For Free

Visitors to this Far Place will know that I have occasionally noted how little real change has occurred in schools over the years I've been teaching despite the fact we're always being told about how much progress has been made in education. But one thing has altered over time: increasingly people have found ways to commodify education and these days it's much more of a business than ever it used to be. If this is progress, then let me be left well behind.

Fortunately there are forces that push in a different direction. I suppose a fundamental sense of goodwill is not so foreign to us that we abandon it completely for the big bucks. It's interesting that as much as there are plenty of instances of folks trying to make money out of educationally-related stuff on the Internet, there's a lot of free stuff easily available.

One small but striking example comes courtesy of Harvard. They have made available a whole series of lectures by the excellent Professor Marjorie Garber on Shakespeare's later plays. To be able to sit-in a lecture with a major scholar of the Bard in the comfort of one's home seems to me somewhat astonishing, and for anyone interested in being similarly astonished and edified I suggest you start here.