Net gain

Divyanshu Dutta Roy

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On a fine sunny day in 1994 when computers had just begun hooking up to a new fad called the Internet, few people around the world could have foreseen the way it would change the way we humans learnt things. But things have changed. Here we take a moment, 20 years later, to sing out the 10 best things to have happened to learning since the advent of the Internet.

The search box

The search box is where all our queries begin today. From the most innocent of questions to the most outlandish of problems are solved today by that ubiquitous white rectangle. But that simple box itself has come a long way since 1998.

Popular search engines today will help you see the correct spelling of a word (if you misspell it), learn the word’s definition (if you type ‘define’ before the word) and convert currencies and all kinds of units if you type a ‘to’ or ‘in’ between the units (250 watts to donkeypower).

Besides these, finding out the weather or time in the remotest corner of the globe (prefix the word before location), calculating simple or complex mathematical problems, reading copyright free books (e.g. Moby Dick), finding out public data (e.g. Population of Solan) and more are just a few keystrokes away.

As far as search boxes go, WolframAlpha deserves a special mention. The ‘computational knowledge engine’ helps you learn literally everything from ‘how fast does a mosquito fly’ (1.4 km/hour) to how long it would take to speak 35,000 words in Finnish (4 hours).

When you come to think of it, if all the world’s search boxes were connected in an array to a speech recognition software — Jarvis from Iron Man or Cortana from Halo would not seem like science fiction any more.

The online encyclopaedia

With 4.68 million articles (in the English version) on every topic under the sun and beyond, Wikipedia is no less than eighth wonder of the 21st century. Sure, it has many of the trappings any democratically-generated content platform has, but even with those Wikipedia is perhaps the biggest stride in knowledge and learning since the written word. Begin your day with a few minutes on the Wikipedia Main Page and be amazed by just how shallow and stupid television pundits and right-wing dunderheads really seem by the time you end it.

Video hosting sites

You hit about 321,000 results if you happen to search ‘How to bake a cake’ on YouTube today but you get 379,000 results if you search ‘How to bake a chocolate cake’. There is probably not one cake in the world that you cannot learn to bake if you sprinkle some online time before you get down to looking for the oven mittens.

From tips on romance to repairing the Hubble space telescope, there are very few things left today that you cannot learn if you’re willing to sit back on the couch and hit a few keys on the right video hosting site. For those too impatient to read through the walls of text on Wikipedia or for those too selectively indisposed to scroll, a video on any of YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion and more is a godsend.

Q and A

They aren’t really locomotive engines that wheeze out responses to the your oddest of questions but websites like HowStuffWorks, About.com, Yahoo Answers, Askville, Answers.com and Quora fall under a wide group of online tools and communities that are all about solving your inanest of issues. And then there are more — for every imaginable niche and topic, websites like these will teach you everything from how to file an RTI application to how to cut an apple just with your bare hands. Heck, some distant day you will even be able to learn where your local politician gets his never-ending pots of funding from.

Do it yourself

Though a lot of DIY resources come from websites and services mentioned earlier, but this is where really awesome but nice places on the web such the Instructables.com, Doityourself.com, Makezine.com, Greenupgrader.com, eHow.com, Howcast.com and more come in handy. Besides these purpose-built guides, every online network worth its salt has a thriving community of DIY enthusiasts such as the Reddit DIY page.

Podcasts

The oddly overlapping path to nerd-haven and becoming a social-situation, ninja is to take all that time waiting at a bus stop, flopping around in commute, wishing the elevator moved faster or even listening to good old misogynistic hip-hop and use your earphones to plug-in some useful or interesting podcast. There are funny ones, there are intelligent ones, there are provocative ones and there are ones that get you thinking. News, facts, humour, satire, plays, chat shows, interviews, music there are thousands of podcasts that would not only make your more productive and efficient but also get you to learn truckloads of things. Get started by checking out iTunes or any podcast app or going straight to sites such as Soundcloud or Podbean. You can download them to your phone or music player and tune-in whenever the proportion of time expended and value derived goes out of whack.

The gift of tongue

Learning a language has never been easier. Once upon a time you had to visit a language institute or tutor and put up with everything that came on the side. Today tools such as Duolingo, Rosetta Stone or Livemocha not only make your life easier but also has brought that to a much more approachable level. For most counts and purposes, a visit to these sites and services will serve you well — a German (not Sanskrit) belt will give your engineering career a boost and a French star may very well work wonders for your social life.

TED

If being a Google ninja, a YouTube rockstar, a Wikipedia geek or a podcast diva is not enough for you then TED is your cool club. Tons of things have been said and written about TED and this amazing platform for global leaders of innovation — not just in Technology, Entertainment and Design — is the place where you can get your zen on. One video on TED every day is guaranteed to bring you to an intellectually level so superior that our civil aviation authority will plead you to put a red blinker on your head. No, really.

The Khan academy

Started in 2006, by a Bangladeshi-American educator Salman Khan, the Khan Academy is best summed by its motto of “A free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere”. The website, thanks to generous donations by philanthropists worldwide, is the most suave and neat platform for learning all the core subjects taught in schools. For students without the best of schools or teachers, Khan Academy is the one stop for mastering all the world’s education.

Higher studies

Higher education has come a long way from days when people had to take sea voyages to get respectable degrees. Like everything else, technology has brought higher education much closer to the people looking for it. And even though Online Universities and Massively Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have not taken off the way we would have liked these to, but things such as JSTOR, Google Scholar, Coursera and edX are great examples how technology, almost always, makes things better. Don’t shoot the messenger.

QUICK GUIDE:

Search engines: Google, Bing, yahoo, DuckDuckGo
Online encylopedia:  Wikipedia
Video-hosting sites: YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion
Q and A sites:  HowStuffWorks, About.com, Yahoo Answers, Askville, Answers.com and Quora
DIY sites: Instructables.com, Doityourself.com, Makezine.com, Greenupgrader.com, eHow.com, Howcast.com
Podcasts: iTunes, Soundcloud , Podbean
Language learning: Duolingo, Rosetta Stone or Livemocha
Higher education: JSTOR, Google Scholar, Coursera and edX