I've been writing a lot lately about the different sides of content sharing, which for lack of a better word, we have been calling Web 2.0. In fact, just the other day, I blogged about Theresa Clifford's article where she speculated that perhaps we need a few more experts amidst the free wheeling world of content sharing. Well, today I discovered the ultimate in expert content sharing, a site calling itself the Open Courseware Consortium.

Here, you'll find for free, full courses from some of the world's elite universities, and according to this article in InfoWeek, there are plenty of others who are jumping on the bandwagon that have not joined the consortium. The venerable Massachusetts Institute of Technology is among the participating institutions. According to a blurb on the MIT Open Courseware Media page:

MIT Open Courseware (MIT OCW) makes the course materials that are used in the teaching of almost all MIT’s undergraduate and graduate subjects available on the Web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world. This initiative continues the tradition at MIT, and in American higher education, of open dissemination of educational materials, philosophy, and modes of thought. Through November 1, 2006, MIT OCW has published 1550 courses.

How can you not like this idea? This is the ultimate in the free exchange of ideas, simply providing the pure intellectual fodder for you and you can do with it what you will. Certainly, this does not give you the rich experience of the exchange of classroom banter between teacher and students, but for those people simply looking for professional development or trying to satisfy intellectual curiosity, this provides access to some of the top minds in any particular field.

