Remember Anything

Modern professors in institutions of higher education can take advantage of many free accelerated learning techniques just by spending a certain amount of their own personal time browsing the internet, talking to young people, and discovering learning tools they might direct students toward systematically. Rather than railing against the amount of time young people waste in front of computer screens, wise teachers can capitalize upon such media as the modern means by which entertainment might be transformed into an accelerated education opportunity.

One obvious example of a web site that is rich with educational material is YouTube. There are several ways to take advantage of this material. Teachers might show video segments that help illustrate lecture points. It is often possible to bring the website up in the classroom and give students short clips that provide them with first-hand viewings of famous people, other excellent lectures on topics of interest, or even geographic regions, medical case examples, poetry readings, or dry material presented with good humor. No matter what the course content, YouTube or a related web site is apt to permit access to rich video material on that topic.

Beyond these teacher-directed methods of using this source material, however, students might be directed toward these sites with a specific objective. For example, several different small groups of students might each be given a collective assignment to go onto the internet and view a number of different videos on the subject of interest and then meet to discuss together the best video to direct the entire class to see. Each member of the group will be required to write a short blurb on the strengths and weaknesses of the video that member reviewed and assign a rating number to its overall quality from one to ten. Each of these separate reviews should be turned in to the instructor, and the one that all members of the class are directed toward should be the video with the highest average rating. As each different group from the class reviews videos from a topical area, the end result of this exercise is that each member of the class will watch and review several videos to rank the best from their own group and then be able to simply watch the videos that represent the best from each of the other groups or topics. In this way, students will have become very directly involved in free accelerated learning techniques.

Beyond YouTube, the possibilities for expanding internet learning opportunities are vast. Consider, for example, the use of Amazon Mechanical Turk as a classroom learning tool. Students might answer collectively the snippet questions about a wide variety of topics, performing whatever internet research is necessary to derive correct answers and perhaps even going to the website www.snippet.com to see their own answers posted and rated by snippet users. Students might conduct research on the internet by posting “high intelligence tasks” (HITs) for others to perform through surveys and then analyze the obtained data together. Possibilities are endless for creative professors who choose to use rather than bemoan internet “distractions” as source material for higher education.

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