Otherwise, they might have to hire a bunch of child laborers to do it. Photo, circa 1910, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

If you’re logging all your leisure hours at the community garden and plants now take up more space in your living room than furniture, this gig may be for you. The NYC Parks Department needs a new gardener. For an annual salary $36,602-$52,680 a year, said individual will: (more…)

You coulda been a plumber! Instead you went to MIT.

You’ve yearned to join the ranks of countless presidents, Supreme Court justices and Nobel laureates, but lacked the grades or money. Now it’s time to break out your button-down collar and penny-less loafers and celebrate. Yesterday, two of the fanciest schools in all the land —Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — jointly announced the launch of edX, a new online initiative aimed at bringing their otherwise expensive classes to the masses free of charge starting this fall. The program is an outgrowth of MITx, an online learning project launched by MIT last December.

MIT President Anant Agarwal said the goal of the $60 million edX initiative is to “educate a billion people around the world” through an open source online platform, which, little does he know, could include you sitting naked and drunk at your computer at 3am screaming lines from Good Will Hunting at your screen. (more…)

Kio Stark thinks your grad school savings have better places to go. Like around the world.

In the middle of getting a PhD in American Studies, Kio Stark dropped out after she realized how much she could be learning on her own. Now, she’s one of the leading evangelists for independent learning and, perhaps ironically, an adjunct faculty  at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. She is the author of Don’t Go Back to School: A Handbook for Learning Almost Anything, featuring interviews with successful independent learners like Cory Doctorow, Dan Sinker, and Quinn Norton. We spoke to her about how to DIY grad school, the growing recognition of self-education and what it takes to get a really awesome job right now. Spoiler! It’s not that piece of paper. You know. That one.  (more…)