"Fausto Fernós' eye" by Jason Smith. Click photo for details.
When I lived in London I used to attend lectures and talks at least once a week (often at the Royal Institution, a wonderful place).
They were one of the mainstays of my intellectual life, and I used to leave many of them babbling with excitement (the adult equivalent of kids doing chops and kicks as they leave Kung-fu movies).
Here in Belgrade there are still many talks and lectures that one can attend, but unsurprisingly, it cannot match London.
Luckily there are several superb sites at which you can see (or sometimes just hear) recorded lectures and talks that are guaranteed to stimulate you intellectually.
Here is a list of my 10 favourite sites and resources:
- TED.com - The runaway best video lecture series. Superfood for the mind. I have seen some literaly stunning presentations on this website. Brilliant men and women are given 20 minutes to make their main points. Do yourself a favour and go and check it out.
- Pop!Tech – Is a “one-of-a-kind conference, a community of remarkable people, and an ongoing conversation about science, technology and the future of ideas”.
- Edge.org – Undoubtedly one of the most concentrated sites of brilliance and inspiration on the planet.
- What Is Enlightenment Unbound – “WIE Unbound delivers fresh weekly audios, videos, and downloadable MP3s featuring the leading-edge visionaries, mystics,scientists, philosophers, and activists found in the pages of What Is Enlightenment? magazine.”
- @Google Talks (YouTube Channel) – Authors, scientists, politicians and other luminaries talking to staff at Google.
- UChannel (University Channel) – A collection of public affairs lectures, panels and events from academic institutions all over the world for you to view, listen to, stream or download.
- World Lecture Hall – World Lecture Hall, your entry point to free online course materials from around the world.
- WGBH Forum Network - an audio and video streaming Website dedicated to curating and serving live and on-demand lectures given by some of the world’s foremost scholars, authors, artists, scientists, policy makers and community leaders.
- MIT OpenCourseWare – It was MIT that kicked off the whole lectures-made-public phenomenon when it made its learning materials available online.
- Zencast.org – OK, this may look like religious proselyting, but Zencast has beautiful lectures on the theme of Buddhism and mindfulness from the likes of Alan Watts, Gil Fronsdal, Thich Nhat Hanh and Eckhart Tolle.
- Academic Earth – “Thousands of video lectures from the world’s top scholars.”
- YouTube Edu – Videso from colleges and universities, including lectures.
Here are some other sites I am not so familiar with:
- Smart People on Cool Topics Series: SciTalks (Science), Busitalks (Business), HumTalks (Humanities)
- VideoLectures.net – Aims to provide free and open access of a high quality video lectures presented by distinguished scholars and scientists at the most important and prominent events like conferences, summer schools, workshops and science promotional events from many fields of Science.
- Freevideolectures.com – Bringing free education to everyone
- Top 10 Universities With Free Courses Online
- Big Think – Brand new and interesting
Other resources
For a list of my current favourite Podcasts, Streams, Radio Stations and Audio Blogs , see this post.
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Great post, thanks.
I thought for a while now that it’s suddenly become possible to get an extremely high quality undergraduate education for free via the web. (Especially in a subject like psychology). It’s quite remarkable how quickly this has happened – maybe 5 years ago this was certainly not true. Imagine how things will look in another decade…
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