Here’s something you don’t see every night: the far side of the Moon, photographed by one of NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft.

The Moon is “tidally locked” in its orbit around the Earth, meaning its rotational and orbital periods are exactly synchronized. As a result, we always see the same view of the Moon no matter when or where (on Earth) we look at it. In this interesting video, released last week by NASA, we get a rare glimpse of the Moon’s other side, starting with the north pole and moving toward the heavily cratered south.

The video was captured on January 19 by the “MoonKAM” aboard one of a pair of GRAIL spacecraft that were launched last Fall and began orbiting the Moon on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. The primary mission of GRAIL is to study the Moon’s interior structure and to learn more about its thermal evolution.

GRAIL is also the first planetary mission by NASA to carry instruments dedicated solely to education and public outreach. The “KAM” in “MoonKAM” stands for Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students. The program, led by former astronaut Sally Ride, will engage fifth- to eighth-graders from across the country in selecting target areas on the lunar surface to photograph and study. Educators interested in participating can register at the MoonKAM website. To learn more about the video and GRAIL, see the NASA news release.

The Far Side of Moon: A Rare Glimpse from NASA is a post from: Open Culture

Before we rush headlong into a new year, it’s worth pausing, ever so briefly, to consider the ground we covered in 2011. What topics resonated with you … and jazzed us? Today, we’re highlighting 10 thematic areas (and 46 posts) that captured the imagination. Chances are you missed a few gems here. So please join us on our brief journey back into time. Tomorrow, we start looking forward again.

1) Universities Offer More Free Courses, Then Start Pushing Toward Certificates: The year started well enough. Yale released another 10 stellar open courses. (Find them on our list of 400 Free Courses). Then other universities started pushing the envelope on the open course format. This fall, Stanford launched a series of free courses that combined video lectures with more dynamic resources – short quizzes; the ability to pose questions to Stanford instructors; feedback on your overall performance; a statement of accomplishment from the instructor, etc. A new round of free courses will start in January and February. (Get the full list and enroll here.) Finally, keep your eyes peeled for this: In 2012, MIT will offer similar courses, but with one big difference. Students will get an official certificate at the end of the course, all at a very minimal charge. More details here.

2) Cultural Icons at Occupy Wall Street: OWS was a big national story, and we were always intrigued by its cultural dimension — by the cultural figures who championed the movement. You can revisit performances/speeches by: Philip Glass & Lou Reed; Willie Nelson, Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie; David Crosby and Graham Nash; Joseph Stiglitz and Lawrence Lessig; Noam Chomsky; and Slavoj Zizek. Also check out: 8 Lectures from Occupy Harvard and Artistic Posters From Occupy Wall Street.

3) Books Intelligent People Should Read: Neil deGrasse Tyson’s list “8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read” ended up generating far more conversation and controversy than we would have expected. (Users have left 83 comments at last count.) No matter what you think of his rationale for choosing these texts, the books make for essential reading, and they’re freely available online.

Tyson’s list dovetails fairly nicely with another list of essential texts — The Harvard Classics, a 51 volume set that’s available online. According to Charles W. Eliot, the legendary Harvard president, if you were to spend just 15 minutes a day reading these books, you could give yourself a proper liberal education. And that could partly apply to another list we pulled together: 20 Popular High School Books Available as Free eBooks & Audio Books — the great literary classics taught in classrooms all across America, all free…

4) Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry: Christopher Hitchens left us this past month. And, until his last day, Hitchens was the same old Hitch — prolific, incisive, surly and defiant, especially when asked about whether he’d change his position on religion, spirituality and the afterlife. All of this was on display when he spoke at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles last February. We covered his comments in a post called, No Deathbed Conversion for Me, Thanks, But it was Good of You to Ask. And even from the grave, Hitchens did more of the same, forcing us to question the whole modern meaning of Christmas.

During Hitch’s final days, Stephen Fry emceed a large tribute to his friend in London, an event that brought together Richard Dawkins, Christopher Buckley, Salman Rushdie, Lewis Lapham, Martin Amis, poet James Fenton and actor Sean Penn. It’s well worth a watch. But you also shouldn’t miss some other great videos featuring the wisdom of Mr. Fry — his introduction to the strange world of nanoscience, his animated debate on the virtues (or lack thereof) of the Catholic Church, and his thoughtful reflection, What I Wish I Had Known When I Was 18.

5) Four for the Fab Four: John, Paul, Ringo and George. We sneak them in whenever we can. A sprinkling here and there. This year, we served up an ever-popular post, Guitarist Randy Bachman Demystifies the Opening Chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, and a no less popular freebie: Download The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine as a Free, Interactive eBook. Trailing right behind are two other good Beatles picks: All Together Now: Every Beatles Song Played at Once and The Beatles’ Rooftop Concert: The Last Gig.

6) Wisdom from Great Philosophers: Want the chance to take courses from great philosophers? Here’s your opportunity. Our meta post brought together courses/lectures from Bertrand Russell, Michel Foucault, John Searle, Walter Kaufmann, Leo Strauss, Hubert Dreyfus, and Michael Sandel. You could get lost in this for days. Also while you’re at it, you should check out The History of Philosophy … Without Any Gaps, an ongoing podcast created by Peter Adamson (King’s College London) that moves from the Ancients to the Moderns. Plus we’d encourage you to revisit: Noam Chomsky & Michel Foucault Debate Human Nature & Power in 1971.

7) Vintage Film Collections: Scouring the web for vintage films. It’s something we love to do. In 2011, we brought you 22 films by Alfred Hitchcock, 25 Westerns with John Wayne, 32 Film Noir classics, and a series of films by the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. All are listed in our big collection of Free Movies Online.

8) Back to the Future: We had fun going back — way back — and seeing how past generations imagined the future. Arthur C. Clarke Predicted the Future in 1964 … And Pretty Much Nailed It. Before that, American fashion designers looked roughly 70 years into the future and guessed how women might dress in Year 2000. Turns out fashion designers aren’t the best futurists. And, even before that (circa 1922), we get to see the world’s first mobile phone in action. Seriously!

9) Animated Films: 2011 started off on exactly the right note. On January 1, we featured Shel Silverstein’s animated version of The Giving Tree. Then some other gems followed: Destino, the Salvador Dalí – Disney collaboration that started in 1946 and finished in 1999; Spike Jonze’s Auprès de Toi (To Die By Your Side), a short stop motion film set inside the famous Parisian bookstore, Shakespeare and Company; John Turturro narrating an animated version of Italo Calvino’s fairy tale, “The False Grandmother;” and a series of animated films featuring the voice of Orson Welles. Also let’s not forget these splendid animation concepts for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and, just for good measure, Terry Gilliam’s vintage primer on making your own cut-out animation.

10) New Archives & Art on the Web: Last but not least — 2011′s new archival projects that brought great culture to the web.

• Google “Art Project” Brings Great Paintings & Museums to You
• Royal Society Opens Online Archive; Puts 60,000 Papers Online
• Google Puts The Dead Sea Scrolls Online (in Super High Resolution)
• The Smithsonian Launches Wildlife Photo Archive
• Sir Isaac Newton’s Papers & Annotated Principia Go Digital

And now onward into 2012….

The Best of Open Culture 2011 is a post from: Open Culture

On YouTube, the path to education is as narrow and as difficult to walk as a razor’s edge. Left to their own devices, kids have a tendency to veer away from the math tutorials and head straight for the water-skiing squirrels. What’s an educator to do?

Google believes it has the answer with “YouTube for Schools,” a new service that gives teachers and administrators the ability to filter out everything but their own selections from YouTube EDU, a curated collection of educational videos from sources ranging from Sesame Street to Harvard.

“We’ve been hearing from teachers that they want to use the vast array of educational videos on YouTube in their classroom, but are concerned that students will be distracted by the latest music video or a video of a cute cat, or a video that might not be appropriate for students,” writes YouTube Product Manager Brian Truong. “While schools that completely restrict access to YouTube may solve this distraction concern, they also limit access to hundreds of thousands of educational videos on YouTube that can help bring photosynthesis to life, or show what life was like in ancient Greece.”

To help teachers find the best material with ease, YouTube has organized the educational videos by subject and grade level, with more than 300 playlists to choose from at youtube.com/teachers. To learn more, or to sign up, go to youtube.com/schools.

Also don’t miss our own curated list of Intelligent YouTube Channels, which highlights the best video collections on the Google-owned service.

Google Presents YouTube for Schools, Makes Video World Safe for Teachers is a post from: Open Culture

In late October, Computerworld unearthed a lengthy interview with Steve Jobs originally recorded back in 1995, when Jobs was at NeXT Computer, and still two years away from his triumphant return to Apple. Filmed as part of an oral history project, the wide-ranging interview begins with Jobs’ childhood and his early school days, and it all sets the stage for Jobs to muse on the state of public education in America. He began:

I’d like the people teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I work for, making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Why should they work at a school for thirty-five to forty thousand dollars if they could get a job here at a hundred thousand dollars a year? Is that an intelligence test? The problem there of course is the unions. The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it’s not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can’t teach and administrators run the place and nobody can be fired. It’s terrible.

Asked what changes he would make, Jobs continued:

I’ve been a very strong believer in that what we need to do in education is to go to the full voucher system. I know this isn’t what the interview was supposed to be about but it is what I care about a great deal…. The problem that we have in this country is that [parents] went away. [They] stopped paying attention to their schools, for the most part. What happened was that mothers started working and they didn’t have time to spend at PTA meetings and watching their kids’ school. Schools became much more institutionalized and parents spent less and less and less time involved in their kids’ education. What happens when a customer goes away and a monopoly gets control … is that the service level almost always goes down.

And so the answer. Vouchers, entrepreneurship and market competition:

I’ve suggested as an example, if you go to Stanford Business School, they have a public policy track; they could start a school administrator track. You could get a bunch of people coming out of college tying up with someone out of the business school, they could be starting their own school. You could have twenty-five year old students out of college, very idealistic, full of energy instead of starting a Silicon Valley company, they’d start a school. I believe that they would do far better than any of our public schools would. The third thing you’d see is I believe, is the quality of schools again, just in a competitive marketplace, start to rise. Some of the schools would go broke. A lot of the public schools would go broke. There’s no question about it. It would be rather painful for the first several years…. The biggest complaint of course is that schools would pick off all the good kids and all the bad kids would be left to wallow together in either a private school or remnants of a public school system. To me that’s like saying “Well, all the car manufacturers are going to make BMWs and Mercedes and nobody’s going to make a ten thousand dollar car.” I think the most hotly competitive market right now is the ten thousand dollar car area. You’ve got all the Japanese playing in it. You’ve got General Motors who spent five million dollars subsidizing Saturn to compete in that market. You’ve got Ford which has just introduced two new cars in that market. You’ve got Chrysler with the Neon….

The full transcript appears here. Or, if you want to watch the interview on video, you can jump to Computerworld, where, rather lamely, you will need to register before watching the actual talk. Bad job by Computerworld.

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Steve Jobs Muses on What’s Wrong with American Education, 1995 is a post from: Open Culture

Paola Antonelli — Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at the MoMA, longtime proponent of humanized technology, self-described “curious octopus” — has arguably done more for the mainstream infiltration of design literacy than any other individual in contemporary culture. In her recent opening keynote at the unequivocally titled media and ideas conference The Conference in Malmö, Sweden, Antonelli pulls the curtain on her curatorial process and, with her signature on-stage charisma, takes a revealing look at how her shows go about the incredible balancing act of being both beacons of the bleeding edge of design and an approachable education platform for instilling in the general public a basic understanding of the fundamental importance of design — something she describes as “push[ing] design down from the realm of art and up from the realm of decoration and prettification into real life.”

“What designers do is they take revolutions that happen maybe in science or technology or politics, and they transform them into objects that you and I can use, that you and I can feel some familiarity or at least some curiosity about, so we can be drawn in and we can start a new life and a new behavioral pattern. And this idea of designers as the interface of progress, between progress and humanity, is what I try to stay with.” ~ Paola Antonelli

Antonelli’s excellent new show, Talk to Me: Design and the Communication Between People and Objects, is on display at the MoMA through November 7.

Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of cross-disciplinary interestingness. She writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and DesignObserver, and spends a great deal of time on Twitter.

Paola Antonelli on Design as the Interface Between Progress and Humanity is a post from: Open Culture

For more than a decade, Luis Soriano, a primary school teacher, has traveled the rugged terrain of Colombia by donkey, delivering books to children in hundreds of rural villages. The project, powered by his two donkeys Alfa and Beto, goes by the name “Biblioburro.” And it seeks to promote literacy in areas where access to books is not always a given. You can find more information and pictures on the homepage of the Biblioburro project and also make a small donation. A video update shows what these donations are actually used for.

Bonus material: The clip above is part of a 60-minute PBS documentary available in full here. If you are a teacher and want to work with the film in class, you will appreciate this related lesson plan. Biblioburro has even been covered by The New York Times, and there is now a similar project underway in Ethiopia.

By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.

Biblioburro: Library on a Donkey is a post from: Open Culture

He was kind to me, but I had no sense that he took particular notice of me. There were other, smarter kids in the class, and soon I fell back into my usual position — of thinking I was just a little over average in most things. But near the end of the semester, we read “Macbeth.” Believe me, this is not an easy play to connect to the lives of suburban high schoolers, but somehow he made the play seem electric, dangerous, relevant. After procrastinating till the night before it was due, I wrote a paper about the play — the first paper I typed on a typewriter — and turned it in the next day.

I got a good grade on it, and below the grade Mr. Criche wrote, “Sure hope you become a writer.” That was it. Just those six words, written in his signature handwriting — a bit shaky, but with a very steady baseline. It was the first time he or anyone had indicated in any way that writing was a career option for me. We’d never had any writers in our family line, and we didn’t know any writers personally, even distantly, so writing for a living didn’t seem something available to me. But then, just like that, it was as if he’d ripped off the ceiling and shown me the sky.

Over the next 10 years, I thought often about Mr. Criche’s six words. Whenever I felt discouraged, and this was often, it was those six words that came back to me and gave me strength. When a few instructors in college gently and not-so-gently tried to tell me I had no talent, I held Mr. Criche’s words before me like a shield. I didn’t care what anyone else thought. Mr. Criche, head of the whole damned English department at Lake Forest High, said I could be a writer. So I put my head down and trudged forward.

You can read Egger’s remembrance in full here.

Dave Eggers: The Teacher Who Encouraged Me to Write is a post from: Open Culture

The new ebook offers a “comprehensive guide to learning online and charting a personalized path to an affordable credential,” and it comes complete with some handy-sounding tutorials: how to write a personal learning plan, how to teach yourself online, how to build your personal learning network, 7 ways to get college credit without taking a college course, etc.

The book also smartly features a long list of open educational resources, where the author was nice enough to give us a small mention.

You can read The Edupunks’ Guide to a DIY Credential on Scribd, or alternatively you can download it in multiple formats (PDF, Kindle, ePub, RTF, etc.) at the bottom of this page.

Download The Edupunks’ Guide to a DIY Credential (Free eBook) is a post from: Open Culture

Doonesbury Confronts Creationism in the Classroom is a post from: Open Culture

Jon Stewart put it nicely. Now filmmaker Michael Moore takes the gloves off. Visiting Madison, Wisconsin this Saturday, he told the crowd “America isn’t broke.” Rather, the money that used to run the country simply got siphoned out of the system and put into unproductive Wall Street accounts. Strong words, but if you consider that most US corporations pay no US taxes, that billionaire hedge fund managers pay far lower taxes than the rest of you, that we’re preserving the unsustainable Bush tax breaks that overwhelmingly benefit the extremely wealthy, then you start to think about our national deficits and Wisconsin’s battles with teachers in a different light.

Make no mistake about it. The deficits are a real problem. And any truly excessive perks for public workers should be cut. But the middle class shouldn’t bear the sole brunt of the national sacrifice. And, so far, that’s all we see. Main Street took the hit in 2008 while Wall Street walked. And that’s what’s happening again…

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Michael Moore Tells Wisconsin Teachers “America Isn’t Broke” is a post from: Open Culture