Colonial and Revolutionary America: A Free Course

in History | March 10th, 2009

Although the flow of open edu­ca­tion­al resources has been slow­ing down late­ly (anoth­er casu­al­ty of the reces­sion), the stream has not yet run dry.

Stan­ford has recent­ly added anoth­er free course to its iTunes col­lec­tion. Taught by Jack Rakove, a Pulitzer Prize-win­ning his­to­ri­an, Colo­nial and Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Amer­i­ca (iTune­sU —  Feed) cov­ers the ear­ly phase of the tra­di­tion­al Amer­i­can his­to­ry sur­vey course. The major themes addressed here include “the char­ac­ter of colo­nial soci­ety; the ori­gins and con­se­quences of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion, from the Stamp Act con­tro­ver­sy to the adop­tion of the Fed­er­al Con­sti­tu­tion; the impact of the Rev­o­lu­tion on the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion and cul­ture; and (implic­it­ly) the long-term sig­nif­i­cance of the social and polit­i­cal his­to­ry of this era for our con­cep­tions of Amer­i­can nation­hood, soci­ety and cit­i­zen­ship.” This course is being rolled out in week­ly install­ments. You’ll cur­rent­ly find sev­en lec­tures, but there will even­tu­al­ly be 30.

I’ve added the course to our big col­lec­tion of Free Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es, and it will be per­ma­nent­ly housed there. This page is loaded with links to thou­sands of hours of free lec­tures and cours­es from major uni­ver­si­ties. A great resource in gen­er­al, and par­tic­u­lar­ly for these lean times. Check it out, and please for­ward it to a friend (or men­tion it on your web site) if you have a chance. Thanks.

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The Tolstoy Bailout, Or Why The Humanities Matter

in History, Life, Literature, Philosophy | March 10th, 2009

Writ­ing in The New Repub­lic, Leon Wieselti­er offers a response to the Feb 25 piece in the NYTimes: In Tough Times, the Human­i­ties Must Jus­ti­fy Their Worth. His argu­ment is worth a read, and here is one lengthy mon­ey quote:

The com­plaint against the human­i­ties is that they are imprac­ti­cal. This is true. They will not change the world. They will change only the expe­ri­ence, and the under­stand­ing, and the eval­u­a­tion, of the world. .… It is worth remem­ber­ing, then, that the cri­sis in which we find our­selves was the work of prac­ti­cal men. The secu­ri­ti­za­tion of mort­gages was not con­ceived by a head in the clouds. No poet cost any­body their house. No his­to­ri­an cost any­body their job. Not even the most pam­pered of pro­fes­sors ever squan­dered $87,000 of some­one else’s mon­ey on a lit­tle rug. The cre­ativ­i­ty of bankers is a lux­u­ry that we can no longer afford. But now I read about “defend­ing the virtues of the lib­er­al arts in a mon­ey-dri­ven world,” as the Times says. I would have thought that in these times the per­spec­tive of mon­ey would be ashamed to show itself. What author­i­ty, real­ly, should the stand­point of finance any longer have for Amer­i­can soci­ety? Who gives a damn what Ken­neth D. Lewis thinks about any­thing? … The study of reli­gion, defend­ing itself to cap­i­tal­ists? …

In tough times, of all times, the worth of the human­i­ties needs no jus­ti­fy­ing. The rea­son is that it will take many kinds of sus­te­nance to help peo­ple through these trou­bles. Many peo­ple will now have to fall back more on inner resources than on out­er ones. They are in need of loans, but they are also in need of mean­ings.… We are in need of fis­cal pol­i­cy and spir­i­tu­al pol­i­cy. And spir­i­tu­al­ly speak­ing, lit­er­a­ture is a bailout, and so is art, and phi­los­o­phy, and his­to­ry, and the rest.  … Regres­sion analy­sis will not get us through the long night. We need to know more about the human heart than the study of con­sumer behav­ior can teach. These are the hours when the old Pen­guin paper­backs must stand us in good stead. It was for now that we read them then.

Very well said, and the log­ic out­lined here could be one rea­son why the con­tin­u­ing edu­ca­tion pro­gram that I help lead — which is heavy on meat & pota­to human­i­ties cours­es — is so far far­ing quite well.
via the TNR Twit­ter Feed (ours here)

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Ricky Gervais on American Optimism

in Comedy, Life | March 9th, 2009

Ricky Ger­vais, the come­di­an and brains behind The Office, talks here about the dif­fer­ence between British and Amer­i­can humor, and it real­ly gets down to deep cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences. Opti­mism, the belief that any­thing is pos­si­ble, ver­sus an ingrained pes­simism and pen­chant for the under­dog. I won­der whether UK read­ers would agree with this char­ac­ter­i­za­tion. And, more so, I won­der which out­look, the British or Amer­i­can, can bet­ter get you through these dif­fi­cult times. The answer, to me, is not obvi­ous…

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The New Open Source Textbook

in Media | March 9th, 2009

A lit­tle rev­o­lu­tion is get­ting under­way. The state of Vir­ginia has pub­lished a new open source physics text­book under a Cre­ative Com­mons license. As detailed in this piece from ZDNet, this peer-reviewed text­book was pro­duced in less than six months by a team of authors, which includ­ed “active researchers, high school teach­ers, and col­lege pro­fes­sors, as well as some retirees.” And it was launched on CK-12’s tech­nol­o­gy plat­form. Here comes the new world of text­book pub­lish­ing. Quick to press, vet­ted, easy to revise, pro­duced at a low cost by pub­lish­ers, free for stu­dents. What’s not to like … except if you’re in the tra­di­tion­al text­book pub­lish­ing busi­ness?

As a quick aside, you can find anoth­er free physics text­book (in e‑book for­mat) at motionmountain.net.

via ccLearn Twit­ter Feed (Open Cul­ture Twit­ter feed here)

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Learn Acoustic Guitar with YouTube

in Music, YouTube | March 8th, 2009

It was time to do some­thing new. So I bought an acoustic gui­tar and decid­ed to see what I could learn on my own. And this, then, led me to look for free resources on the web. Not shock­ing­ly, YouTube has a fair amount to offer. A num­ber of dif­fer­ent video providers have post­ed lessons that can get you going. How to buy an acoustic gui­tar, how to tune it by ear, how to strum, how to fin­ger pick (a video viewed close to 1 mil­lion times), how to play var­i­ous chord pro­gres­sions (above), etc. It’s all there — although it’s also kind of jum­bled togeth­er, and you’ll need to do some sift­ing to find what you need. Some of the major YouTube chan­nels fea­tur­ing free gui­tar lessons can be found here, here, and here. 

As a last note, you’ll notice that these videos are gen­er­al­ly pro­duced by ven­dors look­ing to upsell more com­plete video pack­ages. This means that you’ll have to suf­fer through a lit­tle bit of mar­ket­ing. But, it’s hard­ly unbear­able and the lessons are oth­er­wise quite help­ful.

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The Books We Say We’ve Read

in Books | March 6th, 2009

Have you ever lied about read­ing a book? Well, if so, you’re hard­ly alone. Accord­ing to The Guardian, 65% of peo­ple polled in a sur­vey admit­ted to hav­ing made such a lie. And what books did they claim to have read? George Orwell’s 1984 ranked #1. Then the order went some­thing like this: Tol­stoy’s War and Peace, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and the Bible. 

I was remind­ed today that 1984 was first pub­lished 60 years ago. You can get the 60th anniver­sary edi­tion here, or you can always down­load a free, high qual­i­ty audio book from Archive.org. And, for more free audio books, vis­it our large col­lec­tion.

Fol­low us on Twit­ter here…

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New Bob Dylan Album Coming

in Music | March 5th, 2009

Appar­ent­ly, in April, Bob Dylan plans to release a new album. Let’s hope that he con­tin­ues to defy grav­i­ty. Get more details here.

Relat­ed Con­tent

When Bob Dylan Went Elec­tric: New­port, 1965

Like A Rolling Stone 1966

Bob Dylan at The Super Bowl

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The Life You Can Save

in Life, Philosophy | March 5th, 2009

If you’re not famil­iar with him, Peter Singer is an Aus­tralian-born philoso­pher who teach­es at Prince­ton and who wrote Ani­mal Lib­er­a­tion in 1975, help­ing to launch the ani­mal rights move­ment. A prac­ti­tion­er of applied ethics, he has also tak­en con­tro­ver­sial posi­tions on euthana­sia. Nowa­days, he’s work­ing on less sen­si­tive issues. His lat­est book is called The Life You Can Save: Act­ing Now to End World Pover­ty, and it makes the basic point that most of us could be doing more, with very lit­tle effort, to save lives around the world.

It’s a giv­en that we would rush to save a small child about to step into oncom­ing traf­fic. That’s a no-brain­er, an instinct. But, if we’re told that we can save the lives of chil­dren world­wide by giv­ing token amounts of mon­ey each month, we often react indif­fer­ent­ly and then go out and con­sume. In this inter­view heard on San Fran­cis­co air­waves this morn­ing, (MP3 — iTunes — Feed), Singer gets into how small sac­ri­fices can make big dif­fer­ences, and why we should make them. And if you’re look­ing for char­i­ties that can help make these dif­fer­ences, Singer pro­vides a help­ful list on his web site.

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