Download The Edupunks’ Guide to a DIY Credential (Free eBook)

in e-books, Education | August 2nd, 2011

It’s hot off the dig­i­tal press. Anya Kamenetz, a senior writer at Fast Com­pa­ny Mag­a­zine and author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupre­neurs, and the Com­ing Trans­for­ma­tion of High­er Edu­ca­tion, has teamed up with the Gates Foun­da­tion to release a free ebook, The Edupunks’ Guide to a DIY Cre­den­tial.

The new ebook offers a “com­pre­hen­sive guide to learn­ing online and chart­ing a per­son­al­ized path to an afford­able cre­den­tial,” and it comes com­plete with some handy-sound­ing tuto­ri­als: how to write a per­son­al learn­ing plan, how to teach your­self online, how to build your per­son­al learn­ing net­work, 7 ways to get col­lege cred­it with­out tak­ing a col­lege course, etc.

The book also smart­ly fea­tures a long list of open edu­ca­tion­al resources, where the author was nice enough to give us a small men­tion.

You can read The Edupunks’ Guide to a DIY Cre­den­tial on Scribd, or alter­na­tive­ly you can down­load it in mul­ti­ple for­mats (PDF, Kin­dle, ePub, RTF, etc.) at the bot­tom of this page.

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Animated: Stephen Fry & Ann Widdecombe Debate the Catholic Church

in Animation, Current Affairs, Religion | August 2nd, 2011

Intel­li­gence Squared (iTunes – Feed – Web Site) brings Oxford-style debat­ing to Amer­i­ca. Each debate fea­tures one motion, one mod­er­a­tor, and three pan­elists argu­ing for a motion, and three argu­ing against. Should Air­ports Use Racial and Reli­gious Pro­fil­ing? Is Islam A Reli­gion Of Peace? Is The Two-Par­ty Sys­tem Mak­ing the U.S. Ungovern­able? These are some of the recent top­ics that have been tack­led.

Now, tak­ing a page out of the RSA play­book, Intel­li­gence Squared has pro­duced a short ani­mat­ed video that gives artis­tic life to a debate held in Octo­ber 2009. The motion — “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world” — was sup­port­ed by Ann Noreen Wid­de­combe, a for­mer British Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty politi­cian turned nov­el­ist. And tak­ing the con­trary posi­tion was pop­u­lar British actor and writer Stephen Fry.

You can watch the ani­mat­ed ver­sion above, and the full debate (which also fea­tured Christo­pher Hitchens) here. More iq2 videos can be found at their Youtube Chan­nel, which oth­er­wise appears in our col­lec­tion of Intel­li­gent YouTube Chan­nels. H/T @joabaldwin

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Fry on Phi­los­o­phy and Unbe­lief

Stephen Fry: What I Wish I Had Known When I Was 18

Stephen Fry Gets Ani­mat­ed about Lan­guage

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The First 10 Videos Played on MTV: Rewind the Videotape to August 1, 1981

in History, Music, Television | August 1st, 2011

On August 1, 1981, MTV took to the U.S. air­waves, for­ev­er chang­ing the land­scape of Amer­i­can music and pop cul­ture. If you were around then, you’ll remem­ber the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing, the astro­naut plant­i­ng the MTV flag on the moon’s sur­face, and then the first apt­ly picked video — the Bug­gles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Fast for­ward four years, and we were all say­ing, I Want My MTV.

A list of the first ten videos aired on MTV appears below. Click the links to take a walk down mem­o­ry lane.

  1. “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Bug­gles
  2. “You Bet­ter Run” by Pat Benatar
  3. “She Won’t Dance with Me” by Rod Stew­art
  4. “You Bet­ter You Bet” by The Who
  5. “Lit­tle Suz­i’s on the Up” by Ph.D.
  6. “We Don’t Talk Any­more” by Cliff Richard
  7. “Brass in Pock­et” by The Pre­tenders
  8. “Time Heals” by Todd Rund­gren
  9. “Take It on the Run” by REO Speed­wag­on (not orig­i­nal)
  10. “Rockin’ the Par­adise” by Styx (dit­to)

Thanks Robin for the reminder…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Time Cap­sule: The Inter­net in 1995

“Jer­sey Shore” in the Style of Oscar Wilde

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Snack Foods of Great Writers

in Literature | August 1st, 2011

Wendy Mac­Naughton, an artist and illus­tra­tor liv­ing in San Fran­cis­co, won­dered what snacks fueled some of our great­est writ­ers. F. Scott Fitzger­ald turned to apples and canned meats, and Kaf­ka to milk, dur­ing their dai­ly writ­ing rou­tines. How about Lord Byron, Emi­ly Dick­in­son, Mar­cel Proust, John Stein­beck, Tru­man Capote or food writer Michael Pol­lan? Mac­Naughton tells you about their dietary habits in The New York Times Book Review. (And it just so hap­pens you can find texts by many of these authors in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks.)

Mac­Naughton’s illus­trat­ed col­umn, “Mean­while,” appears reg­u­lar­ly at The Rum­pus.

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How the Egyptian Pyramids Were Built: A New Theory in 3D Animation

in History, Science | August 1st, 2011

Jean-Pierre Houdin spent a cou­ple of decades work­ing as an inde­pen­dent archi­tect around Paris. Then, his career took a big turn. Work­ing with his father, Houdin tried to crack an ancient mys­tery — how were the great pyra­mids of Egypt built?

Through­out the cen­turies, var­i­ous the­o­ries have been put forth. Herodotus, who vis­it­ed Egypt around 450 B.C., spec­u­lat­ed that some “machines” were involved. Oth­ers thought that mounds serv­ing as ramps played a cen­tral role in the con­struc­tion. And still oth­ers have guessed that extrater­res­tri­als were the real builders (seri­ous­ly).

Now Houdin enters into the debate with what Egyp­tol­o­gist Bob Brier calls a “rad­i­cal new the­o­ry.” Using state-of-the-art 3‑D soft­ware, Houdin has con­clud­ed that the bot­tom por­tion of the pyra­mids were built with an exter­nal ramp, and the upper por­tions with inter­nal ramps. Brier sum­ma­rizes the the­o­ry rather well in this short arti­cle.

Houd­in’s work has focused par­tic­u­lar­ly on the Great Pyra­mid of Giza, oth­er­wise known as the Pyra­mid of Khu­fu, built cir­ca 2500 B.C. (See image here). And he has gone so far as to cre­ate a 3D inter­ac­tive film that visu­al­ly doc­u­ments his hypoth­e­sis. We’ve embed­ded a good clip above. You can also head to Khu­fu Reborn to get the full inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence. (Note: You’ll need a PC, 3D glass­es and some down­load­able plu­g­ins to make it all work.)

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Klaus Nomi: Watch the Final, Brilliant Performance of a Dying Man

in Music | August 1st, 2011

Klaus Sper­ber was born in Immen­stadt, south­ern Ger­many, in 1944. As a teenag­er, he dis­cov­ered his love for opera and also pop music. In the ear­ly 1970s, he moved to New York and soon found many friends among the East Vil­lage artists there. Around this time, he start­ed using the pseu­do­nym Klaus Nomi, an allu­sion to the Amer­i­can Sci­Fi mag­a­zine Omni and an ana­gram of the Latin word omni(s) (all, every). David Bowie dis­cov­ered Nomi in 1978 and helped him sign with RCA records two years lat­er. But Nomi’s musi­cal career was cut short when he was diag­nosed with AIDS  — an ill­ness vir­tu­al­ly unheard of in those days. He died in New York on August 6th, 1983, at the age of 39 — two years before Rock Hud­son’s death raised pub­lic aware­ness of this new ill­ness. His ash­es were scat­tered over New York City.

Klaus Nomi’s musi­cal style was undoubt­ed­ly unique: he com­bined opera and New Wave pop music and per­formed his music in elab­o­rate stage shows rem­i­nis­cent of retro-futur­is­tic Sci­ence Fic­tion visions of the 1920s: face paint­ed white in Kabu­ki style, black lips, extrav­a­gant clothes and hair­styles inspired by Cubism. One of his most famous live per­for­mances is Total Eclipse from the music film Urgh! A Music War (1981).

The video above shows Klaus Nomi’s last per­for­mance before his death. Towards the end of 1982, he returned to Europe for a small con­cert tour and also per­formed at Eber­hard Schoen­er’s Clas­sic Rock Night in Munich, close to the place where he was born. He chose the Aria of the “Cold Genius” from Hen­ry Pur­cel­l’s 1691 opera “King Arthur or, The British Wor­thy.” In the third scene of Act Three (The Frost Scene), the Cold Genius is awak­ened by Cupid and ordered to cov­er the land­scape with ice and frost. The answer of the Cold Genius is sung by Klaus:

What pow­er art thou, who from below / Hast made me rise unwill­ing­ly and slow / From beds of ever­last­ing snow? / See’est thou not how stiff and won­drous old, / Far unfit to bear the bit­ter cold, / I can scare­cly move or draw my breath? / Let me, let me freeze again to death.

This per­for­mance is cer­tain­ly one of the most mem­o­rable in oper­at­ic his­to­ry — Klaus Nomi con­veys the mes­sage of the text with every fiber of his body (note in par­tic­u­lar the move­ments of his hands and eyes). And as one YouTube com­menter put it, the fact that Klaus knew that “he was dying of AIDS when he gave this per­for­mance (…) gives an added albeit unwant­ed poignan­cy to his per­for­mance.”

There are two oth­er famous per­for­mances of The Cold Song: by Andreas Scholl and Sting. You can decide for your­self how they com­pare to Klaus Nomi’s inter­pre­ta­tion.

Bonus mate­r­i­al: In 2004, the doc­u­men­tary film The Nomi Song took a clos­er look at Klaus’s life and music (view the trail­er here). YouTube also has two inter­views with Klaus Nomi: Klaus Nomi on NYC 10 o’Clock News (c. 1981) and a 1982 inter­view from French TV.

By pro­fes­sion, Matthias Rasch­er teach­es Eng­lish and His­to­ry at a High School in north­ern Bavaria, Ger­many. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twit­ter.

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