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there is so much shit to know in the world you'll never learn it all. And there's so much shit you wish you knew in the world you'll never know as much as you should.
That shouldn't stop you from trying, though. There's a lot of quality material available for free to help you.
Open Academic Courses
In the last few years, a lot of renowned Universities have started recording introductory courses for listening or viewing online for free. This isfucking awesome. Think about it for a minute; for hundreds of years courses at institutions like Yale were restricted to a small number of enrolled students and those who had the initiative to audit them. Now, access to some of the best educational material in the world is available for free to anyone who wants it. The course selection offered by these institutions is admittedly small, but when you're getting them for free you can't complain. Almost all of these courses are available on iTunes as well (some are now only on iTunes) listed by their respective institution
Yale - http://oyc.yale.edu/
Harvard - http://www.extension.harvard.edu/courses/
MIT - http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
Columbia - http://itunes.columbia.edu/
Stanford - http://itunes.stanford.edu/
Princeton - http://hulk03.princeton.edu:8080/WebMedia/lectures/
Boston College - http://frontrow.bc.edu/programs/
UC Berkeley - http://webcast.berkeley.edu/
UC Irvine - http://ocw.uci.edu/
Carnegie Mellon - http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/
Tufts - http://ocw.tufts.edu/
Michigan - http://open.umich.edu/
Notre Dame - http://ocw.nd.edu/
Specific Course Material
Here are some Universities which have course material on a particular area of study.
Cornell / Quantum Physics - http://bethe.cornell.edu/
Johns Hopkins / Public Health - http://ocw.jhsph.edu/topics.cfm
University of Washington / Computer Science - http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/course-webs.html
Indiana Purdue (IUPUI) / Computer Science - http://wally.cs.iupui.edu/wallyindex.html
Duke University / Law - http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/lectures/
Harvard / Medicine - http://mycourses.med.harvard.edu/public/
Oxford / Mathematics - http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/opencourseware/
Lectures, Talks, Etc
Some communities specialize in recording lectures on a plethora of topics; unlike open courses, the lectures don't necessarily coalesce around a common theme. They often attract damn good writers, thinkers, and speakers who represent the absolute pinnacle of their respective fields. FORA.tv records lectures from Nobel laureates, Supreme Court justices, and just about anyone else you can imagine. TED has become ubiquitous in the past few years for their TED Conferences, where they attract awesome speakers and condense good talks to less than twenty minutes. Like Open Courses, they can be downloaded on iTunes or streamed from their respective sites.
FORA.tv - http://www.fora.tv/
TED - http://www.ted.com
Open Courseware Consortium & Academic Earth
A few of the Universities featured above (but not all) are members of the Open Courseware Consortium, which aggregates the course listings of them into one site to allow for easier searching. Exercise discretion; the OCC contains good Universities and really shitty ones, so I'm just listing it to expedite searching of particular topics you might be interested in.
Academic Earth was conceived as a lecture streaming site akin to Hulu with the goal of centralizing lecture videos. While a noble concept, a lot of Universities don't like giving up their lecture videos to a foreign site that easily and it's use is pretty limited because of it. It's still a great resource with a substantial amount of material and thus a good resource for searching a lot of course offerings for a specific topic (like the Consortium above), but the role it plays is pretty limited.
Open Courseware Consortium - http://www.ocwconsortium.org
Academic Earth - http://www.academicearth.com
Other Material
I've heard nothing but good about Khan Academy - a not-for-profit which has videos on econ, math, and science. If you're interested and some of the above material isn't helping you, check them out.
Khan Academy - http://www.khanacademy.org/
What should I start out with?
Look around. Find something that interests you. Yale's open coursework is especially well-done, though that's just my opinion - you're likely to find good courses anywhere. Spend ten minutes looking; as hackneyed as it sounds whatever piques your interest is likely the best option.
Alright, I watched/listened to some. What now?
Talk about it. Post your thoughts on what you watched, recommend it or shit on it for others in the topic...knowledge begets knowledge.
Well my goal is to listen to a couple of these on my ipod over the past few months.
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