lynda.com Video Training

When a company such as lynda.com offers free online video training, a person in my line of work signs up. Granted, all the videos are partial-lessons/marketing tools to get us to spend money, but the information they do provide for free is very helpful. And, hey, if you watch one of the training videos and realize you would be better off with the full lesson then it's worth your time and money. Some topics include: Google Search Tips, Podcasting, Flash 8 Video Integration, Click-to-play Videos and CSS Navigation Styles with Dreamweaver 8. Lynda.com has been producing these videos since February of this year. You can subscribe by clicking here. It's well worth your time.

Gapminder: Visualise Human Development

From their Web site: Gapminder is a non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualise human development. This is done in collaboration with universities, UN organisations, public agencies and non-governmental organisations. In collaboration with Google they have produced this software: http://tools.google.com/gapminder/. It's good to see an organization truly pushing the capability of Flash (and Google for that matter). It's some of the most advanced work I've ever seen, presented in a simple, easy-to-use fashion. Go to the following page to download charts and tools from Gapminder: http://www.gapminder.org/index.html.

Berkeley and iTunes: Academia at its Best

I learned about Berkeley's iTunes site today. Check it out here. I listened to a few items, and the Politics and Public Policy event, "Bush Science: Use and Abuse of Science in Policymaking," was very interesting, but not all that surprising. Is this the future of education? In addition to events, Berkeley has also posted full courses on these pages. Anyone can virtually attend any class at any time. And they've kept everything very simple and straightforward. My friend Alan told me about MIT's online course section, which isn't as multimedia oriented, but still pretty cool. Stanford launched an iTunes page a few months ago (check it out here) but it's not nearly as academic as Berkeley's initiative. Are Stanford and Berkeley the only two schools who have officially launched iTunes pages? I found an interesting podcast put out by the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication started back in January, but nothing close to what Berkeley or even Stanford has. It'll be interesting to watch this space grow and see who takes the lead. Right now I would argue Berkeley has a clear advantage.

The Night Sky Podcast + Stellarium

I've recently developed a strong interest in astronomy, and found two things worth checking out: The Night Sky podcast and Stellarium software. Stellarium is, "a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. … Just set your coordinates and go." It's available for Linux, Mac and Windows. The Naked Eye is blogged here, but you can find it on iTunes by doing a search for "Andrew Douch," creator. Douch is a professor at a local school in Shepparton, Victoria, Australia, and initially set up the podcast for his students, describing the night sky in his part of the world. If you put the coordinates for Shepparton, Victoria, Australia, into Stellarium you can see the same night sky Douch desribes in his podcast. Even if you don't find this stuff as interesting as I do, it's pretty amazing how technology literally puts the world at your fingertips. And it's free to everyone.