50+ Free Courses from UC Berkeley on iTunes

in Online Courses, UC Berkeley | January 8th, 2007

This is noth­ing short of impres­sive. Last April, UC Berke­ley, one of the pre­miere uni­ver­si­ties in the coun­try, announced its plan to put com­plete aca­d­e­m­ic cours­es on iTunes. Fast for­ward nine months, and you can already find 59 full cours­es avail­able as pod­casts. Sim­ply click here to access Berke­ley’s iTunes site (or here for the Rss feed).No mat­ter where you live, you can access at no cost the very same cours­es attend­ed by stu­dents pay­ing full tuition. And, giv­en the crit­i­cal mass of cours­es being offered across a range of dis­ci­plines, you can put togeth­er your own per­son­al­ized cur­ricu­lum and expand your hori­zons on the fly.

If the human­i­ties are your thing, you can take US His­to­ry: From Civ­il War to Present, Exis­ten­tial­ism in Lit­er­a­ture & Film, or Euro­pean Civ­i­liza­tion from the Renais­sance to Present. If you’re into the social sci­ences, you may want to con­sid­er World Reli­gions, Peo­ples and States, US For­eign Pol­i­cy after 9/11, Human Emo­tions, or Intro­duc­tion to Sta­tis­tics. Turn­ing to the hard sci­ences, you can take your pick from Physics for Future Pres­i­dents, Intro­duc­tion to Chem­istry, Gen­er­al Astron­o­my, and Gen­er­al Biol­o­gy. Final­ly, for those with a tech­nol­o­gy bent, you can con­sid­er lis­ten­ing in on An Intro­duc­tion to Com­put­ers, The His­to­ry of Infor­ma­tion or even The Foun­da­tions of Amer­i­can Cyber­Cul­ture. But, if these par­tic­u­lar cours­es aren’t for you, there are many more to choose from.

Berke­ley’s col­lec­tion has gen­er­al­ly remained off of peo­ple’s radar screen, which is too bad. It’s an excel­lent pod­cast col­lec­tion, one of the best out there. Hope­ful­ly we can help read­ers find out what they are miss­ing.

For more, please see our col­lec­tion of Free Cours­es from top uni­ver­si­ties.

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The #3 Podcast on iTunes: Coffee Break Spanish & The Threat to Traditional Media

in Apple, Language Lessons | January 6th, 2007

They say that the advent of the blo­gos­phere marked a crit­i­cal turn­ing point when the lit­tle guy, with some mox­ie and smarts, could start cred­i­bly com­pet­ing against the major news­pa­pers. (Good­bye CNN.com, hel­lo Dai­ly Kos.) Now, with iPods becom­ing ubiq­ui­tous, the cor­po­rate media estab­lish­ment is sud­den­ly find­ing its posi­tion being threat­ened on a new front. The big tele­vi­sion and radio play­ers have to com­pete today with thou­sands of pod­cast­ers, and while, sure, many sound no bet­ter than Wayne & Garth, some pod­cast­ers do an expert job and they’re win­ning over new lis­ten­ers.

Here is a good lit­tle case in point. If you look at the 30 most pop­u­lar pod­casts on iTunes, you have many rec­og­niz­able media brands on the list. HBO, VH1, ESPN, The Econ­o­mist, NBC, ABC, etc. But sit­ting in the #3 posi­tion is noth­ing oth­er Cof­fee Break Span­ish (web site), a pod­cast put togeth­er by Mark and Kara (no last names are pro­vid­ed) that helps lis­ten­ers learn use­ful bits of Span­ish over a dai­ly cup of cof­fee. And, in two short months, they’ve had 500,000 down­loads. What con­clu­sions can we draw? A very obvi­ous one is that there’s an appetite out there to learn for­eign lan­guages, par­tic­u­lar­ly Span­ish. This is some­thing we fig­ured out when we post­ed our col­lec­tion of for­eign lan­guage les­son pod­casts sev­er­al weeks ago. Then there is the less obvi­ous fact that the dig­i­tal era has enabled small con­tent providers, with lit­tle to no cap­i­tal, to serve niche mar­kets, which if tak­en togeth­er, can turn out to be quite large. (Chris Ander­sen has made this gen­er­al point quite well in his influ­en­tial arti­cle, The Long Tail.) The big media play­ers have long made their liv­ing in a util­i­tar­i­an fash­ion, pro­duc­ing con­tent that brings the great­est amount of hap­pi­ness to the great­est num­ber. They could­n’t afford to both­er with the nich­es, and this has cre­at­ed the space for the Marks and Karas of the world to do their thing. We’re now increas­ing­ly liv­ing a world of niche mar­kets, frag­ment­ed audi­ences, and small con­tent pro­duc­ers. And the num­ber of small play­ers will only get big­ger, and the big play­ers, small­er. Watch out CNN. It’s only going to get tougher.

Check out Open Cul­ture’s For­eign Lan­guage Les­son Pod­casts or our entire pod­cast col­lec­tion.

 

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Yale’s 15 Lectures on Democracy

in Yale | January 5th, 2007

As part of its 300th anniver­sary cel­e­bra­tion, Yale Uni­ver­si­ty gath­ered togeth­er some of its fore­most fac­ul­ty and offered an extend­ed series of lec­tures on the state of Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy. Col­lec­tive­ly enti­tled “Demo­c­ra­t­ic Vis­tas,” this wide-rang­ing series explores Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy in his­tor­i­cal and con­tem­po­rary terms and looks at how it mesh­es with oth­er fix­tures of our social life — reli­gion, fam­i­ly, eco­nom­ic mar­kets, tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion, etc.  From this page, you can access all of the illu­mi­nat­ing pre­sen­ta­tions in audio and video, includ­ing those by Yale’s Pres­i­dent Richard Levin and Richard Brod­head, the for­mer Dean of Yale Col­lege and now Pres­i­dent of Duke Uni­ver­si­ty.

The one caveat worth men­tion­ing is that these talks were record­ed not long before 9/11. And, in some respects, this may give the lec­tures an out-dat­ed feel. Can we real­ly have a valu­able dis­cus­sion about Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy with­out address­ing 9/11, the war on ter­ror, and the war in Iraq? In some ways no, but in many ways yes. Amer­i­ca is still large­ly Amer­i­ca, the same coun­try it was six years ago, and, for the most part, these dis­cern­ing lec­tures remain high­ly rel­e­vant today. Indeed, Yale has already uploaded some of them to its new pod­cast col­lec­tion on iTunes.

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A Mention in the Christian Science Monitor

in MIT | January 5th, 2007

Just a very quick fyi: Open Cul­ture got a nice lit­tle men­tion in yes­ter­day’s Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor. It’s with­in the con­text of a very good arti­cle about MIT’s Open­Course­Ware ini­tia­tive, which is def­i­nite­ly worth know­ing about.

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Free Beethoven and Mozart Recordings via Podcast

in Most Popular, Music | January 4th, 2007

Beethoven_1See our fol­low up piece: More Free Clas­si­cal Music Pod­casts: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wag­n­er and Some Yo-Yo Ma

Cour­tesy of Deutsche Welle, the Ger­man inter­na­tion­al broad­cast­ing ser­vice, you can fill your iPod at no cost with some excep­tion­al clas­si­cal music. We’d par­tic­u­lar­ly encour­age you to focus on two pod­casts. First, Beethoven­fest (iTunes Feed Web Site), which lets users down­load “Beethoven’s most famous sym­phonies per­formed by excel­lent young orches­tras.” Next, Clas­si­cal Mas­ter­pieces (iTunes Feed Web Site), which gives you free access to sym­phonies by Mozart, Strauss, Schu­mann, Brahms, and Bruck­n­er, each pre­sent­ed by con­duc­tor Kent Nagano and the inter­na­tion­al­ly known DSO Berlin. (Inci­den­tal­ly, a quite large col­lec­tion of free clas­si­cal music can also be found on Wikipedia. Thanks to one of our read­ers for let­ting us know.)

Final­ly, we should men­tion that Deutsche Welle offers a lot of oth­er free pod­casts in Eng­lish. Take for exam­ple Inspired Minds (iTunes Feed Web Site), a series of pod­casts explor­ing the world’s great thinkers, or Deutsche Warum Nicht? (iTunes), a mul­ti-part series that will teach you Ger­man from the ground up. A great trove of con­tent that’s worth your time.

You can find more clas­si­cal music in our Music Pod­cast Col­lec­tion .

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Culture Kiosque: The Euro Guide to Culture

in Media | January 2nd, 2007


Culturekiosque
Some like cul­ture, and some like Cul­ture — art, sym­pho­ny and opera, jazz and dance, the works. For the Big C cul­ture fan, Cul­turekiosque is a score. It’s a high-qual­i­ty webzine that lets you keep your fin­ger on the pulse of the inter­na­tion­al cul­ture scene. The site notably offers an events cal­en­dar that lists cul­tur­al events tak­ing place across the world, some­thing that trav­el­ers might appre­ci­ate. It also fea­tures more sub­stan­tive arti­cles and reviews, which, although writ­ten in Eng­lish, are not lim­it­ed to the cul­tur­al hap­pen­ings in the Anglo­phone world. (The site explic­it­ly refers to itself as “The Euro­pean Guide to Arts and Cul­ture World­wide.”) So, while you’ll get Cul­turekiosque’s take on how things went down at this year’s Burn­ing Man fes­ti­val in the Neva­da desert, you’ll also get their view on how the Orchestre de Paris is far­ing under its new Ger­man con­duc­tor. Also worth a par­tic­u­lar men­tion is the web site’s spe­cial jazz series called Sons of Miles, a 41-part series that looks back at Miles Davis and the many jazz musi­cians he influ­enced. A great resource for the jazz offi­ciana­do. To access many parts of the site, users will need to reg­is­ter.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.