"In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History"

According to this article, it looks like some of the brick-and-mortar educators out there are finally starting to get the picture on where education is going:

“I don’t believe that charters and vouchers are the threat to schools in Orange County,” ... said [William M. Habermehl, superintendent of the 500,000-student Orange County schools]. “What’s a threat is the digital world — that someone’s going to put together brilliant $200 courses in French, in geometry by the best teachers in the world.”

I'll bet we can come up with a few "brilliant" online courses in French—and probably for a lot less than $200.

Tim Ferriss and language learning

For those of you that haven't stumbled upon it yet, Tim Ferriss's blog is quite an interesting read, but I am of course most interested in his posts about languages, the best of which are:

• How to Learn Any Language in 3 Months
• Why Language Classes Don’t Work: How to Cut Classes and Double Your Learning Rate
• Youse, Y’All, and Other Confusions of Modern English
• How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour
• How to Resurrect Your High School Spanish… or Any Language

Once I get through Street-Smart Language Learning, you'll quickly see that I agree with almost all of his ideas.

And, courtesy of Tim's blog, here's a bonus link to a good article on frequency lists: Why and how to use frequency lists to learn words by Tom Cobb.

Related:
Top 10,000 words in Dutch, English, French, and German
Word lists based on frequency of use