Monday, January 08, 2007

Three Interesting Sites

In my journeys around the web yesterday, I found three sites that are interesting so I thought I'd share them with you.

~ The first one is Open Culture, which is cool all on its own. But even more cool is a post there revealing that we can download UC Berkeley lectures for free from iTunes. That's just too damn cool.

No matter where you live, you can access at no cost the very same courses attended by students paying full tuition. And, given the critical mass of courses being offered across a range of disciplines, you can put together your own personalized curriculum and expand your horizons on the fly.

If the humanities are your thing, you can take US History: From Civil War to Present, Existentialism in Literature & Film, or European Civilization from the Renaissance to Present. If you're into the social sciences, you may want to consider World Religions, Peoples and States, US Foreign Policy after 9/11, Human Emotions, or Introduction to Statistics. Turning to the hard sciences, you can take your pick from Physics for Future Presidents, Introduction to Chemistry, General Astronomy, and General Biology. Finally, for those with a technology bent, you can consider listening in on An Introduction to Computers, The History of Information or even The Foundations of American CyberCulture. But, if these particular courses aren't for you, there are many more to choose from.

~ The second site is from the National Constitution Center and is an Interactive Constitution. It allows keyword searches, exploration by topic, and examination of Supreme Court cases. You can download and print the Constitution or just read each of the individual articles. The Interactive Constitution is based on The Words We Live By: Your Annotated Guide to the Constitution by Linda R. Monk.


~ Finally, there is another free on-line encyclopedia. This one isn't a wiki, but it seems to be pretty cool all on its own. The HighBeam Encyclopedia has over 57,000 entries from the Columbia Encyclopedia. But if it doesn't have anything on the item you are searching for, it still pulls up magazine articles and whatever else it can find on the item you searched for.

My general test of these things is to enter Roberto Assagioli, the founder of Psychosynthesis and a rather obscure figure in modern psychology. There was no entry for him, but the thing pulled up several magazine articles in which he is mentioned. That's better than most.


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