The arrow of time

When joining the university I basically had to choose between Physics and CS/IT for my career. I was very good in physics in high-school and was a winner of a couple of country-level competitions - always in experimental physics. I never did very good at math but was always tinkering with things. This aspect - the ability to tinker with a whole lot of things very readily is what ultimately got me interested in computers, and Open source in specific, but I've always kept an eye for physics and science in general so I find these videos incredibly interesting.

They are done in an conversational style, not as lectures, which makes them actually more useful as they are more natural - the speakers are more relaxed and the topics are focused and short. These are not "hard core science" videos - they do not contain the necessary "hard work" portion of learning, but are immensly awesome at popularizing their topics.

As far as I an tell there are three groups of the videos:

• Sixty Symbols - I think this is how it all started, that this is the oldest one. It basically explains various symbols used in science such as gamma (as in radiation, or photons in general), h (Planck's constant) etc.
• The Periodic Table of Videos - describing elements and compounds in chemistry, often with cool experiments, but also common topics in chemistry. I think these are my favorites since I don't know much about chemistry.
• Nottingham Science - general science topics that don't fit in other specific areas, Also very interesting, but less focused.
  

In reality, I consider these groups completely arbitrary and all the videos form a continuum of science-oriented topics - they would just as well fit together if they were all in a single bunch.

It's not uncommon for the videos to reach 50,000 viewers as of time of this writing! Consider this: a single professor teaching for example four classes a year can reach about 500 students a year - and in little more than a year these videos had an audience of an equivalent of 10 professor-years! This is an awesome achievment in education.

Again, the purpose of these videos is not to effect a complete education in a field for their audience, it is more in line with the "life-long learning" mantra - increasing the general education level of Internet viewers. I don't know how common it is but I'm very much in favour of "conversational" style of learning as opposed to dry lecturing. I've often learned much more by simply speaking to specialists vaguely about the supposed topics (and with large off-tangent excursions) then by sitting at lectures. I imagine a distance learning effort which included such a style in between dry lecturing would be much more effective than the alternative.

There are starts in this direction - I think the filmed Feynmann Lectures were amongst the first such efforts, and more recently there is the Khan Academy. I think this should be the future of education.