Bird’s Eye: (Full disclosure: as an alumnus, I’m biased, but.) What these all have in common is a continuing desire amongst the MIT community to make knowledge freely available to everyone. (One could probably put Tikkunista in this context.) We start with the learning initiative, which makes MIT courses freely available online; salute recently retired Prof Lewin, of the Physics dept, whose brilliant lectures are available for free online (three notable ones below); and end with a fascinating interview with the founder of Dropbox, which allows sharing between different computers/tablets/smart things also for free.

* MIT Launches Online Learning Initiative   Technology Review

After almost 10 years of giving teachers and learners around the world free online access to nearly all MIT’s undergraduate and graduate course materials through OpenCourseWare, MIT is upping the ante.

In December the Institute announced an initiative that will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform. Code-named MITx, the effort will organize and present course material to enable students to learn interactively at their own pace, take part in online laboratories, receive individual assessments, and communicate with one another. MITx will operate on an infrastructure of open-source, scalable software….

MIT expects this learning platform to enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. The eventual plan is to host a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.MIT will also make the MITx open learning software available free, so that other universities and learning institutions, such as K–12 school systems, can use the software for their online education offerings.

First Course online: Check the description for 6.002x Circuits and Electronics to learn what physics and math you need to be successful, watch a short introductory video, and enrol. The course, which runs March 5–June 8, is free but you must register and complete the assignments to earn an MITx certificate.

* The Professor Who Brings Physics to Life  Technology Review

For 43 years, Lewin taught as many as 600 students a semester in MIT’s three introductory physics courses—8.01, 8.02, and 8.03—and consistently drew rave reviews. In 1999 the Institute began videotaping the 94 lectures from the three courses, and in 2004 OpenCourseWare started posting the videos, which could be viewed free of charge by anyone with an Internet connection. The lectures soon spread to YouTube, iTunes U, and Academic Earth, and in 2007 the New York Times caught wind of the traffic, profiling the physics professor in a front-page feature as an international “Web star.”

…On May 16, 2011, Lewin celebrated the release of his book by taking his notes out once more to deliver one last lecture in 26-100. The hall was filled beyond its capacity with current and former students, faculty, and fans. For Lewin, that last lecture—of more than 800 he has given in the hall—was a bittersweet high.

“You know you’ve got them in your hands,” he says. “You know that you could do anything with them that you wanted. You also know in a way it’s the last time that you will do that. Then you know that it comes to an end. It’s very emotional for me. But the beauty is, two million people watch me every year. And that will only increase.”

Sample Lewin lectures available

–How to Make Teaching Come Alive

–The Birth and Death of Stars

–The Wonders of Electricity and Magnetism

*  Dropbox: Founder Drew Houston Simplifies the Cloud  Technology Review

One file-hosting service in particular has evoked the kind of devotion ordinarily accorded social-networking services or beloved hardware manufacturers: Dropbox, the product of a startup founded in 2007 by MIT computer science students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. The service lets people use almost any computing device to store files in folders in the cloud as thoughtlessly as they store files in folders in their device’s memory. For most users, the service is free.

TR: Why did you want to start a company in a field—Internet file hosting—where there were so many competitors? I count as many as 15, including Apple’s new iCloud service.

Houston: For me, it goes all the way back to MIT, where there is a campus network called Athena. You can sit down at any of thousands of workstations and your whole environment follows you around: not just your files but where your icons were on your desktop. Then I left and discovered that no one had really built that for the rest of the world.

…TR: Tell me the requisite founder’s tale.

The breaking point for me was a bus ride. I went down to Boston’s South Station to ride the Chinatown bus to New York. I was thrilled to open my laptop and have four hours where I could finally get some work done. But I had that sinking feeling that something was wrong, and I started feeling in my back pocket for my thumb drive, and of course I could just see it sitting on my desk at home. So I sulked for about 10 or 15 minutes and then opened up the [text] editor and wrote some code that I thought would solve the problem. And I met up with Arash through a mutual friend at MIT, and he decided to drop out with a semester left, and we went to California and got to work….