I’ve been meaning to do one of these Open Yale Courses online for a while. I’d love to watch Robert Shiller’s course in financial markets (I think Shiller is great but I’m undecided how much I can really tolerate hearing about financial markets…) You can also view Paul Bloom’s introduction to psychology.
I haven’t looked at many of the courses on iTunes yet but there’s a ton of stuff there too, from all over the world.
Finally, the digital democracy thing gives me a sense of need. So I fired up Donald Kagan’s Introduction to Ancient Greek History as a refresher.
The first lecture is embedded below. I’ve been putting this off for a while but once I got past the first few minutes (past the, “oh no, a crusty old professor” reaction) I was amazed. This first lecture isn’t so much about Ancient Greece as it is about the whole history of political ideas throughout Western Civilization.
Required reading, I think — as the saying goes… but reading isn’t required.
[Update: These lectures are awesome! Seven hours later I've now watched 3 more episodes (I skipped two on the Dark Ages) -- er, I mean lectures -- and I'm totally absorbed. I wish I did this sooner... Fleshing out a lot of ideas for November too. And I regret the "crusty old professor" crack. Kagan is actually an engaging lecturer -- I even LOL'd a few times. I think my reaction was more like, "Whoa, this is longer than 4 minutes and the camera isn't moving around and there's no beat." And no Auto-Tune either.]