The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here’s a quick recap of January’s reader favorites in case you missed them.
Digital MBA: America’s Best Business Schools on Your iPod
45 Free Cutting-Edge Books … Courtesy of Creative Commons
10 Excellent University Podcasts
50+ Free Courses from UC Berkeley on iTunes
Free Beethoven and Mozart Recordings via Podcast
The Hottest Course on iTunes (and [...]
≡ Category: Language Lessons | ≅ 33 Comments
See our complete collection of foreign language lesson podcasts.
Here is a quick “lifehack” for you. You can now learn foreign languages and stay current on politics all at once. How so? By taking advantage of a smart podcast concept being used by French and German broadcasters. Radio France Internationale (RFI) issues a daily [...]
≡ Category: Harvard | ≅ 2 Comments
It was only a question of when, not if. Harvard has finally carved out a space, albeit a rather small one,
on iTunes. (See yesterday’s press release.) Established by the Harvard Extension School, the iTunes site currently features one free, full-fledged course called Understanding Computers and the Internet, which had previously been issued in other [...]
≡ Category: Books, Most Popular, e-books | ≅ 8 Comments
Yesterday, we alerted you to the free audio and text versions of Lawrence’s Lessig’s book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. Today, we’re pointing you to a larger collection of high-quality books (45 in total) that you can download legally thanks to Lessig’s Creative [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
Norman Mailer, now 84 years old, has just published his first novel in a decade. And what becomes immediately clear is that age has done little to stop Mailer from taking his trademark literary risks. Just as he felt free to inhabit the mind of Jesus in The Gospel According to the Son (1997), he [...]
≡ Category: Business, Economics, Most Popular | ≅ 8 Comments
Is it something of an oddity to see the words of famous philosophers and historians getting digitized
and downloaded to iPods everywhere? Sure it is, and that’s why we generally like talking about humanities podcasts. But is it strange to think of America’s leading business schools carving out a space on iTunes and bringing their ideas [...]
≡ Category: Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
It’s old news that the Sundance Film Festival has gone corporate. Some still protest that fact.
Others accept it, seeing it as an unavoidable reality in an era when even our sports stadiums bear corporate names. And yet still others choose to focus on the good that comes along with the bad. One upside to the [...]
≡ Category: Philosophy | ≅ 1 Comment
For those who dug our recent piece on UC Berkeley’s 59 courses available on iTunes, here’s another little item for you. Susan Stuart, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, recently taught a course on the epistemology (or theory of knowledge) of the great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. And figuring that it might help her [...]
≡ Category: Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
We’re not here to write about the State of the Union speech per se (enough other bloggers have done that), but rather to mention a cool new technology that’s been applied to the Bush speech. A company called Pluggd, using "HearHere technology," now gives you the ability to search audio and video files just [...]
≡ Category: Law | ≅ Leave a Comment
Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford, has made a big name for himself by developing a sustained critique of how Congress, at the behest of corporate America, has progressively stifled cultural and scientific innovation by extending the duration and scope of copyright laws. Out of this critique, Lessig founded Creative Commons, a non-profit which [...]
≡ Category: Art | ≅ 3 Comments
Museums have always been in a tricky position. Instead of bringing art to the public, they have made the public come to them. And, even while they did this for perfectly logical reasons (the works of art are priceless and delicate after all), museums have nonetheless limited their ability to reach more people and promote [...]
≡ Category: Most Popular | ≅ 1 Comment
For more enriching audio, see our collection of Free University Courses.
1.) Abraham Lincoln’s Invention of Presidential Powers – James MacPherson iTunes Audio Stream
Princeton’s James MacPherson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author on the American Civil War, discusses how Lincoln invented presidential war-time powers. It’s a topic of particular interest given the recent debate over the
validity of [...]
≡ Category: Science | ≅ 1 Comment
Not too long ago, we mentioned the Edge.org, the web site run by John Brockman, the literary agent of some very important scientific minds. Now it’s worth mentioning it again. With the start of the new year, the web site asked 160 influential thinkers "what are you optimistic about?" And, as you’d expect from some [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ Leave a Comment
Open Source, a radio program hosted by Christopher Lydon, recently pulled off something rather unusual. The broadcast (iTunes – mp3) made it abundantly clear why an Ancient Greek text, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, remains fascinating and highly relevant to modern day readers. Written 2400+ years ago, Thucydides has something important to offer history [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ 1 Comment
The only downside to using a feed reader (Bloglines, Google Reader, MyYahoo, etc.) to access Open Culture is that you won’t be able to see our podcast directories which reside in our left nav bar. To assist you, we have pasted links below that will give you direct access to the podcast collections. Bookmark & [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Film, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
Oodles of print have been written about Sacha Baron Cohen’s film, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” And there’s perhaps not a great deal more to say about it, other than it’s remarkable how well the film has been received by America’s cultural establishment. Edgy, shock comedy that uses [...]
≡ Category: Podcast Articles and Resources | ≅ Leave a Comment
For every university that has started podcasting lectures or courses, dozens have proved slow to take this step. If you’re an educator who thinks that your university should go digital at long last, you’ll want to take a look at this article appearing in The Chronicle of Higher Education. How to Podcast Campus Lectures overviews [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ 1 Comment
It was probably only a matter of time before this happened. According to The New York Times, Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, has agreed to publish a work by whichever new writer takes first prize in a contest sponsored by the social-networking site, Gather.com. A la American Idol, everyday people and panel of [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ 1 Comment
It was only a question of when, not if. Harvard has finally carved out a space, albeit a rather small one,
on iTunes. Established by the Harvard Extension School, the iTunes site currently features one free, full-fledged course called Understanding Computers and the Internet, which had previously been issued in other digital formats. (See our [...]
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