Abstracts
Online Stored Video Lectures
Physical attendence at a lecture has its advantages. The quality of the
experience is infinitely higher, there is the option of interactivity, realtime
outcomes have the spice of unpredictability, and often there are free snacks.
However stored lectures are certainly convenient, plus you can surf -- watch a
few minutes of lecture A, a few of B, etc., etc., - - before committing to any
one in particular. To the degree that a scorching first five minutes is
diagnostic of the whole this approach pretty much guarantees a quality
experience. You do need to have a pretty deep pool of choices, but there is
good news out there on that.
Perhaps the global leader in this field is Cambridge University's magnificent Videolectures.net. MIT has by far the
richest archives locally, supporting three big stored video libraries: MIT Tech TV, MITWorld, and OpenCourseWare.
(Selections from these archives also appear on iTunes U and YouYube.)
MIT Tech TV is MIT's YouTube. Incredibly
varied. Here is one example, not
that one example could possibly be typical. There is often
something interesting here,
which links to a collection of the videos MIT has used to illustrate its press releases..
MITWorld carries several hundred videos
of events at MIT, including hundreds of lectures on science and technology.
Lectures tend to be addressed to a general but sophisticated public, are usually
about important subjects, and are often delivered by the key investigators of
the field. MITWorld is also noteworthy in that someone has bothered to write
comprehensive abstracts for most of the entries, a feature that almost all other
archives lack. I might recommend Grant Wilson's talk on Nanofabrication and
Stephen Chu's overview of
thermodynamics.
Finally there is the famous OpenCourseWare, which
contains actual lectures from real classes. Perhaps
the most famous of these
are the physics lectures given by Walter Lewin. Dozens of colleges around the world
have followed MIT's example (including Tufts
and UMass), although not many
offer a video lecture archive like MIT's.
The Media Lab has a small
archive of its own events, as does
The Computation for Design and Optimization
Program.
MIT is conducting a couple of interesting experiments with the medium. Note
especially the Lecture
Browser -- a project of the Spoken Language Systems Group. A subset of
lectures were copied from the above libraries, run through a speech recognizer,
and the resulting text indexed. Anyone wishing to locate a specific term or
usage in a lecture needs only to type that term into the search field. The
engine will pull up all the lectures in which that term appears, presenting you
with an audio copy and the transcribed text, starting both versions at the
point where the term of interest appears.
Other academic institutions in the area have much smaller archives, at least on
the topics of interest here. As of January 08 there were about twenty videos
tagged as "science" (most recent - April 4, 2007) and eight tagged as
"technology" (April 13, 2007) in harvard@home, Harvard's primary video
depository. Other associated archives are scattered among the Radcliffe Institute, the Evolution and Theology of
Cooperation Project, the Mind/Brain/Behavior
Intiative, the (highly recommended) Observatory Night Lectures
at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the Longwood
Seminars and Science in the
News Initiative, both at the Harvard Medical School. Like they say at
Harvard, "Every tub on its own bottom". The Harvard School of Public Health has a few items.
Outside Harvard and MIT pickings are slim. BUniverse, BU's archive, is just
getting off the ground. The topic category called "Science, Technology, and
Math" contained ten lectures on March 29, 2008). (That said, when BU does
record a talk it is often an exceptional event by someone really interesting,
like Murray
Gell- Mann or Freeman Dyson.)
You can find a complete list of all videos by clicking on the 'search' link
without entering a keyword in that field. Recommended: Artificial
Intelligence in Video Games with Ian Davis. The Museum of Science
has a small
archive. Tufts' Wright Center for Science Education has some lectures on
"cosmic evolution" here.
One reason why local institutions do not have their own libraries might be the
presence of the WGBH Forum Network, a
local consortium that records and serves events of interest sponsored by its
members, most of whom are local. As of January 08, the WFN reported serving
2,000 lectures which in aggregate had been streamed about a million times. About
250 lectures are tagged with either "science" or "technology".
There are good abstracts.
Dartmouth's archives are pretty thin,
despite the campus' rep as a high-tech player. Recommended: a short video about the creation of
the world's smallest steerable, untethered, mobile, robot.