Here’s anoth­er free­bie for the intel­lec­tu­al tech junkie. Har­vard Law School is offer­ing this semes­ter an inno­v­a­tive course, CyberOne: Law in the Court of Pub­lic Opin­ion. What it cov­ers is how arguments/debates get played out in the media space cre­at­ed by the Inter­net and oth­er new tech­nolo­gies. And, beyond that, it specif­i­cal­ly focus­es on how the “First World and cor­po­rate dom­i­na­tion of enter­tain­ment media, laws, and news can be bal­anced by the voic­es of indi­vid­u­als, groups and uni­ver­si­ties who use new media intel­li­gent­ly.” To bet­ter exam­ine how dif­fer­ent con­stituen­cies use the Net, the course has been opened not only to law stu­dents, but to dis­tance learn­ers reg­is­tered in Har­vard’s Exten­sion School, and also to every­one who has an inter­net con­nec­tion, or so-called “At-Large” Learn­ers. (This is where you come in, and there’s no cost.) In keep­ing with its tech­no­log­i­cal focus, the course incor­po­rates a range of Inter­net tech­nolo­gies into the teach­ing. Blogs, wikis, Google mes­sage boards, vir­tu­al worlds cre­at­ed by Sec­ond Life  — it’s all part of the exper­i­ment that you might want to look into more close­ly.

Resources: 

• Course Descrip­tion
• Infor­ma­tion for “At-Large” Learn­ers
• Course Video Lec­tures
• Read­ings
• Instruc­tor Blog

What do sleep­ing and com­put­ing have in com­mon? Not a whole lot (nor real­ly should they), except for this. We sleep and use com­put­ers a good chunk of our lives, and yet we gen­er­al­ly have no idea how either works. Sleep is the 33% of our lives that we hard­ly give a thought to. And com­put­ing, well, few of us know what’s going on inside that box when we turn it on, open a pro­gram, surf the web or, alas, get a virus.

As usu­al, Har­vard has answers, at least for the techies among us. But instead of ask­ing stu­dents to go into hock to get them, this time the uni­ver­si­ty is giv­ing the answers away. (Con­sid­er it a gift from the school’s $29.2 bil­lion endow­ment.) Cour­tesy of the Har­vard Exten­sion School, any stu­dent who can’t make it to Cam­bridge can freely access the online course Under­stand­ing Com­put­ers and the Inter­net. The course, which revolves around a series of 14 lec­tures, is con­ve­nient­ly deliv­ered in sev­er­al for­mats — one ver­sion that down­loads to your com­put­er, anoth­er that down­loads to the Ipod/iTunes, and final­ly one that streams over the web, which you can find at Google Video and Youtube. To get start­ed, to get your lit­tle piece of Har­vard for free, click here.