A recent post brings up a nagging question that I have had while reading a lot of edubloggers and even more mainstream media in the last six months. I agree that the Mechanical Universe is excellent. If you watched and understood them you would know a lot of physics. The same of course can be said of reading or listening to all of Feyman's Lectures or even watching Kahn Academy. Then I think to myself, I would learn a lot of physics if I just read Giancoli's Physics (the text for my course). Content being essentially free (say approximately $100, or bus fare to the nearest library) is nothing new. It has been true for my entire life. Why then does free content seem so new to so many people?
Physics teachers make all the physics that is revealed in all the resources above fun, relevant and engaging for students. Teachers make physics matter. Teachers include student stories with their own story and weave in the story that is physics. Teachers nurture a openness to the mysteries of physics that lets us all imagine a new world. Careful, loving, thoughtful, inventive story weaving makes every participant, the teacher, the student and physics itself a new creation.