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Posted on 20 September 2012

I started this blog talking about different ways to learning English, and I'm going to come back to the same topic, because my list of creative ways to learn English have been enriched by a new item few days ago, and I'm raring to tell you about it.

But let's start from the beginning. Few days ago I was coming back from a business trip in Rome, where I attended a meeting on a very difficult issue: combined heat and power generation. We had such a technical discussion, and I understood only half of the words the other participants said.

On the plane to Milan, I wondered if physics could be considered like a foreign language: you need to learn the rules, the words, and then you can speak physics properly. I think I probably speak a better English than physics! Then I started reading favourite italian magazine, a magazine that put together the best articles in international magazine translating it into Italian.

I found an interesting article on what's happening now in South Sudan, (another topic you know I'm interested in) and after that, I found a really inspiring article on the new frontier of education.

I read the story of Sebastian Thrun, formerly professor at Stanford, and the guy who developed the Street view project at Google. He realized that teaching to a small group of students, most of them paying high tuition fees, most of them from USA, meant a waste of the opportunity of teaching students from all over the world. Nowadays, technology give us the possibility to change the education system, so he founded Udacity, a free online non profit university with the purpose of providing free high level education that overcome all the boundaries: time, money, language, geography, age, gender.

He is a very famous guy in the internet, so when he announced he intended to put his whole course on how to build a search engine on the internet, open to everyone, he received something like one hundred thousand answers!

So he quitted his job at Stanford and is currently running this free university, offering a small group of courses, hosted by very skilled professors.

In the meanwhile, many other projects started, with the same purpose, so I did a quick research and I found out a really bright chest of wonder.

What I love the most of BBC LE and of this blog is that every reader, every comment comes from a different country, a different culture. It's one of the most challenging and most exciting sides of writing here, and I got excited at the idea of learning many other things in the same way.That's the reason why, eventually, I enrolled in a course of computer science in this new university, to learn a computer programming language called Python, together with students from all over the world. I think that this revolution in the education system is a dream that is going to be realized for poor people, less developed countries, and for everyone deserving a chance to improve his life.

And I hope this also could help me learning two new languages, English and computer science!

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