Lainchan University

Everything that exists exists in the wired. Most of us can't afford to study at university, and those that can are forced into the obedience that comes with being a disposable piece of a monolithic institute. I put to you that it is now the institutes themselves that are disposable. Every resource worth sharing - lectures, textbooks, papers - has been shared somewhere in the wired. We have all the knowledge, all we need is organising. We compile resources (all free of course (though everything is free if you try hard enough)), we create a curriculum, we come up with a schedule and were set. We have a functioning, zero hierarchy, free for all university with a 100% "isn't just here to get a job as an accountant" score. I think having a proper schedule, curriculum and community is what people need to transition from "Reads popular science and watches maths videos on youtube" to "Has a deep understanding of subjects and is capable of new discoveries and insightful works". Also we can be the first university who's mascot is anime girls licking caramel off each other in a sauna so that's pretty cool.

>we create a curriculum Shouldn't we start with the curriculum? Alternatively we can pick an existing curriculum and modify it to fit our needs. And also, what would be those needs?

>>3383 >Alternatively we can pick an existing curriculum and modify it to fit our needs I was thinking that too. >what would be those needs? To get the kind of deep, intricate understanding of the subjects we choose to study that most people consider to only be attainable by studying at a high end university.

I love this idea. I may contribute. Anyways I will almost certainly be revisitting my textbooks from my information theory class and I will try to use that chance to dig up papers on that stuff. And I will dump it here. How about we add extracurricular activity prsprt of 'advanced classes' where we dump papers that go a bit above standard knowledge on certain topics?

>>3386 Lol, when I have multiple typos in one sentence: *sort of 'advanced classes'

idea: MIT OpenCourseWare already has lots of good soykaf. We use that for the material, and build a community that meets regularly to learn stuff from there. Like "ok, for the next 3 months we're going to do this class"

I have a Master's degree in Experimental Psychology. I would be willing to talk about various psychological topics and expand into the schizophrenia-autism dynamic and Henri Bergson.

I gotta say, I really like this idea. >>3383 This is a good idea, but I also think that the curriculum should have some qualities. First, it should be versatile so it can fit the particular needs of an individual instead of being a set of monolithic generalized areas of development. Second, it should be heavily peer-reviewed. After all, this is the kind of thing that our tools and userbase make possible. That's all I can think for now.

>>3388 I don't think this should be a study group. Sure, getting together is okay, but perhaps that could be peripheral to the central idea of establishing a curriculum that'll guide people through a set of incremental subjects. There are already study groups if that's what you want and I personally am suspicious of the idea of study groups altogether, perhaps because I'm a loner. Either way, the study group thing shouldn't be central to this project. And I am serious about this. Next, the progress should be measurable. Perhaps a set of goals should be set at strategic points of the plan as milestones. Such goals could be of the kind "The student will be able to succesfully construct a proof for a nontrivial theorem in the theory of Real Numbers", thus a list of such goals should be at each breakpoint. Of course, there is no external authority to measure this, so as a consequence, there could be no exams. Another consequence is that the student alone should know when he is ready to move on to the next segment or if he should review what he has learned. Other ideas that come to mind are that projects should be suggested to the student, which of course will give him practice on the matter at hand, but also tangible results from his effort, and also something to show. After all, if all you can say to a potential employer is "well I watched some lectures online" it won't do much. If you have a portfolio, on the other hand.... So in sum, we should organize in a way that allows us to leverage the tools we already use, like git (for example, to make a suggested curriculum which others could of course contribute to or fork), which should be distributed (so it's not under a single authority), and to properly organize the material as has been so far suggested. Oh and we need to collect a bibliography,.

Sounds interesting. I may take part depending on how things unravel.

>>3392 I completely agree that we set projects and goals. Its vital that this is not a passive experience and that there is rehearsal of ideas. I do think getting together and discussing the lessons should be given some priority too as its rehearsal of ideas and things you misunderstood will be corrected. I think sharing and peer reviewing the projects should be done for the same reason.

How are we handling different subjects?

http://libgen.io http://sci-hub.cc maybe these can be useful

>>3388 Thanks for the recommendation. Our curriculum was changed and they removed some subjects that interested me,fortunately, some of then are available on the OpenCourseWare.

https://sci-hub.cc/http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2058-7058/3/8/26/meta

The last one and these ones are about information theory: https://sci-hub.cc/10.1103/PhysRev.47.777 http://euro.ecom.cmu.edu/program/courses/tcr854/2001/readings/autoag96.pdf

One more: http://biocomparison.ucoz.ru/_ld/0/37_SjS.pdf

>>3400 >>3403 >>3404 >>3405 It would be appreciated if you gave a brief run down on what these sites are for other people who may not feel comfortable clicking on random links without any context.

>>3408 This, I don't like when people just dump a soykafload of resources without giving info. I find it really distasteful. Like that guy who dumped a zillion python books on a pdf thread, doubt he read even a fraction of them

>>3408 i'm >>3400, those links were: (from wikipedia) "Library Genesis or LibGen is a search engine for articles and books on various topics, which allows free access to content that is otherwise paywalled or not digitized elsewhere at all. Among others it carries PDFs of content from Elsevier's ScienceDirect web-portal. (...) As of July 2016, the database contains more than 52 million articles from about 50,000 publications" on the other hand scihub is a site when you can put any link of academic papers with paywalls and it removes the paywall and gives you the pdf

>>3408 It's all pdf's. Or rther it's all peer reviewed papers. I haven't yet read them myself, but I have printed them out and will read them in the following weeks. I could have copy pasted the abstract of each but didn't due to not having time.

>>3392 Ok, but I am not confident at all that it will geto ff the ground if you don't use already-existing material.

>>3398 I really don't think the project should be at all focused on a study group. I've always learned alone, and whenever I've had questions, I had a search engine, stackoverflow, random blogs all over the internet, and ultimate IRC and the beginner's general to ask. I don't mean to say that there should be no study group. If you want to form a study group go ahead, but don't make it the core of the project. An IRC channel on it would perhaps work better than "a study group". With a study group you first have to have everybody agree on a common theme to study. Then you'd have to count on people actually doing the studying. And I already have experience with people, real flesh people. And if most people in meatspace won't do what they """commit""" to, what can you say about a bunch of self-loathing anonymous internet addicts with ADHD? (No offence guys, I am too). The point is that if 10 people jump in, 2 will follow through, and the group will be generally stagnant because they'll be better off in the particular communities where people gather out of their own interest rather than on a very very weak commitment to strangers on the other side of the world. Or looking for their own answers where they are readily available: all over the rest of the internet. Again, the core should be having a good plan with the characteristics I mentioned (they're just suggestions ofc) and some reading/watching material that allows for a directed efficient sequence of topics with minimum redundancy and growing complexity. >>3412 Well I suggest as has already been said, that we take an existing curriculum, compile some resources (video lectures and reading material), and work from there, adapting it to the needs and limitations of users.

>>3413 There is also already an IRC channel on irc.lainchan.org, #wired-students, though I am not sure if it has been re-registered yet, and the topic restored to the existing gitla.in projects repository lainons were using. There are currently 11 lainons idling in that channel, and there was at least 2 collaborative projects, and 3 existing curricula that lainons were following, including CS50.

>>3414 Oh neat, then I guess we could build on that.

I think the best way to organize this would be a wiki. Everyone could start gathering resources and we could develop the courses and programs there too. We should start with a course on how to teach.

>>3440 You may want to look at the existing wikis that exist for this and other purposes. E.g. Unofficial Lainwikis https://lainchan.wiki/Main_Page https://lainwiki.barton.ovh/ https://gitla.in/barton/lainwiki InstallGentoo Wiki https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Main_Page WikiUniversity Wiki https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page WikiBooks Wiki https://www.wikibooks.org/ c2Wiki http://wiki.c2.com/ h2g2 https://h2g2.com/ Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis

>>3446 Great links, thank you.

>>3446 Can we use lainchan.wiki for this? It seems to be made for the IRC.

>>3454 So far the wiki looks like a face book directory. Might as well add some content to it, they would likely appreciate it.

Bump

>>3388 I like study group idea. The vast majority of ppl who start online courses never finish them. I think this would hold us more accountable

>>3389 >Experimental Psychology What the hell is that? I'd love to hear about it in this thread if we can avoid derailing

I like this idea. I would not be compiling anything or taking up any serious study but I would love to see a Lain Library of interesting information.

>>5577 The title is pretty self-explanatory.

You have my support. Setup a common contact channel and we can start discussing the first steps/ setting up systems and organization.

>>5581 P.S. I am a physicist and roboticist. I am still young and inexperienced, but I can offer many books and some insight from a long time hobbyist and new professional.

The main problem with self-study is that you have no peers, no structure and no guidance. So I agree that is should be the main focus of this kind of program. I could probably set up a course in abstract algebra or geometry if people are interested in that.

>>5646 I took a course which included some group theory last year and I really enjoyed it, so this sounds cool to me. I'm sure most of you know this, but you can find Feynman's excellent lectures on physics here: http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

>Also we can be the first university who's mascot is anime girls licking caramel off each other in a sauna so that's pretty cool. That's a good selling point. >>3392 >Perhaps a set of goals should be set at strategic points of the plan as milestones. Such goals could be of the kind "The student will be able to succesfully construct a proof for a nontrivial theorem in the theory of Real Numbers", thus a list of such goals should be at each breakpoint. The problem here is that many milestones that would be necessary to show (to the student themselves) that they truly understand certain topics require, at the least, a "grader" who checks the work and confirms that it is correct. Proofs are a great example. You can write a correct proof in virtually infinite ways, so there's no way to automatically confirm its legitimacy. Someone has to read through it and say, "Yeah, that's good," or, "No, you're missing a case and this proof is easier done directly than through using proof by contrapositive." Code is another good example. Sure, students can compare input/output with a rubric, but that won't help them catch bad code practices. I think the milestones are good idea, but there are very few areas of study where milestones could be used reliably without an authority figure checking them, especially the more in-depth the studying goes.

>>5650 User reviews. Directly democratic, distributed marking system. Yes, plebs would be able to leave their uninformed opinions on your work, but you could post it anonymously to prevent personal biases, you could provide a questionnaire along with the work which must be filled in correctly in order for the review to count towards the proper score, also you could make it on an opt-in basis so if you're not interested in expressionist paintings then there's no need for you to review them. I'm just saying it's probably the fairest way, if you don't merely believe it will simply lead to appealing to the mass consensus. >>3382 Suppose I'm not actually very talented or don't regard myself as very talented. Do you still think there's a role for us brain dead slobs to play within it?