Recent Arrivals: The Great Courses catalogue expiring February 16, 2012

SFFaudio Recent Arrivals

The Great CoursesThe Great Courses (formerly called The Teaching Company) has a new catalogue out. It is offering discounts up to 80% (for Canadian customers). I’ve scanned it, here’s the |PDF|, but be sure to have a look at it quickly as the catalogue’s offers expire on February 16, 2012.

Incidentally, this new course entitled Espionage and Covert Operations: A Global History sounds terrific!

Posted by Jesse Willis

Norbert Elliot’s lecture on Jorge Luis Borges

SFFaudio Online Audio

NJITNorbert Elliot’s World Literature 330 course is designed to offer:

“…students an opportunity to enhance their understanding of contemporary global interactions by exploring a diverse array of culturally expressive artifacts–novels, short stories, and poems–groups geographically by region. Course readings represent the following regions: North America; Latin American and the Caribbean; and Australia and Oceania”

Lecture 11 is titled – Jorge Luis Borges |MP3|

Posted by Jesse Willis

New Releases: The Great Courses (The Teaching Company) Summer 2011 Catalogue

New Releases

The Teaching CompanyAs promised, I’ve got a complete scan of the latest Teaching Company catalogue – and I did it before the prices expire! Strangely this catalogue comes not from a random discard, but instead from my mom, who had it come in her mail. She’d never heard The Teaching Company, or this catalogue of “The Great Courses” and she has no idea how she got on their mailing list!

It isn’t fair. I want to be on that list!

Here’s the Summer 2011 catalogue of The Great Courses |PDF|

And as usual it’s just lousy with educational goodness. Among the many lecture series that struck me as cool sounding were:

How To Become A Superstar Student, 2nd Edition (Page 11)
The Art Of Teaching: Best Practices From A Master Educator (Page 21)
Games People Play: Game Theory In Life, Business and Beyond (Page 31)
The Wisdom Of History (Page 37)
Books That Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (Page 39)
The World Was Never The Same: Events That Changed History (Page 41)
Classical Mythology (Page 51)

Posted by Jesse Willis

MIT: J. Michael Straczynski: The Julius Schwartz Lecture

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Here’s a two hour lecture given by J. Michael Straczynski at MIT back in 2009. Sorry, there’s no audio only edition.

MIT Tech TV

This year’s Julius Schwartz Lecture speaker was transmedia creator J. Michael Straczynski, who has most recently entered the motion picture arena, writing the period drama Changeling for Clint Eastwood and Angelina Jolie, adapting such books as Lensman for Ron Howard, World War Z for Brad Pitt’s company, and They Marched Into Sunlight for Tom Hanks and Paul Greengrass, as well as reviving Forbidden Planet for Warner Bros. and selling two new original movies, The Flickering Light and Proving Ground to Universal and Tom Cruise’s United Artists, respectively. He has also begun work on Last Words, a pilot for a new TV series for the TNT network.

Previously known best for his role as the creator of the cult science fiction series Babylon 5 and its various spin-off films and series. Straczynski wrote 92 out of the 110 Babylon 5 episodes, notably including an unbroken 59-episode run through all of the third and fourth seasons, and all but one episode of the fifth season.

His early television writing career spans from work on He-Man, She-Ra, and The Real Ghostbusters through to The New Twilight Zone and Murder She Wrote. He followed up Babylon 5 with the science fiction series Jeremiah.

Straczysnki also enjoys continued success as a comic book writer, working on established superhero franchises, such as The Amazing Spider-Man, Supreme Power and Thor, as well as his own original series, such as Rising Stars, Midnight Nation, The Twelve, and The Book Of Lost Souls. He is also a journalist, publishing over 500 articles in such periodicals as the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Writer’s Digest Magazine, and TIME Inc.

He was one of the first television producers to actively engage his fan community online and has consistently explored the interface between digital media and other storytelling platforms.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Lecture on Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick

SFFaudio Online Audio

Here is David Gill’s fascinating three part lecture on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as recorded at the 2010 Philip K. Dick Festival in Colorado.

I’m afraid there is no HuffDuffing these MP3 files, but they are downloadable.

<a href="http://philipkdickfestival.bandcamp.com/track/david-gill-on-do-androids-dream-of-electric-sheep-part-1">David Gill on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? part 1 by Philip K Dick Festival</a>

<a href="http://philipkdickfestival.bandcamp.com/track/david-gill-on-do-androids-dream-of-electric-sheep-part-2">David Gill on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? part 2 by Philip K Dick Festival</a>

<a href="http://philipkdickfestival.bandcamp.com/track/david-gill-on-do-androids-dream-of-electric-sheep-part-3">David Gill on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? part 3 by Philip K Dick Festival</a>

And, as a bonus, here’s Erik Davis on “Dreaming, PKD, Lovecraft

<a href="http://philipkdickfestival.bandcamp.com/track/erik-davis-on-dreaming-pkd-lovecraft">Erik Davis on Dreaming, PKD, Lovecraft by Philip K Dick Festival</a>

[via the Total Dick Head blog]
Posted by Jesse Willis