Today, we have a guest feature by Alexandra Juhasz, Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College, in Claremont, CA. This piece consolidates lengthier blog entries about a course she ran on YouTube, called “Learning from YouTube,” in Fall 2007.

It’s perhaps a stretch to call this a piece of “open culture,” except that the footage, using time-lapsed video to show a man stuck in an elevator for 41 hours, accompanies a piece printed in the latest edition of The New Yorker — Up and Then Down: The Lives of Elevators.

Thanks to a new program called Britannica Webshare, web publishers — be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers who post frequently on the web — can now get free online access to Britannica and its 65,000 articles. Normally, this service runs $70 per year. For more info, read TechCrunch’s scoop on the new initiative.

By now, many of you have probably seen (or at least heard about) the last lecture by Randy Pausch, a computer science professor from Carnegie Mellon University, who is dying from pancreatic cancer.

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Today we’re highlighting for you a new course posted on Stanford University’s iTunes site. Originally presented by Stanford Continuing Studies (where I happily spend my days), Global Geopolitics is taught by geography expert Martin Lewis, and “examines the global political situation from a geographical perspective.

Penguin is presenting six stories, by six authors, over six weeks, in a series called We Tell Stories. And they’re using the web to tell these stories in original ways. One story, The 21 Steps, gets told over Google Maps — an approach that scores points for creativity, but also tires a little quickly.

The folks at Apple have rolled out an intriguing new podcast that takes you inside the world of moviemaking. The Set to Screen Series (get it on iTunes here) follows Baz Luhrmann, the Oscar-nominated director (Moulin Rouge! and William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet) as he works on a new film.

Can you bear it? If not, here’s a version by Christopher Walken.

(This video has not been added to our YouTube playlist.

The New York Times has a great article on a professor of management science who has founded an almost completely automated publishing company.