In a new effort to establish another home for intelligent conversation on the web, the Intelligent Channel went live on YouTube this week. Launched as part of YouTube’s new original channels initiative, the Intelligent Channel presents luminaries from the educational, arts, and cultural worlds in intense conversations.

The channel will kick off with three strands of original video programming produced by the channel’s parent company Intelligent Television in New York:

On “The Paul Holdengräber Show,” the renowned founder, director, and host of “Live from the New York Public Library” interviews award-winning writers and artists about their work and other passions. Holdengräber’s first guest – the show premieres today – is Colum McCann, author of the National Book Award-winning novel Let the Great World Spin. (You can watch the conversation above.) Holdengräber’s next guest is Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the bestselling Eat, Pray, Love.

In “Richard Belzer’s Conversation,” the star of “Law & Order SVU” and “Homicide” interviews actors, comedians, directors, musicians, and writers. Belzer’s opening guest is comedian Gilbert Gottfried, who discusses the implications of comedy after September 11th and in the face of tragedy more generally. His next guests will include Dick Cavett and Emmy-award winning writer-producer Tom Fontana.

In “Enlightenment Minutes,” the famous and the even more famous speak to the audience about their moments of enlightenment, personal transcendence, and growth.

The Intelligent Channel also features the new “Ed Archive” – video, film, and oral histories from universities, museums, libraries, and archives that have yet to hit the web.  “Enlightenment Minutes” and the “Ed Archive” will premiere in February 2012.

The Learning Channel has disappeared, the Discovery Channel gives us less to discover than it did, and the History Channel has hardly any history any more!  The Intelligent Channel’s guests come on because they love enlightenment.

The Intelligent Channel – here’s to the conversation!

Peter B. Kaufman is founder of the Intelligent Channel and Intelligent Television (www.intelligenttelevision.com) in New York.

The Intelligent Channel Launches (with Colum McCann Interview) 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 1941, director Dave Fleischer and Paramount Pictures animators Steve Muffati and George Germanetti produced Superman: The Mechanical Monsters — a big-budget animated adaptation of the popular Superman comics of that period, in which a mad scientist unleashes robots to rob banks and loot museums, and Superman, naturally, saves the day. It was one of seventeen films that raised the bar for theatrical shorts and are even considered by some to have given rise to the entire Anime genre.

More than a mere treat of vintage animation, the film captures the era’s characteristic ambivalence in reconciling the need for progress with the fear of technology in a culture on the brink of incredible technological innovation. It was the dawn of the techno-paranoia that persisted through the 1970s, famously captured in the TV series Future Shock narrated by Orson Welles, and even through today. Take for example books like Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.

Superman: The Mechanical Monsters is available for download on The Internet Archive, and Toonami Digital Arsenal has the complete series of all seventeen films. Find more vintage animation in Open Culture’s collection of Free Movies Online.

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.

The Mechanical Monsters: Seminal Superman Animated Film from 1941 is a post from: Open Culture

This partnership will let video/filmmakers unleash their creativity and produce some extraordinary video remixes – à la Donald Discovers Glenn Beck – without running the risk of legal complications. And because the Creative Commons library will be stocked only with videos released under a less restrictive CC-BY license, the resulting remixes can have commercial ambitions. A boon for some.

Finally, we shouldn’t miss another important component of this partnership: Moving forward, any videomaker can release their own creative work under a CC license on YouTube. Fast forward 6 t0 18 months, and the Creative Commons library will be vast,  and the remix opportunities, endless. A good day for open culture.

via YouTube’s blog and GigaOm

YouTube & Creative Commons Partnership Will Open Creative Floodgates is a post from: Open Culture

On Thursday night, the Guggenheim Museum and YouTube unveiled the winners of a highly publicized video contest, YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video. The contest originally generated 23,000 submissions from 91 countries, and, from there, Guggenheim curators culled a shortlist of 125 videos. Then the big moment: 20 winners were selected during an awards ceremony held last night at the museum.

The ceremony itself featured performances by artists who have made YouTube integral to their art – above we have Kutiman, the Israeli artist known for his mother of all funk remix, giving the audience something rather different: a live mashup of Brahms’ “Hungarian Dance,” accompanied by the Noname ensemble from the Julliard School and YouTube Symphony Orcherstra players. And to wrap things up OK Go, the unofficial kings of YouTube, performed ‘White Knuckles’ and ‘This too Shall Pass.’ Keep a close eye on the YouTube channel dedicated to the Biennial of Creative Video. The winning videos will almost certainly be coming online soon.

OK Go & Kutiman: Live from the Guggenheim is a post from: Open Culture

This year, Tim Burton’s production of Alice In Wonderland was welcomed by a flurry of media buzz and a rather polarized public response debating whether the iconic director had butchered or reinvented the even more iconic children’s classic. But discussion of the film’s creative merits aside, one thing it did do brilliantly was rekindle the public’s interest in what’s easily the most beloved work of children’s literature of the past two centuries.

So beloved, in fact, that Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel has generated hundreds of reprints, film adaptations and various derivative works over the years. Many of these works are now available in the public domain — even a simple search in the Internet Archive sends you down a rabbit hole of adaptations and remakes, spanning from landmark early cinema treasures to offbeat products of contemporary digital culture.

Today, we’ve curated a selection of the most interesting and culturally significant — the “curiouser and curiouser,” if you will — free versions of, tributes to, and derivatives of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland.

• The fundamentals: A Project Gutenberg free digital copy of Carroll’s original Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland text
• A 1916 abridged version intended for younger children, digitized by the Library of Congress, is available from the International Children’s Digital Library and features some wonderful illustration — though, regrettably, it lacks the Cheshire Cat
• This 1979 Russian translation of the book, with contributions from Mark Bernstein, features some gorgeous original illustration
• Open Source Radio has a free audio copy of the original Lewis Carroll text, as does Project Gutenberg, and this LibriVox version has more user-friendly chapter-based mp3 navigation
• For a classic with a spin, try this audio version read by blogger extraordinaire, BoingBoing co-editor, Popular Science columnist and vocal free content advocate Cory Doctorow
• The earliest cinematic adaptation of the book, directed by Cecil Hepworth in 1903, is a silent film gem, clocking in at just 8 minutes and 19 seconds. Watch above.
• In 1915, W. W. Young directed the second American adaptation of Alice — a massive six-reel production that showcased the rapid evolution of filmmaking in just a decade since the first production. Though much of the film is now lost, 42 minutes of it can be seen at the Internet Archive for free
• A 1966 British adaptation by director Jonathan Miller for the BBC features an ambitious cast — including Peter Sellers as the King of Hearts, Sir John Gielguld as Mock Turtle, Michael Redgrave as The Caterpillar and Peter Cook as the Mad Hatter — and its soundtrack, scored by the legendary Ravi Shankar, exudes the borderline folk-psychedelia sound of the Woodstock era. The film, divided into seven parts, is available for free on YouTube.
• This 2-minute version of Alice In Wonderland shot in the virtual world Second Life is an eerie testament to just how widely Carroll’s classic resonates.
• Perhaps the biggest treasure of all, Lewis Carroll’s original manuscript, available from the British Library — 91 pages of precious literary history, with original illustrations from artist John Tenniel. The online gallery also features a preface telling the fascinating story of the Oxford mathematician’s real-life inspiration for the book and the fate of the real Alice

Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of eclectic interestingness and indiscriminate curiosity. She writes for Wired UK, GOOD Magazine and Huffington Post, and spends a disturbing amount of time curating interestingness on Twitter.

Alice In Openland is a post from: Open Culture

• Richard Dawkins on the Awe of Life & Science
• Picasso’s Guernica Animated in 3D
• The Only Existing Video of Anne Frank
• Robert Sapolsky on the Uniqueness of Humans
• Stand by Me Travels Around the World
• Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
• Malcolm X at Oxford University
• Steve Jobs Speaks to Stanford Graduates
• Women in Art
• Mark Twain Filmed by Thomas Edison in 1909
• The Bayeux Tapestry Animated
• My Stroke of Insight
• Hubble Deep Field: The Most Important Image Ever Taken
• The Monty Python Philosophy Football Match
• Ira Glass on the Art of Storytelling

The Best of YouTube (According to Open Culture) is a post from: Open Culture

For more smart content from YouTube, see our big list: Intelligent YouTube Video Collections.

YouTube Edu Releases Version 2.0, Goes International is a post from: Open Culture

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnYXbJ_bcLc

The Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain collapsed a little more than 20 years ago (August 1989). And even though I watched the events on TV, my memory of it all has already started to fade. But that’s where YouTube comes in. Above, a quick refresher that makes my day. This clip comes from a larger collection called 101 Historical Moments You Can Relive on YouTube. Thanks for the heads up on this one.

When The Wall Comes Tumbling Down: History on YouTube is a post from: Open Culture

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAm3KWiDPKU

During the past couple of days, fans from our Facebook page have recommended two math videos for us. Here they go: “D” offers up a piece called “The New Math” (above), which talks, yes, about the revolution in teaching mathematics. As you’ll see, the piece breaks into comic song, and it all kind of has an Arlo Guthrie, Alice’s Restaurant feel to it. A bit of a strange combo, to be sure.

Next up, Heather gives us Mathmaticious (get it here), which is a mathematical parody of Fergie’s “Fergalicious,” although sadly or, maybe actually happily, I’m not familiar with it. Snooty, snarky me…

Math on the Tube is a post from: Open Culture