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Educational tools, content explored netspeak

Numerous new educational materials are being released on the Net. This week, NetSpeak reviews the current state of this ever-expanding segment of the on-line world.

Lots of course offerings from renowned colleges and universities are available on-line now ( http://www.hinduonnet.com/biz/2006/10/16/stories/2006101600581700. htm). In addition, many universities host their videos on Youtube.

The recently launched ‘Youtube-Stanforduniversity’s Channel’ (http://youtube.com/user/stanforduni versity) is an example.

Here, along with course videos such as ‘Classical Mechanics’ (http://youtube.com/view_play_list?p= 189C0DCE90CB6D81), you can find course commencement videos from great orators/performers like Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey.

Also, take a look at this resourceful web page with several links to educational videos hosted on Youtube: http://www.oculture.com/20 08/01/10_university_collections_on_youtube.html. Besides this, you may enjoy this beautiful post of ‘Openculture’ (http://www.oculture. com/2007/07/freeonlinecourses.html), with lots of links to free on-line courses from various universities worldwide (on subjects such as archaeology, architecture, cultural studies and economics).

Iberry.com (http://iberry.com/) with a wide array of educational materials is another wonderful resource for higher education teaching/learning. Here you can find links to video/audio lectures and lecture notes on topics such as arts, engineering, science and social science. A notable feature of this site is the news aggregator (http://iberry.com/cms/node/74) that brings together several news feeds from sites with educational content.

Whether you support the ideology it propagates or not, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital) is widely considered as a great work. If you wish to learn more on this work, check out : http://davidharvey.org/, where a series of video lectures on this book by David Harvey, who has been teaching this subject for the last 40 years, is being posted.

Learning objects ( http://www.hindu.com/biz/2003/11/17/stories/20031117000 70200.htm) are self-contained educational resources that can be re-used for different courses. Connexions (http://cnx.org/), an educational resource network that provides a platform to create/share re-usable educational resources, can serve as the next step in this realm. The service allows you to create course modules or generate a complete course on a subject by assembling the modules already hosted by other users. A quick glance at this educational resource repository (http://cnx.org/content/) could bring you a surprising number of course materials on a wide array of subjects (arts, humanities, business maths and the like).

If you are an English literature student or teacher you may find the site Litsum (http://litsum.com/) that hosts free book summaries attractive. The site hosts guides and chapter summaries of several famous books such as ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, ‘Much Ado about Nothing”, ‘The Da Vinci Code’ and so on.

A variety of audio content (audio books, novels short stories etc) is available for free on the Net. If you spend lots of time commuting everyday, audio books might make your travel time productive. The availability of cheap MP3 players with lots of storage has further augmented the demand for audio content. Besides their entertainment value, audio dramas have lots of educational value. For instance, English audio dramas could be used to improve one’s English language listening skills. If you are keen on audio dramas, take a look at the directory Dramapod.com ( http://www.dramapod.com/). This audio drama directory hosts links to audio content in such categories as old radio dramas, comedy, science fiction, Shakespeare and so on.

A file’s extension helps us determine the nature of the file and the application(s) required to create/read it. We come across a variety of file extensions daily and it is likely that some of them are unfamiliar ones. The file extension directory Dotwhat ( http://www.dotwhat.net/) is a handy tool.

J. MURALI

He can be contacted at: jmurali@gmail.com

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Educational tools, content explored netspeak

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