Once the Secretary of Labor under the Clinton Administration, Robert Reich spent 17 years teaching at UC Berkeley. This past spring, he taught his final course there, and it’s now available online. Above, you can stream 14 lectures from “Wealth and Poverty,” a course “designed to provide students with a deeper understanding of both the organization of the political economy in the United States and of other advanced economies, and why the distribution of earnings, wealth, and opportunity have been diverging in the United States and in other nations.” Usually attended by 750 Berkeley undergraduates, the course is also “intended to provide insights into the political and public-policy debates that have arisen in light of this divergence, as well as possible means of reversing it.”
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“We now have to decide within a couple of decades whether the human experiment is going to continue or whether it’ll go down in glorious disaster,” says Noam Chomsky in a new interview on economist Tyler Cowen’s podcast Conversations with Tyler. “That’s what we’re facing. We know answers, at least possible answers to all of the problems that face us. We’re not pursuing them.” This came in response to one of Cowen’s standard questions, about the guest’s “production function”: that is, the methods or systems the guest uses to remain productive in their work. Such a line of inquiry is especially pertinent in Chomsky’s case, given the famously intense work schedule he maintains as a public intellectual at the age of 94.
Recently, that schedule has also involved shooting a Masterclass on Independent Thinking and the Media’s Invisible Powers, whose trailer appears above. In the course\, Chomsky “explores the dark side of media,” teaching us “to cut through propaganda, defend against manipulation, and control what you consume.”
Propaganda, manipulation, and consumption are major themes of his work (one forgets that he first became well-known as a linguist), and he became popularly associated with them thanks in large part to Manufacturing Consent, the 1988 book he co-wrote with Edward S. Herman. Of course, the media landscape looked quite different 35 years ago, and this Masterclass — a class of product scarcely imaginable back then — offers him an opportunity to bring his views into the twenty-twenties.
“Social media tends to drive people into self-reinforcing bubbles,” Chomsky says in the trailer. “It’s driving people even to more extreme views.” This is the kind of lament one now hears aired three or four times before breakfast, but seldom from a figure who’s been theorizing about the underlying forces as long as Chomsky has. Social media may offer an avenue of freedom from the standard suite of top-down mainstream narratives, but it may also constitute just another “power system,” which by its very nature seeks only “control and domination.” Encouraging the habits of critical thinking needed to resist such control and domination has long been essential to Chomsky’s project. And the stakes of that project, as he’ll surely never stop seeking platforms from which to tell the world, could hardly be higher. Explore Noam Chomsky Teaches Independent Thinking and the Media’s Invisible Powershere.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
This spring, Google has launched several online certificate programs designed to help students land an entry-level job, without necessarily having a college degree. The tech company’s latest program covers Cybersecurity, a field that stands poised to grow as companies become more digital, and cyberattacks inevitably continue.
Students can take individual courses in these professional certificate programs for free. (Above, you can watch video from the first course in the cybersecurity certificate program, entitled “Foundations of Cybersecurity.”) However, if you would like to receive a certificate, Coursera will charge $49 per month (after an initial 7-day free trial period). That means that the Cybersecurity Professional Certificate, designed to be completed in 6 months, will cost roughly $300 in total.
Once students complete the cybersecurity certificate, they can add the credential to their LinkedIn profile, resume, or CV. As a perk, students in the U.S. can also connect with 150+employers (e.g., American Express, Colgate-Palmolive, T-Mobile, Walmart, and Google) who have pledged to consider certificate holders for open positions. According to Coursera, this certificate can prepare students to become an entry-level “cybersecurity analyst and SOC (security operations center) analyst.”
First, the Google Advanced Data Analytics Professional Certificate builds on the original Data Analytics Certificate and “delves into machine learning, predictive modeling, and experimental design to collect and analyze large amounts of data.” Featuring seven courses in total, the program takes roughly six months to complete and aims to teach students how to 1) build regression and machine learning models to analyze and interpret data, 2) create data visualizations and apply statistical methods to investigate data, and 3) communicate insights from data analysis to stakeholders. Essentially, it teaches many tools of the trade needed to become a senior data analyst or junior data scientist.
With the Google Business Intelligence Professional Certificate, students can participate in a shorter program that focuses on transforming data into actionable insights for organizations. Consisting of three courses (and lasting about two months), the program helps students learn skills like data modeling, data visualization, and dashboarding–skills that have wide applicability in our data-driven age.
Students can actually take individual courses in these professional certificate programs for free. However, if you would like to receive the certificates, Coursera charges $49 per month (after an initial 7-day free trial period). That means that the Advanced Data Analytics Professional Certificate, if completed in 6 months, will cost less than $300. And the Business Intelligence Professional Certificate would run about $100. Once students complete a certificate, they can add the credential to their LinkedIn profile, resume, or CV. Likewise, they can connect with 150+ U.S. hiring organizations in Google’s Employer Consortium. If you would like to learn more about Google Career Certificates, you can read this handy page on University of Texas’ website.
Update: Google has also added a new certificate program focused on Cybersecurity. Find out more about the program here.
You can sign up for the programs by clicking on the links in bold above. Each program has a 7-day free trial.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
When Yayoi Kusama first arrived in New York, in the late nineteen-fifties, she must have sensed that she was in a practically ideal time and place to make abstract art. That would explain why she subsequently began creating a series of large paintings we now know as Infinity Nets, all of which consist solely of patterns of polka dots — or at least what look like patterns, and what look like polka dots, when viewed from a distance. Up close, there’s something quite different going on, something altogether more organic, irregular, and ever-shifting. and the best method of understanding it is to pick up a brush and paint an infinity net of your own.
You can learn how to do that by watching the video above, which comes from Coursera and the Museum of Modern Art’s online course “In the Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting.” In it, painter Corey D’Augustine goes through all the steps of executing a finished canvas in the style of Kusama’s Infinity Nets, which requires little conventional technical skill, but a great deal of patience.
D’Augustine suggests that you “lose yourself in the serial activity” of painting all these tiny shapes “as a way to quiet the mind.” Get deep enough into it, and “you won’t be thinking about your job or your children or whatever it is, whatever kind of stresses you have on your mind normally.
This therapeutic view isn’t a million miles from what Kusama has said of her own motivations for creating art. Even before launching into the Infinity Nets proper, she was painting polka-dot fields out of inspiration given to her by the hallucinations she’d been suffering since the age of ten. Now, at the age of 94, she’s long been a world-renowned artist, one who voluntarily resides at a mental-health facility when not at work in her studio further exploring the very same visual concepts with which she began. You can learn more about Kusama’s life from the material we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture, and if you want to go all the way into her world, there’s always her autobiography, Infinity Net.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
A recent Pew Research Center survey found that nearly one in five American teenagers is on Youtube “almost constantly.” Ten years ago, the figure surely wouldn’t have been that high, and twenty years ago, of course, Youtube didn’t exist at all. But today, no enterprise directed at teenagers can afford to ignore it: that goes for pop music and fashion, of course, but also for education. Most kids just starting college are on Youtube, but so are those about to start college, those taking time off from college, and those unsure of whether they’re willing or able to go to college at all. Hence College Foundation, a new extension of Youtube channel Study Hall, the product of a partnership between Arizona State University, YouTube and Crash Course.
Crash Course has long produced video series that, both entertainingly and at length, cover subjects taught in school from history to literature to philosophy and beyond. The College Foundation’s program will make it possible not just to learn on Study Hall, but to earn real college credits as well.
“Students who are interested in formal coursework beyond watching the videos may pay a $25 fee to enroll in an ASU online course that includes interacting with other students and instructors,” writes Inside Higher Education’s Susan D’Agostino. Upon completion of the course, “the student can decide whether they would like to pay $400 to record the grade and receive ASU credit.”
Enrollment is now open for the first four College Foundations courses, English Composition, College Math, U.S. History and Human Communication, all of which begin on March 7th. (Those who sign up before that start date will receive a $50 discount.) “Once you’re in a course, you can contact a success coach via email to get help with assignments,” writes TechCrunch’s Aisha Malik. “You can complete your coursework when it’s convenient for you, but you will have weekly due dates for most of the courses. If you want to access additional support, some instructors hold optional office hours.” This sort of learning experience could become a bridge to Youtube life and college life — the latter being the subject addressed, with characteristic Youtube directness, in the existing Study Hall course “How to College.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Back in September, we mentioned that Yale historian Timothy Snyder had started teaching a course, The Making of Modern Ukraine, and putting the lectures online. With the fall semester now over, you can watch 23 lectures on YouTube. All of the lectures appear above, or on this playlist. Key questions explored by the course include:
What brought about the Ukrainian nation? Ukraine must have existed as a society and polity on 23 February 2022, else Ukrainians would not have collectively resisted Russian invasion the next day. Why has the existence of Ukraine occasioned such controversy? In what ways are Polish, Russian, and Jewish self-understanding dependent upon experiences in Ukraine? Just how and when did a modern Ukrainian nation emerge? Just how for that matter does any modern nation emerge? And why some nations and not others? What is the balance between structure and agency in history? Can nations be chosen, and does it matter? Can the choices of individuals influence the rise of much larger social organizations? If so, how? Ukraine was the country most touched by Soviet and Nazi terror: what can we learn about those systems, then, from Ukraine? Is the post-colonial, multilingual Ukrainian nation a holdover from the past, or does it hold some promise for the future?
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What can you do with graphic design skills? More and more, it seems, as emerging technologies drive new apps, software, and games. New design challenges are everywhere, from human-machine interfaces, to 3D modeling in video games and animated films, to re-imagining classic designs in print and on screen. In addition to traditional jobs like art director, graphic designer, production artist, and animator, the past few years have seen a sharp rise in demand for User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) designers, roles that require a variety of different creative and technical skill sets.
You could get a four-year degree in design to work in one of these fields, or you could take a Coursera Specialization and be one step closer. Coursera has met the demand for new job skills and tech education by partnering with top arts institutions and universities to offer online courses at low cost. All of these courses grant certificates that show potential employers you’re ready to put your learning to use. If careers in art and contemporary design, graphic design, web user experience and interface design, or video game design appeal to you, you can learn those skills in the five certificate-granting Specialization programs below.
Graphic designers can choose to be as specialized or generalized as they like, but as in all creative fields, they need a thorough understanding of the basics. A Coursera Specialization is a series of courses intended to lead students to mastery, building on the history and foundations of the field. You can enroll for free and try out any of the Specializations for 7 days. After that, you’ll be charged between $39-$49 per month until you complete the courses in a Specialization. (Financial aid is available).
The exciting Specializations from CALARTS and the Museum of Modern Art will bring you many steps closer to a new career, or maybe even a new personal passion project.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
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