Painless culture and life-changing skills now available for everyone

Lots of my friends and relatives are impressed by the quantity and quality of my knowledge; then they add, “if only I had your perseverance” or, even worst, “if only I had time”. Study activities are often associated with dusty blackboards and an oppressive environment. But what if I told you that everyone can learn much more, even in small chunks of time, without getting bored?

Disclaimer: you can skip this paragraph if you are not interested in a tale about a quite normal childhood.
I remember when I was a child and a young student: when I wanted to expand the basic knowledge provided by the primary school (which I found insufficient and totally boring), I was lucky enough to have an Encyclopedia in my house, searching for specific terms and then looking for others (without links on the paper, I just wrote down some words to find after the current encyclopedic entry). If I wanted to study in a more organized way, like in a curated essay, I needed to go to the public library, obviously taking my loving mother with me if I wanted to borrow some books for 10 days (usually, a mix of comics, novels and scientific studies suitable for some kids older than me). I consumed quite a lot of them, especially on rare occasions (e.g.: when I caught seasonal flu, so I had the whole day to spend reading), never to mention the long summer! Some years later, Internet arrived: it was a kind of luxury good (paying quite a lot for the slow connection time), but I found a lot of updated information and a lot of communities where I could find other people sharing the same passions I had. Then, the first widely known platforms come up: some of them, specific related to the classic knowledge (e.g. Wikipedia), others more “general purpose”, like Youtube, where you can find funny kittens and physics lessons.

Fast-forward to current days: where and how you can grow your knowledge and acquire new skills? I’m not specifically talking only about work-related competencies, but for everything you want to know and even discover whole captivating subjects you’re not aware of! Here you can find some of the ways I personally use and strongly recommend to everyone who has the desire to simply know more about something and/or discover new stuff. They are easily accessible (if you are reading this, I’ll assume you already have an Internet connection and a device to display information, never to mention the ability to understand basic reading and listening material). They are mostly free (or really low cost) and self-paced, ranging from beginner to expert level, so you can learn whenever and wherever you want, you have no excuses!

1. MOOCs

A Massive Open Online Course is an online course designed to be “massive” (so, unlike normal classes, provided to unlimited participation) and “open” (so publicly accessible via the Internet). Introduced in the late 2000s, they usually consist of traditional course materials (filmed lectures, readings, and optional/mandatory quizzes), but some of them also have forums or social media discussions to support community interactions among students, professors, and teaching assistants. Whether they are about Artificial Intelligence, Jazz improvisation, advanced Coding, Psychology, Management and Productivity hacks, Economics, or Design, they absolutely gained the first position in my education. I found them as valuable as the classic lessons I took during my University Master Degrees. Since I took advantage of dozens of them, I strongly suggest you read my article about MOOCs: once you’ll try, you’ll suddenly find yourself addicted to continuous learning! For further details and my experience, read “MOOC: the cheap (or even free!) yet powerful and stimulating way to learn“.

2. TED Talks and useful Youtube channels

Founded in 1984, TED (“Technology, Entertainment, Design”) is a media organization that posts talks online for free distribution under the slogan “ideas worth spreading”. Some of the 3.700+ short videos on TED website are famous talks like “The future we’re building” by Elon Musk and “How great leaders inspire action” by Simon Sinek. You can also see the impressive archive of talks in the TEDx Youtube channel, (TEDx means independent talks under TED license). If you still don’t feed anything interesting for you, you can search for “TEDx”, finding more than 100.000 talks, in several languages (you’ll find also a lot of talks held in your Country). Talking about Youtube: in case you haven’t noticed, aside from videos of kittens in boxes, music videos with girls in bikinis, funny videos and gamers, that platform is a gold mine: you just need to search the right stuff and do a little bit of filtering. You’ll be surprised to find an exciting lesson on physics, a clear animated explanation on economics, and much, much more!

3. Podcasts

A podcast is an episodic series of spoken word digital audio files that a user can download to a personal device for easy listening. Even if I store podcasts in folders (on a smartphone and a PC), listening to these files through a normal music player, some streaming applications and podcasting services provide a way to manage a personal consumption queue across many podcast sources and playback devices. As above, you can find podcasts about everything, from BBC global news and “narrative podcast” (the modern version of a radio drama) like these bedtimes stories, to Houston We Have a Podcast by NASA, scientific debunking, Nature, Tech and, if you miss museums, lots of podcast about art. You can find a podcast about almost everything, but if you search for inspiration, I can also recommend podcasts of the before mentioned TED.

4. Books

Here there’s not so much to write about (I assume/hope you read at least a couple of non-fiction books per year), but I can share with you my 2021 books list if you are searching for inspiration. Personally, I read mostly on e-book readers, but every person has its own style.

5. Audiobooks

We talked about audio and books. But what if you can combine together? This can be a brilliant time-saver idea, even if there are some books I recommend to read taking your time in silence or with pleasant background music. However, if you spend some time commuting, cooking, or walking alone, I think you can profit a lot of this technology. There are thousands of audiobooks; the biggest player here is obviously Amazon with Audible, but you can find also a lot of free audiobooks services like OpenCulture, DigitalBook, LibriVox and LoyalBooks. In some cases, you can also have luck searching on Youtube.

6. Documentaries and Reportages

Curious to know who invented the World Wide Web and how it works? Have you ever wanted to learn more about the history of your Country? Passionate about the life of wild animals living in Antarctica? For this section, there are too many platforms, starting from common Televisions websites and the well-known major streaming services (unless you live on Mars, chances are you’ve heard about Amazon Prime and Netflix), to BBC documentaries (and their great series about Earth) and, like always, you can also find something interesting on Youtube or Vimeo’s DocumentaryFilm section.

…others?

Sure there are other methods, but these are the most commons on which I rely. Do you know other way to learn something? Have you a specific MOOC, talk, channel, podcast, audiobook or documentary to suggest?