When he wasn’t busy hashing out the theory of quantum electrodynamics, Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman was hitting the bongos and singing praises to orange juice. Watch him go. And find more vintage Feynman resources below.
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It may not qualify as culture, but it’s funny and rings awfully true … (Along similar lines, you can get some good animated New Yorker cartoons here and here.)
The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting (which we recently featured in 10 Signs of Intelligent Life at YouTube) is sponsoring the Global Issues/Citizen Voices Contest. Final winners will be chosen by the Pulitzer Center and will receive a Pulitzer Center Citizen Journalist Award. You can get involved. The deadline is March 12. Get details here.
With the recent 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, there has been no shortage of podcasts dedicated to Mozart’s masterpieces. First, Radio Sweden (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) reissued a digital archive of Mozart recordings by the Royal Swedish Opera from the 1940s and 1950s. And, along very similar lines, Danmarks Radio (Feed — Web Site) issued podcasts of nine Mozart symphonies recorded by the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra. (You’ll find here symphonies numbers 15, 17, 23, 34, 35, 36, 39, 40, and 41. Since the web site is in Danish, we’d recommend accessing these high quality MP3’s through the rss feed listed above.) Lastly, we should mention here that, as part of last year’s festivities, The International Mozart Foundation published online for the first time the entirety of of Mozart’s musical scores.
Along with Mozart, you can find plenty of Beethoven. We have highlighted here before, but it’s worth noting again, Deutsche Welle’s podcastcollection called Beethovenfest (iTunes — Feed — Web Site). You’ll want to give it a look, and also see the podcast collection put together by the Boston Symphony Orchestra Conservatory (iTunes — Feed — Web Site). This educational series offers an extensive overview and recordings of Beethoven’s work, as well as that of Arnold Schoenberg. You can also catch more Beethoven (as well as a little Mozart and Bach) with the podcast series called The Concert (iTunes — Feed — Web Site), which features recordings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
Speaking of Bach, you may want to give some time to these two podcasts: Bach Podcast from Magnatune.com (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) and Bach Festival of Philadelphia(Feed — Web Site).
Let’s now leave you with a few other good finds: Wagner Operas Podcast (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) lets you listen in on recordings from the annual Bayreuth Festival, plus more. An Intimate Tour Through the Music of Yo-Yo Ma (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) offers essentially what the title says. Finally, we’d recommend Classical Performance (iTunesFeedWeb Site), which consists of classical music performances from WGBH’s Studio One in Boston; The New York Philaharmonic Podcast (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) which introduces you to the music and performers featured in the concerts of the New York Philharmonic; and From the Top. Live from Carnegie Hall Video Podcast (iTunes — Feed — Web Site), a podcast that showcases the top-notch skills and compelling stories of America’s best young classical musicians.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 57 weeks. If you haven’t read it yet, then you may want to spend some time with Gilbert’s talk at Google. While her talk and reading didn’t completely strike a chord with me, it may well with you. So here you go (and, yes, we’ve added the video to our YouTube Playlist):
Courtesy of Wired’s Blog, here are 10 videos displaying some rather cool chemistry experiments at work. Below, we’ve posted one video that will let you answer a question that you’ve almost certainly pondered for ages — can liquid nitrogen neutralize molten iron? (For more videos along these lines, check out this site.)
Next fall, all new freshmen attending ACU (Abilene Christian University) will receive an iPhone (or iPod Touch) when they get to campus. And, from there, the Apple gadget will figure centrally to students’ campus experience. The iPhone is the latest and greatest “converged mobile media device,” which combines in one gadget numerous functionalities — internet and email access, phone, audio, video, and maps. And once you put a generation of students reared on mobile devices on this common platform, new ways of running the university in the 21st century start to open up.
The changes begin with the way university administration gets done. ACU envisions students using their devices to check their meal and account balances, access course calendars, receive news and special bulletins from the university, and tap into the university phone/employee directory. Not far down the line, the university anticipates that the iPhone will fulfill certain registrar functions — meaning that students can use their iPhone to scope out, and even enroll in, various classes. Then, they’ll add some e‑commerce to the mix and let students use their mobile device to conduct commerce with the bookstore and university restaurants. Are you starting to get the picture? The iPhone becomes a “one stop shop for information and services” that can be accessed on the fly.
But what happens in the classroom? I had a chance to catch up with Bill Rankin, the Director of Mobile Learning Research (and also Associate Professor & Director of English Graduate Studies) who shared some of ACU’s thinking about how the iPhone creates new teaching opportunities. For starters, the device will allow students to access syllabi, course documents (created with Google Docs), homework assignments and podcasts that complement the course. (Imagine students downloading podcasted lectures from previous classes, or listening to clips of Mozart in their music appreciation class, or reviewing bits of French dialogue in the French 101 class.) From here, the pedagogical uses of the iPhone start to deepen. According to Rankin, the Apple gadget will give teachers the ability to conduct real-time surveys that gauge student perceptions of the class (are they understanding the course? is it moving too quickly?) and use the feedback to make the classes “more carefully tailored to the interests and abilities.” It’s also an added perk that the iPhone will let students contribute to the class through their online persona, which, research shows, “emboldens students [particularly shy ones] who might not otherwise share their ideas.” Then there’s this scenario (and others like it): With the iPhone, the “biology class in the field will be able to photograph specimens, post their findings to other classes not currently in the field, communicate with experts, and use the web to identify and research specimens. That’s transformational, and we think it will offer distinct advantages to our students.” Lastly, the iPhone opens up the possibility of creating “hybrid” courses, which means courses conducted partly in the classroom and partly online. For more on the hybrid concept (and other facets of the project), you can watch the video posted on YouTube that introduces ACU’s iPhone initiative. We’ve posted Part 1 below, and you can access Part 2 here. To get more insight into ACU’s intelligent thinking about the potential educational applications of the iPhone, you should spend some time on their “Connected” web site.
For a graduate student in an English Ph.D. program, one of the big milestones on the road to the dissertation is the Oral Exam. In my case this involves five professors, a list of 60–80 books, and two hours in a (rhetorically) smoke-filled room. Since I’m working on contemporary literature and new media, one of the challenges I have to deal with is how to address novels, films, television shows, video games and more as part of the same “list.” How does one put these things together? How can a video game be read as a text alongside Gravity’s Rainbow or Brave New World?
One way to approach this question is to include the work of literary and cultural critics who are already looking at new and traditional media side by side. Following that line, I try to keep up with the academic blog Grand Text Auto, which covers “computer narrative, games, poetry and art.” One of its contributors, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, is working on a book about digital fictions and computer games that looks perfect for my Orals list—and he’s publishing it, chapter by chapter, on Grand Text Auto for blog-based peer review. It will come out next year with MIT Press, but for now, it’s a work in progress.
All fine so far—I could list it as “forthcoming” and direct my professors to the link. But what happens when I start commenting on this book as I read it? What are we to do with the knowledge that this “text” will most likely change between now and next year? Does this item on my Orals list signify a draft of the book, the blog and its comments, or the experience of reading and writing into the MS myself (including, perhaps, responses from the author)?
I find the dilemma particularly interesting because it touches on a central conflict in humanities scholarship. Are we passive observers of the literary scene or active participants in it? It’s a rare academic critic who thinks of calling up a poet to ask her what she meant in a particular line, but that’s exactly the kind of connection that our hyper-conscious, digitally mediated world offers up.
P.S. After all of this hand-wringing, it’s obvious I’m not going to have time to read Noah’s book before I take my exam, so it’s off the list. But I can’t wait to dig in next month!
Just a quick note: If you Google “Open Culture,” you’ll now find that Google has placed “sub-links” beneath the main search results, and these sub-links give you access to some of our most popular pages. (See real-time search results here.) If you’re looking for free audiobooks, online courses and foreign language lessons (just to give a few examples), then this is one quick way to access them.
Just a quick fyi that we’ve added a popular UC Berkeley course, Physics for Future Presidents, to our collection: Free Online Courses from Great Universities. You can download the complete course to your MP3 player. Just scroll down the page and look under “Physics.”
If you’d rather experience this course in video, you can watch the course on YouTube. I’ve posted the first lecture below, and you can find the rest of the lectures here.
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