CYBERIA

OPEN
On The Web

OpenStax College
www.openstaxcollege.org

OpenStax College provides free, open-source textbooks that “meet the scope and sequence requirements for most [college] courses”. Led by a non-profit organization that is “committed to improving student access to quality learning materials”, the site offers peer-reviewed books that are written by professional content developers, and available for free online. The material serves as a “living” resource that can be customized and grows online through contributions from science educators. You can find books in subjects including physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, statistics, pre-calculus, algebra, economics, and more, and even if you don’t use them as your primary textbooks, you can still benefit from this material by using it to supplement the text you’re studying in class in order to better grasp any tricky concepts and seek further explanation into difficult topics.

WordThink
www.wordthink.com

While there are many ‘Word of The Day’ listings, a number of them often include obscure words that aren’t very useful for most of us. WordThink, on the other hand, aims to empower you by adding insightful words to your vocabulary that can actually be used every day. Their staff routinely examines hundreds of daily news media stories to find “words that are compelling and persuasive in getting your point across without wasting time on cryptic words that would never be spoken or sound too pretentious”. The service also provides you with a daily reminder to use many of the words you already know, so that you can build a powerful vocabulary that will help you in your student, professional, and everyday life.

Hstry
www.hstry.co

Hstry is “a free digital learning tool which promotes collaboration and engagement in the classroom”, offering learners a platform to create and share timelines on any topic of their choice. Both students and teachers can use the service to make timelines, and add images, video and audio files, and quizzes to bring the content to life. Students can interact with the timelines and express themselves, and teachers can provide direct feedback and assess their students’ work. Visitors can also make use of the community content, engaging in their studies using the many timelines available on the website. If you think you could benefit from a simple tool to organize your study material as you navigate the world of knowledge, then you might want to give this website a visit.

Profile

Wikipedia
www.wikipedia.org

Is a free online encyclopedia that can be edited by public users.

Began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia.

Was co-founded by American Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and project developer Larry Sanger, and formally launched as a single English-language edition in January 2001.

Passed the two million articles mark in September 2007, making English Wikipedia the largest encyclopedia ever assembled (breaking a record held for almost 600 years by the 1408 Chinese-language Yongle Encyclopedia).

Now has editions in 288 languages, with a grand total of over 37 million articles altogether. English Wikipedia remains the largest, with over 4.9 million articles. Is the Internet’s largest and most popular general reference work.

Has been criticised for its level of accuracy and quality of writing, and “makes no guarantee of validity” for its content.