Holidays, Free resources and University

I've been on leave this week, spending a week at home (was going to go camping, but the weather had other plans about my holiday!!), where I've been doing quite a bit of programming (writing another fun ASP.NET app) and even more learning.

Since getting Broadband (If you're in the UK, Virgin do a good deal. Especially if you rent your flat, since they don't make you sign a 12 month contract like prety much everyone else does...) I've been going througha lot of webcasts on MSDN, especially these by Jo Hummel.

Something struck me about them just now - It's a series of 15 webcasts, each about an hour and a half long, wiht about 30 minutes of Q&A afterwards. So that's about 2 hours. (hey, that Maths A-level's kicking in now! ;-))

When I was at University, we did 3 modules a semester, and they were about 10 weeks long. Now each module would consist typically of a 3 hour lecture (or 2 lectures of about 1 1/2 gours) once a week. That's about 30 hours.

15 webcasts of 2 hrs a peice is about the same time as each of my degree modules. And they're free. How cool is that?

You'll probably see a lot from me over the next few weeks about the wealth of multi-media stuff online at the moment helping the likes of me to learn about programming. I must admit, I'm dead impressed!