Just when you’ve thought that you’ve seen it all …

(PS This has nothing to do with things cultural.)

via The Daily Dish

We have recently spent some time updating our Foreign Language Lesson Podcast Collection. And, along the way, one thing became clear. During the past six months, the number of podcasts offering free lessons in foreign languages has greatly increased, and the lessons now extend far beyond the traditional languages that you’d expect. In addition to Spanish, French, German and Italian, you can now find lessons (thanks to Radio Lingua) in Norwegian, Irish, Polish, and, yes, Luxembourgish. Then, there’s Arabic, Bulgarian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latin, Lithuanian, Mandarin, Romanian, Swedish, Tagalog, Yiddish and beyond. All of these podcasts can be located here. (We have indexed over 100 podcasts presenting lessons in 35 languages.) And the good part is that if you use an iPod, we provide links to iTunes. But if you don’t (if you use any other kind of mp3 player), we provide links to rss feeds as well. Enjoy.

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The German publisher Bertelsmann announced that it will publish annually a 1,000 page edition of Wikipedia starting next September. To be called “The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia,” it will sell for 19.95 euros (or roughly $32 U.S.) and feature some of the most popular articles from the German version of Wikipedia. One euro per copy will go back to Wikimedia, which runs Wikipedia. But nothing, as Readwriteweb notes, will go to the writers who actually create the encyclopedia entries.

Because Wikipedia is published under a free license, its content can be freely used and commercialized. And that’s precisely what Bertelsmann plans to do. In Wikipedia, Bertelsmann has found a motherlode of free content it. It can then monetize that content, keep most of the profits (a publisher’s dream), and kick 5% back to Wikimedia, most likely as a way to undercut the critics. It’s all perhaps legal. But does it feel a bit unseemly? Just a touch. Or maybe you disagree?

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We talk a good deal here about free university courses and lectures, and mostly we end up talking about the humanities. But here’s a good excuse to talk about the sciences, and particularly about computer science. A project started in Slovenia, Videolectures.net provides “free and open access of high quality video lectures presented by distinguished scholars and scientists at the most important and prominent events…” Among the most popular lectures, you’ll find lectures along these lines: Fuzzy Logic, Where the Social Web Meets the Semantic Web, and an Interview with Tim Berners Lee. But, you’ll also stumble upon a few non-scientific talks given by some well known names. Take for example Noam Chomsky (Force, law and the prospects of survival) and Umberto Eco (On The History of Ugliness).

For more university content, visit our University Podcast Collection and our list of Free Online Courses, which includes a good deal of scientific content. Also see our Science Podcast Collection.

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Last week, Junot Diaz landed the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with his debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The book, which Diaz took 11 years to write, also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for best novel of 2007. Below, we have Diaz speaking last year about his prize winning book at Google. (Get more Google author talks here.) You can also catch his interview on NPR’s Fresh air (iTunes - Feed - Stream here).

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A quick heads up: The first issue of The Straddler, a new quarterly online magazine, has just been launched. If the editors have their way, it will be the “anti-magazine of our day.” In the first issue, you’ll find:

• an essay exploring the relationship between an Emily Dickinson poem, the New Testament’s Book of Matthew, the Gettysburg Address, and George Bush’s 2007 Memorial Day speech.
• a consideration of the American gangster film in light of the American economic system;
• a meditation on works by Anne Carson and recent Nobelist Doris Lessing; and also
• some original artwork, poetry, and fiction.

Thanks Elaine for the heads up.

This video gives you the quick gist of how wikis work, and it’s part of a larger series of videos on YouTube — called The Commoncraft Show — that explain the inner-workings of various tech items. Recent videos delve into the mechanics of Twitter, RSS Feeds, social networking, and online photo sharing. We’ve added the video below to our YouTube playlist and the Commoncraft series to our larger collection called 60 Signs of Intelligent Life on YouTube. For other good videos that demystify things technical, you may want to check out this and this.

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Just a quick fyi: Amazon’s digital book reader, the Kindle, is finally back in supply. If you’ve been waiting since March, now is your chance.

A quick fyi: Season 2 of the television version of This American Life starts tonight at 10 pm on Showtime, and we’ve posted below the brief trailer for the new show. Meanwhile, the radio version remains the most downloaded podcast on iTunes ( iTunes - Feed - Web Site). It has been that way for a long time. And you can always find it in our Ideas and Culture Podcast Collection.

It’s not exactly the same as watching a film on the silver screen. But you get what you pay for. Below, we have Frank Capra’s 1939 classic, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, starring Jimmy Stewart and Claude Rains. For those who cling to the hope that democracies can rid themselves of corruption and special interests, this film is for you. Also, to watch 10 classic films online, visit this collection.

Get a higher quality copy of Capra’s classic on DVD here.

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Earlier this week, Travel Hacker posted this collection of tutorials explaining how to maximize the use of your iPod. And it happens to include one of our earlier posts: Turn Your iPod into a Travel Guide: 20 Travel Podcasts.

Travel Hacker could have just as easily included some of our other popular pieces. Take for example:

• 10 Ways to Make Your iPod a Better Learning Gadget
• 10 Unexpected Uses of the iPod
• 200+ Free University Courses on Your iPod

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In 2006, documentary filmmaker Jehane Noujaim (Control Room) made a wish at the TED conference (see below) — for world peace. For Noujaim, peace starts with cultural exchange, with getting to know one another. And since we all can’t travel, another way to achieve this is through film and its ability to “take you into new worlds” and “across borders.”

Two years later, Noujaim’s wish may come true, and the unifying power of film will be put to the test. May 10 marks Pangea Day, a day when people from around the world (from Mumbai and Cairo to Kigali, Rio and LA) will come together and watch the same films made by various international filmmakers. “Watch parties” will be held worldwide, and the event will be broadcast via webcast and mobile phone. Below, we’ve also posted a movie trailer introducing the concept of Pangea Day. For more information, click here. (Thanks Natasha for the heads up.)

Noujaim at TED

Pangea Day Trailer

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Last week, Alexandra Juhasz contributed a guest piece reviewing her experimental efforts to make YouTube an effective teaching tool. And it didn’t take long for the web to take notice. Soon after we posted her review, The Wired Campus (Chronicle of Higher Education) took an angle on the piece. Next, the venerable Ars Technica used the post as a springboard for its own summary. And finally, that story soon reached the homepage of Digg.com, which inevitably meant that Alexandra’s piece got picked up by umpteen smaller blogs. It’s always fun to watch the ripple effects of the web go through their motions.

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The University of Pennsylvania has done it. They’ve created a robot that you can kick apart, and it knows how to reassemble itself. Eerie stuff. Give it a few decades, and these guys (the robots and the students) will be running the show. (Video added to our YouTube playlist)

via Marc Andreessen’s blog

For lots of good science podcasts, check out our list here.

Across the pond, Apple is running a series of ads fashioned after the “Mac v. PC” commercials that have run so successfully in the States. Although the vocabulary and accent are naturally different, the gist of the British ads is essentially the same. Yes, Apple’s schtick translates well, and I’m declaring the third one my favorite. (See the series of commercials below.)

As our readers from London will know (fact: we have more readers from London than any other one city), the actors in Apple’s ads are hardly unfamiliar. The two — David Mitchell (PC) and Robert Webb (Mac) — star in the award-winning English sitcom, Peep Show, which is just about to begin a new season. (Watch second clip below. Note that it features adult language and themes.)

On the American home front, the Iraq war has entered its apathetic phase. The war continues to grind on, but the mission gets far less news ink than before, and the debate over the war’s merits and tactics rarely gets hashed back through. That’s perhaps because many have decided to mentally park the issue until a new administration takes over next year. Or because declining home prices and rising food and gas costs have elbowed the Iraq issue aside. Undeterred, Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro have co-directed a new documentary called Body of War. Being released in US theaters this month, the documentary (featuring music arranged by Eddie Vedder) tracks the daily life of Tomas Young, a soldier shot and paralyzed during his first week of fighting in Iraq, and it gives you a rare glimpse into the difficult road that Young and others have had to travel. All of this makes tangible something that the corporatized media hasn’t covered much — the real human costs of this war. To date, 4,361 American soldiers have died in Iraq; over 30,000 have been injured in hostile action; and suicides of returning vets have reportedly risen to alarming rates. Below, we have posted the trailer for the film. In addition, I’d point you to this recent podcast by Bill Moyers (iTunes - Feed - Web Site), which introduces you to Tomas Young, Phil Donohue, Ellen Spiro and the film they made.

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The New York Times is running an interactive feature that will give you the backstory behind Ansel Adams’ iconic photos taken at Yosemite National Park. Just click on the individual images on this page, and you’ll get a different story. (Also see the Times’ accompanying piece: What Adams Saw Through His Lens.)

Related Content 

Learn the Art of Photography: The Nikon Way

How Camera Lenses are Made

The Best Photoblogs of 2007

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Surviving members of the Grateful Dead announced Thursday that they will be donating their archives to UC Santa Cruz. This podcast (Feed - Web Site), featuring Bob Weir and Mickey Hart (among others), gives you insight into the thinking behind this move…

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Horror/sci-fi fans, here you go… Scott Sigler’s new and very well-reviewed thriller, Infected, can be downloaded for free via podcast (iTunes - Feed - Web site). Or you can get it in hardback for $16.47, which I’m not discouraging you from doing.

With the links above, you can download more free books from Sigler. But, I warn you that the books contain a good dose of graphic language.

Check out our extensive collection of Free Audiobooks here.

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Speaking at Brown University earlier this week, Thomas Friedman had to deal with some unfortunate extra-curricular activities. As he took the stage, two students calling themselves the “Greenwash Guerillas” launched pies (video here) at Friedman and largely missed. But they did leave behind some pamphlets spelling out their motives. According to The Brown Daily Herald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The New York Times deserved this disruption because of “his sickeningly cheery applaud for free market capitalism’s conquest of the planet” and “for helping turn environmentalism into a fake plastic consumer product for the privileged.” Somewhere the giants of revolutionary rhetoric are grimacing and wondering what happened to their once well practiced art.

Now that I’ve got your attention, I want to point you to a talk that Friedman gave last year at Stanford — Green is the New Red, White and Blue (iTunes). The talk takes you into the heart of Friedman’s complex thinking about the environment (and all that the Green Guerillas oddly take issue with). And it’s presented with the same intelligence that you’ll find on display in the second most downloaded podcast on iTunes U: The World is Flat. (This second talk was presented at MIT, and it’s only exceeded in popularity by Randy Pausch’s soulful lecture, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” which we featured on Monday.) Friedman’s thinking in the Stanford podcast (give it a listen, you’ll be better for it) lays the foundation for his new book due out in August — Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America.

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Here is a quick “lifehack” for you. You can now learn foreign languages and stay current on politics all at once. How so? By taking advantage of a smart podcast concept being used by French and German broadcasters. Radio France Internationale (RFI) issues a daily podcast called Le Journal en français facile (iTunes - feed - web site), which delivers the nightly international news in slow and easy-to-understand French. Along the same lines, the German media company Deutsche Welle (which puts out many great language and music podcasts) also has its own nightly news program — Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten (iTunes - feed - web site). It’s essentially the same concept: informative news presented in very simple German, and, in this case, it’s spoken very slowly.

Now, what’s very nice about these programs is that they also provide a written transcript of the spoken word. So you can read along as you listen and make sure that you’re really comprehending. (See transcripts in French and German). Even cooler, with the German version, if you have a video iPod, you can read the transcript on your little portable screen. (See directions).

Finally, check out this offbeat suggestion sent our way by a reader: Nuntii Latini (mp3 - web site) is “a weekly review of world news in Classical Latin, the only international broadcast of its kind in the world, produced by YLE, the Finnish Broadcasting Company.”

To learn more languges, visit our complete collection of foreign language lesson podcasts.

Related Resource: See our article called “Coffee Break Spanish & The Threat to Traditional Media”

Today, we have a guest feature by Alexandra Juhasz, Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College, in Claremont, CA. This piece consolidates lengthier blog entries about a course she ran on YouTube, called “Learning from YouTube,” in Fall 2007. The whole goal was to better understand this new media/cultural phenomenon, and how it can be used in the classroom. How did she set up this class? And what did she learn? Find out below. Take it away Alexandra (and feel free to check out our YouTube playlist as well as our piece, 60 Smart Video Collections on YouTube) ….

I decided to teach a course about YouTube to better understand this recent and massive media/cultural phenomenon, given that I had been studiously ignoring it (even as I recognized its significance) because every time I went there, I was seriously underwhelmed by what I saw: interchangeable, bite-sized, formulaic videos referring either to popular culture or personal pain/pleasure. I called them video slogans: pithy, precise, rousing calls to action or consumption, or action as consumption. I was certain, however, that there must be video, in this vast sea, that would satisfy even my lofty standards, and figured my students (given their greater facility with a life-on-line) probably knew better than I how to navigate the site.

Learning From YouTube was my first truly “student led” course: we would determine the important themes and relevant methods together. I had decided that I wanted the course to primarily consider how web 2.0 (in this case, specifically YouTube) is radically altering the conditions of learning (what, where, when, how we have access to information). Given that college students are rarely asked to consider the meta-questions of how they learn, on top of what they are learning, I thought it would be pedagogically useful for the form of the course to mirror YouTube’s structures for learning, like its amateur-led pedagogy. Yes, on YouTube there is a great deal of user control, but this is within a limited and also highly limiting set of tools. So, I did set forth the rule that all the learning for the course had to be on and about YouTube. While this constraint was clearly artificial, and perhaps misleading about how YouTube is used in connection with a host of other media platforms which complement its functionality, it did allow us to become critically aware of the constraints of its architecture for our atypical goals of higher education. Thus, all assignments had to be produced as YouTube comments or videos, all research had to be conducted within its pages, and all classes were taped and put on to YouTube. This gimmick, plus a press release, made the course sexy enough to catch the eye of the media, mainstream and otherwise, allowing for an exhausting, but self-reflexive lesson in the role and value of media attention within social networking. Beyond this, students quickly realized how well trained they actually are to do academic work with the word—their expertise—and how poor is their media-production literacy (there were no media production skills required for the course as there are not on YouTube). (more…)

It’s perhaps a stretch to call this a piece of “open culture,” except that the footage, using time-lapsed video to show a man stuck in an elevator for 41 hours, accompanies a piece printed in the latest edition of The New Yorker — Up and Then Down: The Lives of Elevators.

Then, there’s this noteworthy fact: the video (see below) is hosted on The New Yorker’s new YouTube site, which we have added to our collection “60 Smart Video Collections on YouTube.”

Related Content:

• The New Yorker Magazine Crosses the Digital Divide
• Satirizing Ahmadinejad: The New Yorker Picks Up Where SNL Left Off
• Animated New Yorker Cartoons: A Funny Twist on Einstein’s Relativity

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Thanks to a new program called Britannica Webshare, web publishers — be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers who post frequently on the web — can now get free online access to Britannica and its 65,000 articles. Normally, this service runs $70 per year. For more info, read TechCrunch’s scoop on the new initiative. To sign up, click here.

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By now, many of you have probably seen (or at least heard about) the last lecture by Randy Pausch, a computer science professor from Carnegie Mellon University, who is dying from pancreatic cancer. Entitled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” the lecture (see video below) is upbeat and uplifting without being the slightest bit morose. And it sets an example for how we can think about living and dying. The lecture has been watched by millions on YouTube, and it serves as the basis for a new book called The Last Lecture, which is now the number one bestseller on Amazon. We’ve added the video to our YouTube playlist. If you haven’t seen it yet, give it your time. It will teach you something more valuable than anything else we serve up here. Also, you can download it on iTunes.

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Today we’re highlighting for you a new course posted on Stanford University’s iTunes site. Originally presented by Stanford Continuing Studies (where I happily spend my days), Global Geopolitics is taught by geography expert Martin Lewis, and “examines the global political situation from a geographical perspective. Topics include: how the countries of the world were formed and came to occupy their present territorial configurations; border conflicts and other spatially based international issues; struggles for secession from established states and movements for territorially based autonomy; and the development and enlargement of supranational organizations such as the European Union (EU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). While the course is globally comprehensive, special attention will be given to current sites of geo-political tension. Maps will be used extensively for both descriptive and analytical purposes.”

[NOTE: This is an enchanced podcast that allows you to see images and maps referenced in the lectures. To view them, click on View, then Show Artwork, in iTunes. This will let you see them on your computer.]

You can now download the first lecture. Additional lectures will be released in weekly installments. The course is also listed in our collection of Free Online Courses from top universities.

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Penguin is presenting six stories, by six authors, over six weeks, in a series called We Tell Stories. And they’re using the web to tell these stories in original ways. One story, The 21 Steps, gets told over Google Maps — an approach that scores points for creativity, but also tires a little quickly. You can access all six stories here. Also check out our extensive collection of free audiobooks here.

via BoingBoing

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The folks at Apple have rolled out an intriguing new podcast that takes you inside the world of moviemaking. The Set to Screen Series (get it on iTunes here) follows Baz Luhrmann, the Oscar-nominated director (Moulin Rouge! and William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet) as he works on a new film. And every three weeks, from now through October, a new video podcast will be released that shows you how films get made. On-set still photography, costume design, cinematography, scoring — it all gets covered here. And yes, of course, this podcast is all in video. You can get more info on this project here.

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Can you bear it? If not, here’s a version by Christopher Walken.

(This video has not been added to our YouTube playlist.)

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