions such as "what is the stars?", a free download such as Celestia or Stellarium should work on most computers. These are beautifully realised astronomy applications that will help you enthral your friends and family with your knowledge of the finer points of the sky above your heads.
Bear in mind that a renaissance person is defined as someone who is well-rounded, with knowledge and skills in a number of areas. We’re not all going to invent the telescope or flying machines, but we can nurture our intellect and imagination.
Librivox.orgis a site for free audiobooks. Many classics are out of copyright so now anyone may read the text into their computer microphone and release the recording. The catch is, the quality of the recordings vary somewhat. It's safe to assume that Aristotle never imagined his Poetics treatise being read in a wide Tasmanian accent into a laptop microphone, but the quality and range of recording is growing all the time.
If you prefer the written word, there are tens of thousands of literary classics available as free e-books from gutenberg.org. You'll soon be briefing your friends on the outcomes in Voltaire's Candide, enjoying again the adventures of Huck Finn or licking your lips as Leopold Bloom fries his breakfast in James Joyce's Ulysses.
Cultural rebirth didn’t end at the turn of the 20th century, fortunately. A quick analysis of the bottomless well of online video shows that it follows the old 80:20 rule – about 20 per cent of it is sublime and the other 80 per cent is cat videos.
Subscribing to a free site such as openculture.comwill help you filter the great art from the dross, with daily links to concerts by modern musical greats such as Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, recitations by beat poets Charles Bukowski and Allen Ginsberg, candid backstage moments with The Beatles, cinematic side projects by Orson Welles and David Lynch and a catalogue of hundreds of free movies.
Openculture.comalso provides details of 450 online university lectures posted by universities such as Oxford, Harvard, Yale and the MIT on everything from economics to psychology. In fact, the very latest wave of formal third level education will see (US-based, so far) universities offering structured courses online, for free, complete with exercises, assignments and certification.
Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are quickly becoming established and promise to democratise and revolutionise third-level education, leaving lecture halls and quadrangles behind for vast planet-wide cyberspace classes of 100,000 students and more.
Coursera.orgis taking enrolments now for autumn courses from Princeton, Stanford and other top-drawer US universities. It is soon to be joined by MOOCs offered by MIT and Harvard. With free access to world-class education, it offers a range of weighty topics such as neurology, computer science and modern poetry. Using video, interactive exercises, social networking and all the web has to offer, the Coursera.org/MOOCmodel could represent the rebirth of online education.
It’s a new phase but think of it as a modernised Open University without the fees and restrictions. Five years from now we could all be renaissance men and women, every day.
