Academic Earth: Continuing to Celebrate Open Source in Education!

Thanks to Joyce Valenza Ph.D and the Never Ending Search Blog, I was reminded about Academic Earth. Just like she states, "Time again to celebrate the generous world of open source in education!"


Professor Diamond begins this lecture with her famous discussion of the human brain.

This is a MUST SEE for everyone! (The 1st four minutes have a great message)

Currently in Beta, the site, in the true spirit of the open source movement, was founded to give everyone on earth access to a world class education. More about Academic Earth's noble mission:

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment that in which that content is remarkably easy to use and in which user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

Lectures originate from:
Berkeley
Harvard
MIT
Princeton
Stanford
Yale

We can now point high school teachers and students, and other life-long learners we know, to lectures in the following subject areas:
Astronomy
Biology
Chemistry
Computer Science
Economics
Engineering
English
Entrepreneurship
History
Law
Mathematics
Medicine
Philosophy
Physics
Political Science
Psychology
Religion

Users can create lists of favorites. Videos are sharable, emailable, embeddable. Some are downloadable for the iPod. All are rated by viewers. For researchers, full citation information pops up instantly.

Academic Earth (joins several other wonderful academic portals on Joyce's streaming video pathfinder)
iTunesU iTunesUniversity lectures as iTunes files
TED: Ideas Worth Spreading
UChannel (from universities around the world)
ResearchChannel (university content)
TED (video from great thinkers)
Academic Earth (video lectures by top scholars)

It also joins a growing list of fine portals for open courseware:
OER Commons
OpenSource Textbooks
MIT’s OpenCouseWare
MIT Highlights for High School
Molecular Workbench
Curriki
Encyclopedia of Life (content about every species reviewed by museums and research institutions around the world)
Wikibooks Open content textbooks

Thanks again to Joyce for all of the great information! J.T.