“When MIT announced to the world in April 2001 that it would be posting the content of some 2,000 classes on the Web, it hoped the program – dubbed OpenCourseWare – would spur a worldwide movement among educators to share knowledge and improve teaching methods. No institution of higher learning had ever proposed anything as revolutionary, or as daunting. MIT would make everything, from video lectures and class notes to tests and course outlines, available to any joker with a browser. The academic world was shocked by MIT’s audacity – and skeptical of the experiment. At a time when most enterprises were racing to profit from the Internet and universities were peddling every conceivable variant of distance learning, here was the pinnacle of technology and science education ready to give it away. Not the degrees, which now cost about $41,000 a year, but the content. No registration required. It’s a profoundly simple idea that was not intuitive.”
Tag: 08.03
The Tools Of Music
“There’s definitely something science fiction-like about a lot of experimental musical instrument building, but perhaps that is because we still fully don’t have a language to describe many of the new sonorities these instruments produce. When many of the instruments we’re used to nowadays were brand new, they probably seemed just as incomprehensible. The reverse is also true. Playing on an older version of a familiar instrument can feel like being greeted by someone on the street in Anglo-Saxon…”
The “Distributed” Library
An experiment in the San Francisco area tries to create a virtual “distributed” library. “List the books and videos that you own. You will then have access to the multitude of books and videos available in other people’s collections. You can search for specific authors or titles, browse individual collections, find nearby users, or find people who like books in common with yours. You will have access to user-written reviews and have the opportunity to write your own. If the owner of a book or video you’re interested in has time for you to pick it up, you can check out items for a 2, 7, 14, or 30 day period (at the owner’s discretion). Returning books late will get you negative feedback, while returning books promptly will get you positive feedback.”
Reducing Ideas To Slides (The Quickest Way To Kill Ideas?)
“Slideware -computer programs for presentations -is everywhere: in corporate America, in government bureaucracies, even in our schools. Several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are churning out trillions of slides each year. Slideware may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience. The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.”
A Turn To The Traditional?
Is a new aesthetic of traditional realist art gaining traction? Some “recent surveys show evidence of a very interesting mind shift among a number of young American painters living here or abroad. In general, a broad spectrum of older artists seem almost inevitably to include shock, angst, or politics in their works—an impulse to disturb articulated in The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes. On the other hand, a growing majority of American artists who today are under 40 years old seem more intent on creating paintings that are visually beautiful, rather than emotionally disturbing.”
Kramer Discourses
Art critic Hilton Kramer expounds on the artworld and reflects on his career as an art critic in a series of audio clips… Among the juicier bits: “Critics who refuse to make judgments…are quickly seen to be… either the whores or the eunuchs of their profession. They may elicit our pity or inspire our contempt, but they can never command our respect…”
Poetry (And Poets) Explained
“Being a poet in America makes as much sense as a butt full of pennies. That’s one of the pleasures of being a poet in America. There’s something wonderful, something perversely subversive about being disconnected from the world of goods and services and John Maynard Keynes, if only for an hour or two every now and again. It’s freedom. Poetry is an uncharted wilderness along whose margins capitalism wilts like arugula in the Wedge parking lot on the Fourth of July.”
Are Music Pulitzers Getting Better?
The music Pulitzer has long been derided for its lack of insight into the best of American music. But, writes Dean Suzuki, “perhaps real change is afoot in the Pulitzer music category, first awarded in 1943. You can, as I did, go on the Pulitzer website and find a list of all winners, as well as nominees (the latter for each year dating back only to 1980). And while it has been slow in coming, there is a perceivable transformation that is taking place. Not only has the past few years seen prizes awarded to composers who would not even have been nominated ten years ago, the stylistic range of nominees has expanded.”
Ukraine – The Land Fads Forgot
“It often seems to me that Ukrainians have a distinctive immunity that protects them from the gaudy attractions of fashionable trends. Having said this, there is a thoroughly prosaic reason for such immunity. In a country of 48 million people the middle class is too small, and the poorer classes, preoccupied with problems of day-to-day living, too numerous, for them to have the time and energy to give which fads need to take root. No all-encompassing means of communication has been established; it is impossible for everyone to learn about the same phenomena simultaneously. So everyone, so to speak, sings his own favourite song.”