The Best of Open Culture 2011

in Art, Books, Education, Film, Music, Online Courses | January 2nd, 2012

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.

And now onward into 2012.…

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Google Presents YouTube for Schools, Makes Video World Safe for Teachers

in Education, Google, K-12, YouTube | December 14th, 2011

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.

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Steve Jobs Muses on What’s Wrong with American Education, 1995

in Apple, Education | November 10th, 2011

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load Free Copy of Steve Jobs Biog­ra­phy; Plus Inter­view with Author

Steve Jobs Demos the First Mac­in­tosh in 1984

Steve Jobs Nar­rates the First “Think Dif­fer­ent” Ad (Nev­er Aired)

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Paola Antonelli on Design as the Interface Between Progress and Humanity

in Art, Education, Video - Arts & Culture | September 1st, 2011

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.

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Biblioburro: Library on a Donkey

in Books, Education | August 25th, 2011

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.

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Dave Eggers: The Teacher Who Encouraged Me to Write

in Books, Education, Literature, Writing | August 4th, 2011

Image by Rhodo­den­drites, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Thou­sands of pub­lic school teach­ers won’t be return­ing to the class­room this fall, thanks to bud­get cuts nation­wide. And that means more than a few Jay Criche’s won’t get the chance to tap the hid­den tal­ents of young stu­dents. Jay Criche, in case you’re won­der­ing, taught Eng­lish at Lake For­est High School and count­ed Dave Eggers (A Heart­break­ing Work of Stag­ger­ing Genius and What Is the What) as one of his stu­dents. Criche passed away recent­ly, and, writ­ing in Salon, Eggers remem­bers his teacher’s deep influ­ence:

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.

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Download The Edupunks’ Guide to a DIY Credential (Free eBook)

in e-books, Education | August 2nd, 2011

It’s hot off the dig­i­tal press. Anya Kamenetz, a senior writer at Fast Com­pa­ny Mag­a­zine and author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupre­neurs, and the Com­ing Trans­for­ma­tion of High­er Edu­ca­tion, has teamed up with the Gates Foun­da­tion to release a free ebook, The Edupunks’ Guide to a DIY Cre­den­tial.

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.

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Doonesbury Confronts Creationism in the Classroom

in Comedy, Current Affairs, Education | July 11th, 2011

Gar­ry Trudeau has tak­en on cre­ation­ism before. He’s doing it again, this time com­ment­ing on the oxy­moron­ic “Louisiana Sci­ence Edu­ca­tion Act,” which allows the teach­ing of cre­ation­ism in the pub­lic class­room. You can view Trudeau’s car­toon in full, and in high res here.

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