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Monday, 10 December 2007 |
.edu is a top-level domain reserved almost
exclusively for higher education institutions in the
United States. Little appreciated outside the world of
academia, there are literally thousands of .edu sites
bursting with incredibly useful and interesting
information and resources. Most of these sites won't pop
up to the surface of the average search engine quest, and
so they remain relatively neglected and underused. Art
fans can visit the Yale art gallery
(http://artgallery.yale.edu) and their amazing array of
online images.
Sweet Briar College has compiled an enormous database of art history resources
(http://witcombe.sbc.edu/ARTHLinks.html) and the University of Michigan has a similar entry
entitled the Mother of All Art History (www.art-design.umich.edu/mother/). If you are a Picasso
fan, check out the Picasso Project from Texas A & M (http://picasso.tamu.edu/picasso). Science
enthusiasts also have an incredible range of resources. They can download a virtual microscope
and look at 90 different samples, from Puerto-Rican sand to algae at the University of Illinois
(http://virtual.itg.uiuc.edu).
There is also the University of Connecticut School of Medicine’s Pathweb, a virtual
pathology museum (http://pathweb.uchc.edu). Flora and fauna can be identified with the help of
Louisiana State University's Herbarium (www.herbarium.lsu.edu), and folk medicine remedies
can be found at the UCLA Folkmed Database (http://www.folkmed.ucla.edu). The same
institution provides language lovers with the possibility of learning about languages they have
never heard of at their Language Materials Project (www.lmp.ucla.edu). Young people can
develop “21st century learning skills” such as learning a new programming language at MIT’s
‘Scratch’ (http://scratch.mit.edu) or Carnegie Mellon’s Alice, a free 3D interactive programming
environment for teaching introductory computing (http://alice.org).
In addition to all these rich resources, many more .edu sites can be found simply by prefixing
your search string in Google with “site:.edu”. Just tweaking that as needed will find thousands
more interesting sites than could be written about here. If UK university sites are needed, just
substitute .ac.uk for .edu.
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