We at Foresight see a lot of nanotech websites and books of limited usefulness, to put it nicely. For quite a while I’ve been getting ads for an online multimedia library on nanotechnology from Nanopolis, and ignoring them.
Now for the first I dug around in their website a bit and am pleased to be able to say that their nanotechnology product might actually be useful in learning key technical concepts. Personally I find it hard to learn these things from just text and two dimensional static graphics, all in black-and-white only in most books. Nanopolis has built a large collection of animated, annotated color graphics and accompanying text, with a “Legend” button that adds labels to the graphics whenever you need them.
I watched a few of the samples on the site, and the combination of color and movement with both text and optional labels seems to really help in making these complex concepts easier to understand (and a lot less boring to learn). If you can’t afford their prices (US$120-360), maybe you could offer to help them with the English on their website, which could use some tweaking. Regarding technical accuracy, see the quotes from scientists.
I can’t say yet whether the topic coverage is extensive enough, but if I were trying to learn these things now, on my own, I’d probably spring for this product. I could do a more thorough review if I had a review copy of the full product (hint hint). —Christine
