Saturday, October 1, 2011

Open Education and Bio380 lecture on Neanderthals

This academic year I have set myself the goal of making all my lecture available for all, in the public domain, via YouTube and maybe also Slideshare. The technical side of doing this is fairly straightforward (capture a screen movie via QuickTime), but the major hassle is ensuring and documenting permissions for all images. In my first attempt, I quickly realised that putting this information on the same slides as the images led to cluttered chaos, so I have piled them all up at the end of the talk.

It is unclear to me what the rules are about using material from published papers, but cannot see how authors would not want students to know about their work. So, in general, I am proceeding along the course of it is easier to apologise afterwards rather than ask permission in advance. If anyone objects to anything I have done, let me know and I will remove the offending material from the public domain. Also, if anyone has tips on how to do all this as efficiently and fairly as possible, please let us know via the comments. Ditto if you want to send words of encouragement!

It will be interesting to see if anyone other than my own students look at this stuff, but here we go, the game's afoot! Information wants to be free!

Here is my first lecture for this year from the Bio380 course: Waking the Dead, on Neanderthals and their influence on the modern human gene pool. Enjoy!

Slidecast via YouTube




Slides via Slideshare