Archive for October 2007

Today we’re going to start a new weekly series trying out and grading university open coursewares. It seems like every week some ivory-tower starts an iniative to open up their doors to us common-folk. While everyone generally lauds these efforts, I think it’s time to ask: how good are these courses?

While here at OEDb we’re pointed out some of the best (such as these 100), in this series we’re going to look at some of the most popular and more obscure offerings with a critical eye, grading each program on (1) the number and variety of courses offered, (2) substance, (3) the material mix & accessibility and (4) overall grade.

To get this started, we’re going to take a look at the series from Utah State University, one of my favorite OCW’s. Although not the largest site out there, this is an OCW with heart, putting lots of attention into each course they post.

Number and Variety of Courses Offered: C+

Hey look, we’ve gotta call a spade a spade, right? USU isn’t going to compete with MIT or Berkeley when it comes to the shear number of courses available. 73 courses ain’t too shabby, but far too many of them are on Weed Control, Turf Management or Lambing and Sheep Management. The courses of more general interest are really excellent, but unfortunately, there aren’t enough of them - eg, there’s only one physics course and three english courses. While I can respect USU for trying to make these more rustic courses available (you aren’t going to find Cattle Management alongside the Charles River), the more general courses are so good that I wish there were more of them.

Course Substance: B+

Far too many OCW programs are lacking when it comes to the quantity and quality of materials per course. USU has done a good job focusing on fewer, well-developed courses. For instance, the course Blogs, Wikis, New Media for Learning has a tremendous amount of content and links (this is a great course to pass along to the parents). With the Quantum Mechanics course, there are pretty detailed notes for each of the 37 lectures. Also, these extension courses on agricultural topics all offer a large quantity of video that you might be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. Overall, I would say that you will find few “substance-light” me-too course on USU where little material actually available.

Material Mix & Accessibility: A-

This is the category where USU truly shines. With most of the USU courses you can say something that you cannot about far too other OCWs: you can use the course and really learn - all the materials I need to learn are provided for me. I’ve previously referred to these courses as Turn-key OCW’s.

Let’s take a look at some examples. The excellent Anthropology of Religion course has multiple videos, lecture notes, images, quizzes and links for each of the ten classes. Although, unfortunately, an interested student would probably need to but this $65 textbook, you could work with these materials and really learn. Similarly, although the excellent 1st year Chinese course would encourage you to purchase some texts, there are plenty of great video lectures and writing lessons that work well on a stand-alone basis.

Meanwhile, there are some online courses that would classify as true turn-key courses, cuash as the Instructional Games class and the English 2010 series. All in all, the courses have a good mix, generally with audio/video, lots of online materials and self-testing resources. If not for the overall reliance on non-open source overpriced textbooks, this would be an ideal example of material mix and accessibility.

Overall Score: B+

USU is an example for other programs to aspire to. The courses are well-developed and accessible while the site is clean and easy to navigate. That being said, there is still room to improve. USU should develop more courses and make them more accessible. They talk about using the Learn HTML course with 60 kids in Hong Kong and Mainland China, while asking you to buy Sam’s Teach Yourself HTML (huh?). With all the free HTML learning resources, I somehow doubt these kids got a copy of Sam’s guide.

So final grade is a B+ … we’re tough graders but just because we want more and more for free. Maybe that’s whiny and needy but if we’re going to offer “open coursewares” I think it’s fair to expect openness and full courses.

Stay tuned. Next week we’ll take a look at Berkeley.

Check out these awesome photos an abandoned Soviet brain research lab.

Last week we took a look at LiveMocha. I was very impressed - it had been a while since I’d checked-out the latest language-learning communities and I was very surprised by the advances. With Mango, I have the same “wow this is great” feeling regarding free online language-learning tutorials.

Mango could be a paid site. But it’s free. Mango starts with some of the traditional online learning site like those at the BBC and takes it to the next level. For instance, I logged in and tried Italian for English speakers. Over 113 flash “slides”, I am walked through exercises to help me understand a basic conversation. The site loads quickly and uses sound, color and repetition to help you get comfortable and familiar with the material. A list of the features is here. But what really impressed me is that after this first lesson I had 99 MORE to go through. Similar options are available for Spanish, French, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Pig Latin, Russian and other languages. There is also English courses for Spanish speakers.

This is a great site to use and a great site to follow. Glad that it’s free.

An oldie (started back in 2000) but still goodie, Ricci Adam’s MusicTheory.net covers everything from the Treble Clef to Diatonic Sevenths. Although the lessons are really thorough and easy to follow, for me, the best parts of this site are the trainers and utilities. One thing is learning the theory and the other thing is being able to hear it in practice. Try the ear trainers to see if you are accurately hearing the intervals. The utilities include chord calculators, which display the intervals on a keyboard, and custom printable ledger sheets. The course materials are available under an attribution-noncommercial creative commons license, so feel free to use them in class.

We’ve previously looked at some good online sources for free documentaries. This google page (mygod! somebody used one!) is a good interface for browsing 589 videos organized by topic and subtopic: eg, Health> Drugs> LSD: The Beyond Within. I’m constantly impressed by all the good documentaries online…and endlessly amazed that they aren’t taken down for copyright violation. But best to just innocently enjoy them and applaud the efforts to make them easier to find.

Osalt.com helps you find free, open-source software, organizing the materials by their commercial equivalents. For instance, if you don’t have 100’s of bucks for Photoshop, try one of these equivalents (I use GIMP - it’s great). If you’re fed up with iTunes, try Amarok or Banshee. Tired of 5 million video programs and stupid codecs? Download VLC - one video player to rule them all….seriously…you will need no other. Hope this helps!

Listening to words is probably the most comprehensive and usable source for free online lectures. With 1366 lectures listed in dozens of topics, you’re sure to find something that strikes your fancy. It’s great to have all these materials in one place and even greater that they’re so well organize. Want only mp3s? You have the option. Looking for video? You got it. Sort by university or author. Look for tags you like. Browse popular to see the best lectures. By signing up you can also create playlists and favorites to come back later. Listening to Words is a great, timesaving tool in the jungle of online lectures.

Now here’s a school commute!

A wonder collection of Chema Madoz’s bizarrely creative photos. More here.

I’ve never been much into cooking and during those university years pre-wife, I’m hard pressed to even think of what I ate and how I managed to survive. Best I can remember is a lot Ramen noodles and friend chicken from the corner shop with bullet-proof glass. I guess that MGD has a lot of vitamins and nutrients.

With my wife pregnant and dead-tired, I’m trying to pick up some of the slack. And feed her something other than a bowl of cereal between groggily waking up from a catnap on the couch and carrying her rapidly-expanding belly to bed.

Here are some of her favorite cooking pages (she really likes to cook…lucky for me…and reads these pages regularly). While I’m still no Ferran Adria…and honestly not even much of a Rachel Ray…I have to admit that I’m starting to have fun.

Delicious Days

Delicious days is the most wonderful food blog around. First off, it is simply beautiful. The bloggers are a couple who live in Munich, who, as far as I can tell, dedicate their time to photography, cooking and travel. The pictures are superb, the recipes varied, well recorded with photos step by step, interesting and well, delicious. The search engine is lovely, you can also browse though the recipes by category - all so organized and professional and good good. The only down side to this blog is that they dont post as often enough as you would like. Maybe it’s more of a quality over quality thing, but it might just be that they’re more into cooking than blogging.

Food Network

Americans will be familiar with this popular cable tv channel with well-known shows such as 30 minute meals and Everyday Italian. Lots of show clippings are on the website.

Jamie Oliver

Jaime Oliver is my favorite celebrity chef and his shows - especially the recent ones such as Jamie at Home - are really excellent. Unfortunately, he’s a bit of a slacker when it comes to his website although there are some good recipes and video clips. The podcast is great and nice to bring with you on the go although he seems to update only every few months.

Yumsugar

Maybe a little too girly, but still a good source for quick tips and interesting recipes. Some of the recipes are interesting, “Yum” posts regularly, and on mondays she talks about making a meal out of her sunday’s recipe, which is pretty clever.

Nami Nami & Milk & Cookies

Two nice amateur blogs in the delicious days vibe though not quite as pretty. Both sites are a bit heavy on baking but still some good info here.

Ask Metafilter: Cooking Tag
The site has tons of great cooking-related posts with lots of recipes and good links (eg, check out this post from today if you still hate the idea of cooking).

Lots of other good cooking sites are book-marked at del.icio.us, although have to admit that these sites are the ones I’ve been frequenting the most.

PS. If you are a total beginner, check out these 20 lessons to kick-start your cooking skills.

Over on the Stingy Scholar we’ve looked at a number of language-learning community sites such as Soziety, Friends Abroad and Shared Talk. But with no disrespect to these great resources, Livemocha takes online language learning to the next level. This is a site I’ll be use a ton over the next few months (I’m try to learn Mandarin). Why is it so good?

Lots of language-learning web sites are based around community interaction, but Livemocha give you something to interact about. It’s one thing to provide a meet-up site where someone who “speaks english / learning italian” can meet someone who “speaks italian / learning english” - but then what do you talk about it?

Livemocha provides some truly excellent Rosetta Stone-styled courses and  shows you who else is doing this course and who is online right now. Rather than blindly seeing if someone wants to talk, you can see who’s studying what and what they already know. Pictures and profiles provide more info on the person to help break the ice.  Additionally, students can upload some writing and speaking samples to receive feedback. In short, Livemocha takes the premise of the language learning community and provides content and a format where that community can really be put to work.

The actual conversation screen is well thought-out as well. While the basics are all handled well - Livemocha can hook into your microphone and webcam and an im screen is available - they’ve also thought to add some neat little features. A virtual keyboard is available so you can copy in foreign accents in your conversation. An translating dictionary is alongside the speaking window. Best of all, some little sample conversations are provides so you can try them out - giving you a basic script for the chat.

I have to admit, I only found this webpage earlier this weekend and maybe my enthusiasm is a bit hasty. I’m going to use this for real over the next few weeks and we’ll reconvene here with some more advance opinions. If you want to try it out, sign up and look for me.

Long nights at the computer have been killing my eyes over the past week. This post has some good tips on how to avoid ever-thickening lenses and some interesting comments on how bad staring a computer screen is for you. For instance, computer use decreases blinking to a third of the normal rate and small fonts can actually cause rises in blood pressure and stress levels

So what are practical solutions? For starters, it’s best to work in a well-lit but not overly lit room and support the light of the monitor with a side desk lamp. Keep the screen 20 to 30 inches from your face and if you need to read off documents considering a document holder to place them vertically by the screen (I’ve never gotten into them but know many colleagues that swear by them). If you’re still stuck with an old cathode monitor, be sure to adjust the refresh rate to the best setting and consider a glare filter for easier viewing.

At the end of the day, the strain is something we all just have to get used too but every little trick helps.

Lit to Go is an excellent resource for K-12 lit teachers from the University of South Florida, containing audio and pdf files from Aladdin’s Lamp to the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The downloadable mp3s are professionally recorded and class questions/other teaching materials are provided. Learn Out Loud has organized the materials by grade level if you’re trying to think of what to use with you class. This quite an impressive free resource - materials such as these are either expensive or not so well done (particularly the audio).

Not much educational value to this, but if you need a study break try bmovies.com for a wide selection of free, streaming kung fu, horror, western and sci-fi classics.

Just added is one of my favorites - early Peter Jackson’s “Bad Taste“. Do you find people falling off cliffs and stuffing their brains back in their skulls while birds peck at them entertaining? If so, then this is a movie for you!

Just came across this video. Looks pretty amazing - gotta try it out.

The “invisible college” of academic blogs contains a wide world of professors speaking intelligently and off-the-cuff. This wiki attempts to organize blogs authored by professors, ordering them by subject and university (the famous crooked timber blog roll is the base list). Some topics (ie, culture, theory literature) have many more entries than others, but this is a good starting point for anyone looking to find academics talking online.

Both my wife and I are heavy readers, sometimes even going through 4 or 5 books in a week. Although friend recommendations help (including our good friend amazon.com), we always have a hard time finding new good books.

With so many book listing/sharing sites on the internet, we decided to try some of them out. Since most of these sites have suggestions features, we used the same five books at each place: Nicholas Christopher “A Trip to the Stars”, Paul Auster “Mr. Vertigo, Carlos Ruiz Zafon “La Sombre del Viento / The Shadow of the Wind”, Cormac McCarthy “Blood Meridian” and Jonathan Safran Foer “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” (you can see them all here).

Here are our opinions.

(1) Library Thing -

This is one of the first and best-known booklist webpages with 19 million books cataloged. Free members can only list 200 books before having to pay $10/year or $25/life.

Wynn says: I like that the searches come up directly through Amazon.com or other sources, since Amazon doesn’t always have all foreign-language books. Very easy interface for adding. The member reviews are pretty good but I wish there was always a basic description of the book (plot, etc.) like on Amazon.

Library Thing has some of the best bells & whistles, such as code to stick in your blog, cell phone and rss notifications, etc. There is also a heavy focus on tagging if you’re into that sort of thing. The Zeitgeist page is a great resource for finding stuff other people like.

The suggestions are pretty good as well but for me the most useful is being able to browse through the collections of all the other members. The best thing about this site is the active member community. I don’t think I would get too involved in the forum talks or rely too much on people’s ranking and reviews, but it’s nice to have so many people chiming in.

Cheli says: I like that it shows you all the different covers for the books and that you can choose which one you want to use. The idea that you an unsuggest a book that stems from one you liek it very good, but to less internet savvy people… how do you unsuggest? I couldn’t do it. Still, I don’t know if I would really get into using it. To me it’s the same thing as Amazon but a bit more cumbersome to use.

Our grade: A-

(2) Goodreads -

One of the other more popular sites with a useful facebook application.

Wynn says: A nice clean interface and some cool options that aren’t on Library Thing, such as the ability to add your own writing. Since it’s ad-based there are no input limits and many of the same bell & whistles, such as code to embed on blogs, etc. There is also a facebook widget which is pretty useful although not as good as the visual books ap (see below).

I like that when signing-up they look through my contacts to see who is already a member. The site does a good job of balancing the community networking without overshadowing its functional use.

Cheli says: Many things I like. Primarily, that you can see what your friends, or your friend’s friends have read. Voyeuristic fun and also a good reading guide. It’s also nice that people post their own writing. Are these things people would want to publish? Do they copyright? Do they share just for fun? To get it out there?

Our ranking: A-

(3) Reader2 -

A little more bare-bones than LibraryThing but 100% free and with many similar functions.

Wynn says: I like how the images pop-up on the side while trying to add books. The brief description is good and the “What to Read Next” options takes me straight to what I’m really interested in. Doesn’t look to be the same kind of community as on Library Thing, but there are a good number of suggestions on here. Tags seem to be the best way to navigates. Overall, decent, but gets overshadowed by Library Thing.

Cheli says: It’s not so pretty and it’s not so useful.

Our grade: C

(4) Listal -

A social networking site socializing around media.

Wynn says: Looks like an interesting sites for people interested in various types of media and meeting other people. The ability to add YouTube videos is unique to the site and the site, overall, is pretty attractive and 2.0-y. I had a hard time find some of the books (eg, when I tried searching for Nicholas Christopher nothing came out, but Trip to the Star came out when I searched for the title).

Unfortunately, the site seems to be more about social networking than finding new stuff to read. I had a hard time coming up with recommendations. I had to put in alot of entries and add friends before anything came up. I don’t need another social-networking site and don’t think it’s worth all the trouble just to come up with more stuff to read.

Cheli says: I’m too lazy to bother with this site.

Our grade:B-
(5) Lib.rario.us -

Lib.rario.us is another catalog page for books and all media types. Still in alpha.

Wynn says: Not too attractive a site and obviously still in early development. I like that there is a del.icio.us style add to favorites to put items from amazon on the site although the library thing interface is still much better. Doesn’t look like there are too many users - when I was on, I didn’t see anyone else under the “see who else is online” feature.

Cheli says: Either I’m too dumb to get this site, or all it really does is catalog your stuff. And the you can also see other stuff, randomly put together…

Our grade: C-

(6) Bibliophil -

One of the original book cataloging sites.

Wynn says: A bit out of date techwise, but there are still some good suggestions on the phpBB message board. Not too much point of going through the trouble to add my books here since it is so much easier on some of the other sites. Nonetheless, will probably spend a bit of time going through here looking for good reads.

Cheli says: Looks like a webpage from the 90’s.

Our grade: B-

(7) Visual Bookshelf -

The most popular facebook book cataloging application.

Wynn says: This seems to be the application that most of my facebook friends are already using. I like that I don’t have to sign-up or do anything since it works right in facebook. The best feature is that all of my friends’ books get listed together making it easy to browse. It’s also a fun way to meet other facebook users with the same taste.

A cool little ap but not exacty a substitute for the breadth of tools and options on Library Thing.

Cheli says: Again, love to see what friends are reading. I like that all the book covers are nicely lined up. Very nice that you click right onto Amazon.
Our grade: B+

Bottom line Wynn: Library Thing really is the best option out there and I could even image paying the $10 or $25 if I really get into it. But honestly, I think I’ll be using Visual Bookshelf since it works 100% in facebook and it’s so easy to use and see my friends suggestions.

Bottom line Cheli: My favorites are Visual Bookshelf and Good Reads because they’re very visual, and I can easily see what my friends are reading. The book covers are nicely shown, which really is so important… and peeking at friends’ reading lists is so much better than random “recommendations”.

Avi sends me this recent Lifehacker post on lesser known .edu sites with good, free materials. While you guys probably know many of these there are some good picks to try out. For instance, the listed art history resources are very useful - especially the “mother of all links” page from the University of Michigan. Among the science listings, the most fun is the virtual microscope, letting you see 90 samples up close. Visit the original post for the selection of space, history, photography links and more.

Also, since we’ve been talking about good documentaries on Google Video, here’s a top 10 list from Dmitri (the Best Video blogger).

The University of Wisconsin has 27 explicit (but educational!) human dissection videos online. I can’t really believe this is freely available on the internet, but…then again…where else would you find it? Crazy stuff.

Textbook Torrents is a Pirate Bay for textbooks, lectures and other learning materials. Without passing judgment on the legality of the site or materials, I’ll say that is has some excellent materials and a whole lot of them - particularly in the “Arts” tab. FYI - I had a bit of trouble creating an account (the page kept failing) but seemed to work after a couple of goes.