Miragebookmark has gathered some notable photos from unconventional bookstores around the globe.
The collection takes you from Holland to Paris, Helsinki, and Porto (Portugal), then to San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Calcutta and beyond.
Worth paying a visit.
From The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Wired Campus” Blog:
“Cole W. Camplese, director of education-technology services at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, prefers to teach in classrooms with two screens — one to project his slides, and another to project a Twitter stream of notes from students. He knows he is inviting distraction — after all, he’s essentially asking students to pass notes during class. But he argues that the additional layer of communication will make for richer class discussions…
Once students warmed to the idea that their professors actually wanted them to chat during class, students begin floating ideas or posting links to related materials, the professor says. In some cases, a shy student would type an observation or question on Twitter, and others in the class would respond with notes encouraging the student to raise the topic out loud. Other times, one of the professors would see a link posted by a student and stop class to discuss it.
Get the full story here, and feel free to tell us about other educational uses of Twitter. Just add them to the comments below. Lastly, you can find us on Twitter here.
“Brewster Kahle wants to create a free, online collection of human knowledge. It sounds impossibly idealistic—but he is making progress.”
More on Kahle’s mission here.
via @Harvard_Press
A good find by Kottke.org…
Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs & Steel (and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed), offers a lecture at USC where he gets into the universal attributes of religions and their underlying adaptive value/social purpose. The talk runs about 41 minutes, followed by a long Q&A session.
For those looking for more academic lectures, I should remind you of the recent launch of YouTube EDU and Academic Earth, plus our large collection of free university courses.
via @kottkedotorg
The Library of Congress has just set up shop on YouTube. On this new channel, you’ll find some new and vintage footage. Above, we’re directing your attention to a clip called “Boxing Cats.” It’s from 1894 and was produced by Thomas Edison’s Black Maria film studio in West Orange, New Jersey. In no way do I condone cat cockfights, but this is some intriguing historical footage. And who knew that there was a little bit of Steve Martin in Thomas Edison? I’ve added the Library of Congress Channel to our page, Intelligent YouTube: The Best Smart Video Collections.
CBGB’s was a longtime mecca of the New York music scene, a venue that helped launch the Ramones, Patti Smith, Blondie, and the Talking Heads onto the national stage. And then it closed in 2006. If you never visited the club on Bowery and Bleecker Streets, you can still take a pretty vivid virtual tour. It starts in the bathroom and you then can wind your way through the rest of the joint. Above, we’ve posted some vintage footage of the Talking Heads performing “Psycho Killer” at CBGB’s, somewhere back in the mid-70s.
Last week, Bob Dylan released for a limited time a free mp3 (“Beyond Here Lies Nothin”) from his upcoming album, Together Through Life. Over at Newsweek, you’ll now find another cut being streamed — “Feel A Change Comin’ On.” Head on over and have a listen.
via Stereogum
Eggman913 on YouTube has a pretty neat schtick. He takes artistic images, then morphs them together in pretty creative ways. The piece above plays with images of famous actresses from different moments in American film history. Eggman913 has also created a montage called Women in Art, which we’ve featured here before. (It has only 9.2 million views on YouTube.) Then there are pieces that have fun with the art of Picasso and Monet, plus a companion clip called Men in Film. The actresses shown in the video above include:
Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich, Norma Shearer, Ruth Chatterton, Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, Barbara Stanwyck, Vivien Leigh, Greer Garson, Hedy Lamarr, Rita Hayworth, Gene Tierney, Olivia de Havilland, Ingrid Bergman, Joan Crawford, Ginger Rogers, Loretta Young, Deborah Kerr, Judy Garland, Anne Baxter, Lauren Bacall, Susan Hayward, Ava Gardner, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Lana Turner, Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, Audrey Hepburn, Dorothy Dandridge, Shirley MacLaine, Natalie Wood, Rita Moreno, Janet Leigh, Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, Ann Margret, Julie Andrews, Raquel Welch, Tuesday Weld, Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, Faye Dunaway, Catherine Deneuve, Jacqueline Bisset, Candice Bergen, Isabella Rossellini, Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sigourney Weaver, Kathleen Turner, Holly Hunter, Jodie Foster, Angela Bassett, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Salma Hayek, Sandra Bullock, Julianne Moore, Diane Lane, Nicole Kidman, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, Reese Witherspoon, Halle Berry.
A quick heads up: Stanford has just launched a free software development course for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The lectures will be rolled out on iTunes first, and eventually they will be posted on YouTube as well. You can get the first lecture on iTunes here. This 10 week computer science course is officially called iPhone Application Programming. Watch for new lectures to be posted weekly. You’ll be learning to develop iPhone apps in no time.
You can find this course housed under the Computer Science section of our collection of Free University Courses.
A light (and, for me, nostalgic) way to ease into the weekend…
Over at Marvel.com, they’re streaming episodes from the original Spider-Man TV series that hit the airwaves back in 1967. A new episode will be posted every Thursday. Above, you’ll find Episode 1, and see where it all began.
This really caught my eye…
If you didn’t make it to the Mark Rothko exhibition at the Tate Modern (and chances are you didn’t), then you can still see it virtually. As you’ll see, the Tate Modern has created a fantastic web site that lets you take a panoramic tour of the Rothko collection. Once you enter the tour here, you should switch into full screen mode (look toward the bottom of screen), then use the arrows and your mouse to move around. You can move from room to room, and zoom in on various paintings. Quite the way to see an exhibition if you can’t make a long journey.
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
©2006-2025 Open Culture, LLC.
All rights reserved.
