Slashdot Mirror
UC Berkeley Posts Full Lectures to YouTube
mytrip writes to tell us that Berkeley is now using YouTube as an important teaching tool. Today marks the first time a university has made full course lecture available via the popular video sharing site. Featuring over 300 hours of videotaped courses initially, officials hope to continue to expand this program.
By watching these, it will have the same effect on me as getting UC Berkeley degree!
(Except for the job offers and stuff.)
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
You would think that YouTube would balk at being the distributor for a university. Will they try and make money with this?
Free sharing of knowledge will only help create more and better engineers and scientists. MIT does something similar as well- at least outlines, and sometimes full lecture notes and videos are available at http://ocw.mit.edu/ for almost all their courses.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Over 300 hours of videotaped intercourses?
Did they mean Porntube, isn't it?
Clicking around randomly, I had to laugh at the attendance for Chemistry 3B, lecture 21. Yeah, that's about par for the course for Orgo that late in the term.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
educating themselves with all this online courseware stuff? Seems to me like most people would still need the oversight of having papers due, the classrooms discussions, and the 1-on-1 talks with professors to get the most out of a subject. But I could be wrong.
Sleeping Kittens 101
Girls Fighting Girls 273: Advanced Techniques
I Love Turtles Symposium
The future looks bright!
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
The internet wasn't created to distribute information, dammit!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...since this will allow students to evaluate their lecturing style in addition to the other aspects that they consider when choosing a course. Personally I would have taken a harder calculus class if could have had another better lecturer. And conversely there are a few non-core courses that I would have dropped if I'd seen the way they were taught.
And hopefully in the end it will lead to a somewhat higher standard in lectures all over in the long run even if there are some that will never change.
I wonder if this is the last gasp before the masses realize...
If you need to pay your own way though college (like I did), you're much better off buying 100- and 200-level credits at the local junior college and saving your money for the 300+ level stuff universities specialize in. (The teaching quality of 100/200's in the junior colleges is usually better than that at universities too - you get an actual teacher with a masters who came up through the high school ranks instead of some useless grad student who's stuck with you because he/she can't get a job.)
Because, depending on the professor, attendance might still be mandatory to get the coveted piece of paper at the end.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
UC Berkeley has been webcasting their classes for several years now. http://webcast.berkeley.edu/ It looks like they're just offloading the storage and network to youtube now.
For a course that I have to take - yes. For something that I'm really interested in - No.
I wish I can remember the term, but there's this style of teaching/learning that's called something like Discovery Learning - I think. Anyway, here's an example of how it works and this is how I learn(ed) computer science (I'm 42 and always learning) in a nutshell:
I see something, an algorithm, a piece of code in a language I've never seen before, whatever. I then say to myself, "WTF is that! I have to find out!" I then Google for it and start reading up on it. When I was a kid and learning how to program graphics, I started teaching myself geometry and trigonometry so I could eventually get the Apple II to draw graphics. The information has stuck with me until this day. Now, the grammar that I had to learn hasn't - as if you couldn't tell.
I really think if our education system got away from the rote learning and drills and allowed kids to learn and have fun at it - it can be fun when you are personally discovering something - our education would greatly improve.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Blah blah blah, all code for: "You can't take LSD over the Internet."
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Not sure about that - I picked up my bad attitude at Duke U, and they like to think of themselves as a "top" school. (Maybe I should have accepted MIT's invitation instead.)
I suppose that might be marginally useful if you're going to get a doctorate in math someday, but I was just a lowly engineering major trying to get on with life without picking up student loan debt. If I was interested in the bells and whistles, I could have gone to the local bookstore and picked up a book on the history of math, mathematicians, etc.
Instead, I was self-funded and debt-free a year out of college: the kind of accomplishment that gets employers' attention when competing with lightweights who coasted through college on their parents' dollar.
As a Berkeley Student, the first thing I thought was YES! Now I don't have to go to class. But seriously, this is why I really like UC Berkeley. They are a public school and seem to really take that to heart. While they wont give any schmuck a degree, they are funded in large part by the taxpayers so why shouldnt anyone be able to take advantage of what they have to offer?
These are already available on the UCB site. I do like the YouTube format better, but the selection from the Berkeley site is currently larger. They have some great analog transistor design classes there.
The ultimate goal of science is to unify all forces of nature to a single law that can be silk-screened onto a T-shirt.
- A complete (spoken) language course on Youtube / web for free would be very valuable. I could easily imagine sitting down for many hours watching a series of these and emerging with conversational language.
One way to pick up French or Spanish is to use the alternate audio and subtitles found on nearly all Hollywood DVD movies. Often there is both audio and subtitles in both French (for the Quebec audiences) and Spanish along with English second subtitles for the deaf.
When paying close attention to the spoken dialog you will notice that it doesn't match the subtitles. That's because the films are actually translated twice by different teams. Once for the audio dubbed dialog and again for the subtitles.
For French try and find modern French movies that have made it to the USA. The dialog and titles (for deaf French speakers) usually match exactly.
For Spanish try paying close attention to the spoken language that is often used for public announcements. Our streetcars repeat every announcement like station stops and cross connections in Spanish. Also try using the auto checkout in grocery stores and ATMs in Spanish.
You could actually try talking to people who are speaking the language that you are trying to learn. This has mixed results in real world contacts. Also try using the web translators like Systran or even the excreteable BabbleFish. Libraries have foreign language sections. Often popular titles are available translated into Spanish and sometimes French. Harry Potter and Steven King novels are often available in both English and Spanish, but in different sections of the library. There used to be books with French (and German) written on the left page and the parallel English text on the right page.
The library may have language DVDs or CDs that can be ripped and copied quickly. If you can rip an entire CD of language dialog in a minute or less, then why not just grab five or six of them. Polish, Portugese, Thai, Japanese, Urdu... Why not?
If you take public transportation, try the game of evesdropping (very discretely) on people speaking foreign languages and trying to determine what language they are actually speaking. I've quietly listened to people from Mexico and realized that they weren't speaking any language that remotely resembled Spanish. When I asked my Hispanic friend (soy estan gringo) about this, she said that they probably were speaking Mayan or some pre-Columbian Indian language that survived in the distant rural villages of Central Mexico. You will eventually be able to tell Spanish from Brazilian, Japanese from Chinese, Polish from Russian, and even if you become a bus-language master, the differences between the various SouthEast Asian languages like Lao and Vietnamese.
Anyway, I'm rambling... ironically... lots of language..so little to say.