Online Video Suddenly Gets Brainy

David Kesmodel writes "Several online-video efforts are under way that offer a more cerebral alternative to the typical fare seen on the Web, the Wall Street Journal reports. The ambitious Fora.tv, for example, intends to establish relations with all of the lecture series from the nation's scores of think tanks, civic groups, bookstores and the like, and then put tapes of their speeches and panel discussions online in an easily searchable fashion."

MIT Open CourseWare

[The Media Mechanic]

MIT's Open CourseWare has online videos of undergraduate and graduate course lectures of actual math, engineering, physics professors... Many of whom are top researchers in their fields. This is about as brainy as you can get!

For example...

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-01Physics-IFal l1999/VideoLectures/index.htm [mit.edu]

Re:i wonder

[Drew McKinney]

It has already for some time. "Big Media" calls the phenomena of short internet videos and blurbs "infosnacking". Blogs, aggregate sites and sites like Youtube are included as sources of infosnacks.

CNN and MSNBC have both tried versions of online blogs and infosnack videos with little commercial success. A few years ago MSNBC launched its big campaign to many oohs and aahs from insiders but few people on the 'outside' paid little attention. While small internet news productions like Rocketboom took off from such content. It seems industry still hasn't caught on.

PBS did a great documentary on this called the "News Wars" - i think part 4 of 4 or 3 of 4 is where they talk about infosnacking.

Re:MIT Open CourseWare

[compro01]

one of the instructors at my collage has been doing something similar for the past 3 months or so. every lecture is posted in both video/video and pure audio (for the dial up users among us).

it's very handy when i have to miss a class, as i can just get the video and find out what happened that day.

Re:i wonder

[pfhlick]

The News War documentary is free online here [pbs.org]. Highly recommended!

bloggingheads.tv

[jalefkowit]

Another example of brainier-than-usual video that isn't mentioned in TFA is bloggingheads.tv [bloggingheads.tv], which hosts hour-long dialogues between two experts on various issues of the day (mostly political, but sometimes they have science, religion & culture too).

Of course, since "experts on various issues of the day" tend not to be among the most attractive people in the world, and the video is just of them talking, I have no idea why they don't just do audio-only and save bandwidth. But if you've got a Mickey Kaus pin-up on you're wall, consider your day made!

new trend, but not *really* new.

[morethanapapercert]

I have been watching two sites regularly for "brainy TV". Both consist of generally very good public speakers giving a lecture or presentation about important concepts. The first I found was TED [ted.com] which focuses more on future concepts, developing trends in society and that sort of forward looking stuff. The second was one I first discovered on my local PBS station (TV Ontario) and later hunted down online. The show is Big Ideas [tvo.org] which features mainly the most skilled Canadian College and University lecturers talking about the subjects that they teach.

I particularly liked Jacalyn Duffin's [tvo.org] lecture about the history of medicine during the Rational Movement and it's relation to the scientific method in making a diagnosis.

If anyone knows of any other good webcast sites (other than the MIT open courseware project, which I already have.) please let me know.

Here's some brainy fare

[WamBamBoozle]

I enjoy the Stanford CS Colloquium [stanford.edu].

The article doesn't actually link to the subject sites, so here you are: fora.tv [fora.tv] and ResearchChannel [researchchannel.org].