For someone whose wages are paid by an institution delivering courses in a more traditional fashion, maybe this interest in open courseware is distinctly unhealthy. But this is classy stuff...
From Open Culture: In India, there are seven institutes dedicated to training some of the world’s top scientists and engineers and making the country an up and coming world power. They are collectively known as the IITs, or the Indian Institutes of Technology. And now some of the IIT courses are being made available in English on YouTube for free.
Topics covered at present are:
Civil Engineering
Computer Science and Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Electronics and Communication Engineering
Mechanical Engineering
This is a massive resource with each course taking around 40 hours. On brief acquaintance some look fine, others consist of a PowerPoint narration. Given that India is at the forefront of software development, etc. these resources are definitely worthy of your consideration.
From Bill Chapman: I hope you'll allow me to add that the Esperanto Association of Britain offers a free Esperanto postal course. Suitable for those who would like a quick taster, this course gives an overview of the language in twelve bite-sized portions. Once you have received the first lesson, simply return your answers with an SAE. Your tutor will reply with guidance and the next lesson. All learners pay is postage!
The long awaited DAISY plug-in for Microsoft Word is now available to download from the DAISY website .DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) is a universal standard format for reading and publishing digital talking books.With the ‘Save As’ DAISY plug-in Word documents, versions XP to 2007, can now be saved as DAISY compatible XML format.
Of course the download is at SourceForge and it's zipped so we can't download it here so we have to go and get our technical chums to "release" the site which may take some time and anyway SourceForge is run by dangerous cyber-terrorists so we're not sure if we can do that without compromising the integrity of our network which we've seriously compromised anyway by having this obsession with "network integrity" and tweaking it so that it barely creaks along now...
As promised a selection (ragbag) of sites which may (or may not be) of some interest to adult learners. All free and all come with the Phantom Engineer's seal of approval.
Mi Vida Loca BBC again, but this is new. Mi Vida Loca (My Crazy Life) is a Spanish course for beginners. There will be 22 episodes, themed according to language topics such as directions, shopping, etc. Each episode is a combination of real-action video with language teaching and practice, focused on developing communicative skills. First 5 episodes are avalable now. http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/spanish/mividaloca/
Annenberg Media Very, very American. Very, very good. A series of series of educational broadcasts on the arts, history, literature, economics, etc. etc. For example, The Western Tradition is a series of 52 half-hour programmes on the rise of western civilisation or, rather, civilization. You have to register to stream the videos but worth the effort. Like having the Discovery Channel on tap. http://www.learner.org/
Interesting though that in this Web 2.0 age of collaboration (wikis, blogs, CMS, social bookmarking, etc.) collaboration still means, for some, allowing others to do their collaborating for them. I was (probably) much too far out all my life, And not waving but drowning.
Without going into great detail - after all we do not live in a blame culture here at aRKive - sometimes it is necessary to kinda think outside the techie box and preempt any, well, potentially disastrous loss of data.
So when your Exchange Server goes toes up about every few days, don't worry, be happy!
Or rather download a copy of the Personal Folders Backup plugin for Microsoft Outlook. (Why isn't this a standard feature?). Works in Outlook 2002 / 2003 / 2007. Choose which of your folders you want to back up; choose how often you backup.
Does it work? We'll see when they get the server back up (sic) on its feet again.
It's Adult Learners' week in the UK next week so this will be the start of aRKive's (rolling) contribution. Why support Adult Learners' Week? Well, NIACE figures published today show that there has been a 3% drop in the numbers of adults participating in learning in the last year. And since we're in the lifelong learning business, and I suppose that business is the appropriate term these days, we'll try to do our bit here, on the interweb, since it's a wee bit late to provide anything in the physical world. Failure in communication systems, I'm afraid. So over the next week there should be a selection of online sites which may interest the adult learner (and hopefully others), all free and, I suppose, available if you have internet access...and that's another story and another problem for another day.
Not ten guitars exactly and, to be honest, I'm not sure where this flurry of guitar-related internet activity came from, but here we go.
It's Guitar Week in The Guardian / Observer. If you didn't get the two-part guide in the weekend's papers they are online in their entirety (I think). With an added video ingredient. Very useful stuff even to these gnarled and rheumatic fingers. Every day this week (from Monday 12) they're publishing "songbooks" - tab, notation, chords - from, well, the usual suspects. You'll have to buy the paper for those though. http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/guides/playingguitar/
Some free software - information courtesy of the ever-excellent MakeUseOf.com.
Did Wendy Alexander read (& subsequently act upon) Ian Jack's article in The Guardian of April 26? Entitled If Boris Johnson wins next week....it might be time to leave England and move north, he ruminates upon a future Britain with probably the most powerful politicians in the UK being two old Etonians (& Bullingdonians - seriously scary stuff), Messrs Cameron [2] & the aforesaid Johnson [8].
The new Nine Inch Nails album, The Slip, is available for free download (MP3, FLAC, M4A Lossless) at http://dl.nin.com/theslip/signup . Just register to be emailed the download link, then buy the CD / vinyl in July.
Marketing ploy? Sure. Any good? Download and listen!
A day late perhaps, but, still it's the MayDaze weekend, so no apologies. And no apologies for the Billy Bragg version either. Don't want this blog to be seen as having a political axe to grind. This one's for Boris Johnson!
5th - 11th May 2008 is Deaf Awareness Week and organisations working with deaf people across the country are inviting everyone to 'Look At Me'. The theme aims to improve understanding of the different types of deafness by highlighting the many different methods of communication used by deaf, deafened, deafblind and hard of hearing people, such as sign language and lipreading.
Supported by over one hundred deaf charities and organisations under the umbrella of the UK Council on Deafness, Deaf Awareness Week involves a UK wide series of national and local events. "The UK Council on Deafness are delighted to coordinate the all-inclusive Deaf Awareness Week campaign, promoting the positive aspects of deafness, social inclusion and raising awareness of the huge range of local and national organisations that support deaf people and their family and friends."
For someone whose wages are paid by an institution delivering courses in a more traditional fashion, maybe this interest in open courseware is distinctly unhealthy. But this is classy stuff...
