In case you missed Colbert’s trip to the war zone, here’s a funny clip.
You can find the link to this video and more here.
A New Politics of the Common Good
A quick heads up: The BBC is featuring a series of lectures with Michael Sandel (Harvard Professor of Government) that will collectively talk about “the prospects of a new politics of the common good.” Sandel is a very popular professor at Harvard. Some 15,000 students have taken his courses over 30 years. In the first lecture, Sandel takes a look at the morality of the markets (a timely topic, to be sure) and “considers the expansion of markets and how we determine their moral limits.” You can listen here.
Also, note that you can find another mini-course by Sandel on the Harvard website. Justice: A Journey in Moral Reasoning (Video) is one of the very few courses that Harvard has produced and made available to the public. You can find it otherwise listed in our collection of Free University Courses.
Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature
Earlier today, Seth Harwood wrote about a new challenge for writers — making sure books get distributed through as many digital reading platforms as possible. His thinking dovetails nicely with Wired’s list of the “Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature.” Here are some of the Wired items that mesh or flirt with what Harwood is talking about…
2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.
4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.
5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.
8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.
11. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.
Get the full list here. Thanks to Ed Finn for giving us a heads up on this list.
Pico Iyer on “The Joy of Less”
Pico Iyer, the British-born essayist, has a nice reality check in today’s New York Times, and it’s now the most emailed article of the day. Here are a few key passages:
“I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied…”
“…my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down [in Santa Barbara, CA]. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.”
On a related note, you might want to check out this piece in the The Atlantic, What Makes Us Happy?, which takes a look at Harvard’s long effort to answer that question.
Writing in the Digital Age: It’s All About the Platform
A couple of weeks ago, crime writer Seth Harwood wrote a very popular piece here — How I Sold My Book by Giving It Away. Now he’s back and telling us about the new challenge of writing in the digital age. Take it away Seth (and check out his new book JACK WAKES UP )…
The number of ebook readers and reading devices is growing rather than shrinking these days. We’re entering a world where individual readers will decide not only what books they want to read, but how they want to read them. And here there’s something to think about for authors: As readers choose the reading platform they like best, they’ll see a certain set of books in that space. Different books show up at Wal-Mart than at your local independent bookseller. On the Kindle there are different books—with different prices—than on the iTunes App store. And even within the iTunes store, you’ll find different books in the Audiobooks section (owned by Audible.com), the Podcasts»Arts»Literature section (where many of the titles are free), and in the App store.
As an author, I want to be wherever a reader can look. On every platform and every new platform, I want my book to be available. My novel JACK WAKES UP started out as a podcast (via iTunes, RSS Feed, & MP3). People liked it. It got to print on demand, and Amazon sold it in print and Kindle formats. Guess what? It did pretty well. Now, it’s out from Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, and readers can find it at all the online outlets, as well as brick and mortar bookstores nationwide—both big box and indy. But that’s still missing part of the market: soon more and more people will be buying their books on their iPhones as Apps—both audio and text—or on Kindle, Scribd, eReader and who knows where else. All I can do is work toward making JACK WAKES UP available in as many places and ways as possible.
At the Publishing 3.0 panel session during April’s LA Times Festival of Books, the experts spoke about the problem of publishing in the 20th century being demand—how do you generate the interest in your book and get people to buy it—and that the new problem in the 21st century is supply. With so many books published, many will fail. There’s literally just too much, a glut of books that no one has a good idea how to fix.
The other supply-side issue is platform. As the publishing game steams quickly toward different platforms, virtually unlimited choices for readers, different pricing models, reading experiences, and preferences, my duty as an author now involves making sure my work is offered on as many platforms as possible to ensure my book is an option for the greatest number of readers.
Apple Will Bring a Million Books to the iPhone
Apple announced a new line of products this morning. Most will focus on the new, speedier iPhone. But what caught my eye is the Iceberg e‑book reader that will bring 1,000,000 books to the iPhone. This will include, according to Engadget, 500 bestsellers, 50 major magazines and about 170 daily papers, plus textbooks by Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt and McGraw Hill. Sounds awfully like what Amazon is doing with the new Kindle DX. You can learn more about the Iceberg reader here.
Online Educational Resources in Africa
Today, Amanda Coolidge (British Columbia Institute of Technology) joins us and talks about what’s happening with Open Educational Resources (OER) in Africa. Down the line, she’ll be blogging about OER in other parts of the world as well. Take it away Amanda.
Over 500,000 Nigerian teachers need teacher training and you can bet this is going to be a challenge. Africa is working toward the UN Millennium goal of free education for all by 2010. Still, teachers and students across Africa need resources in and outside of the classroom and, like anywhere else in the world, they need resources developed in the context of their own environment and culture.
The good news is that one of the world’s most comprehensive open educational resource repositories in teacher education is called “TESSA: Teacher Education in Sub Saharan Africa”. TESSA has produced a large bank of materials directly aimed at enhancing and improving access to, and the quality of, local school-based education and training for teachers. These materials (including audio and other media) are modular in format. They focus on classroom practice in the areas of literacy, numeracy, science, social studies and the arts, and life skills. All the materials are available through this website in a variety of different formats and in 5 different languages.
Since TESSA was launched in June 2008, the response from the Open Resource community globally has been gratifyingly positive.
“The TESSA materials are easily located in the environment around us without having to travel long distances at high cost”
Teacher, Tanzania
“perhaps the most successful of all the OER projects we have heard about”
Sir John Daniel, President and Chief Executive Officer, Commonwealth of Learning
Amanda Coolidge is currently Educational Technologist at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) in Vancouver, BC. She was previously with the Open University UK and BBC based in Kenya.
Ian McKellen Stars in King Lear
Thanks to PBS, you can watch online Ian McKellen starring in King Lear, one of Shakesepeare’s finest tragedies. McKellen performed the play first in England (2007), then on a worldwide tour, before filming the production for public television. You can watch it all right here, and if you want to follow the original text, you can get it from MIT’s Shakespeare web site, which houses Shakespeare’s complete works online.
Related Content:
What Did Shakespeare Really Look Like?
Goethe and Shakespeare on Google
Shakespeare and the Uses of Political Power
via Metafilter
The Dalai Lama’s Introduction to Buddhism
When the Dalai Lama paid a visit to Emory University, he offered an introductory lecture to Tibetan Buddhism. The lecture is not exactly what you’d normally get in the university classroom. The talk is not entirely linear. And he spends some time speaking in English, then speaks in his native tongue (with the help of an interpreter). But, he can talk about Buddhism with the authority that few authors can, and there’s a reason audiences come to see him in droves. Things really get going about 23 minutes in.
Harvard Studies Twitter
The folks who publish the Harvard Business Review have conducted a study of Twitter, surveying 300,000 Twitter users in May 2009 to see how people are using the service. And here are the top level findings:
- “Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women.”
- “An average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman.”
- “Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.”
- And finally, “the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets.”
The numbers suggest that Twitter is not sticking that well. People sign up and then most leave. That’s too bad. But it doesn’t negate the fact that Twitter has been a very useful tool for Open Culture. As we’ve written here before, Twitter has put a human face on our audience and allowed us to get to know you much better. Meanwhile, we can’t say the same about Facebook (although we’re not knocking it.) What’s your experience with Twitter? (PS You can find us on Twitter @openculture).
David Carradine: Rewind the Videotape
As many may now know, David Carradine was found dead this morning in Thailand. Above, we feature him acting in the popular 1970’s television series Kung Fu. “In this clip from the pilot episode of Kung Fu, Caine (David Carradine) is discussing life with a fellow expatriate. Their discussion touches on the unity of opposites, which is symbolised in Taoism as the yin-yang. The yin-yang is the most important concept in Taoism.” The Guardian has also assembled a nice collection of clips tracing Carradine’s acting career. Find it here.
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