So Lyle Hopwood was kind enough to point out to me after I wrote this post about Apple, iTunes and their educational initiative that MIT provided lots of their courses online.

This got me wondering and wandering around the web, looking for places where I could find some brain candy - especially since intelligent, challenging and learned documentary television seems to be so totally out of fashion (have you seen what they’ve done to Horizon!).

And the good news is, there is stuff out there.

Fora TV
Perhaps the most technologically sophisticated and slickest of these sites, with a really wide-ranging scope and a pile of content drawn from recordings of think tank events and public discussions. Although the site claims to draw material from all over the world, there’s a pretty heavy US bias - which makes the politics and much of the arts stuff less interesting to me. Europeans (and Australians) might twitch to discover the three top stories in the “Europe” section were an address by Aussie PM John Howard, George Bush on “democracy and security”, and a thing on the Middle East. There’s plenty of meat in the science and health channel though.

RESEARCH CHANNEL
The Research Channel (with it’s UK equivalent) draws on academic sources to provide their material. There’s some great panel from the University of Southern California and Robert Lawrence Kuhn (I particularly enjoyed one with Marvin Minsky and Francis Fukyama) and another with David Brin, Octavia Butler & Michael Crichton on “Is Science Fiction Science”. Sadly the specifically British content isn’t as good - it’s much shorter and less wide ranging. Video quality on these sites is variable (and it’s never particularly high) but there’s content is intelligent. The better programmes are those that don’t try to be so slick.

UNIVERSITIES
As Lyle pointed out, there’s a broad range of material available at MIT’s site and other universities, such as Princeton, Cornell and Imperial College London also have material available to stream or download.

BBC
The BBC have a lot of archived radio stuff on their site. By far my favourite - and perhaps the best thing the BBC does - is Melvyn Bragg’s “In Our Time” the Radio 4 panel discussion which can transform a dreary train journey and costs me a fortune in books about subjects I really didn’t think I was interested in. Unlike most BBC programmes, In Our Time has an extensive archive of programs covering an extraordinary very wide range of topics in science, religion, philosophy, history and culture and it remains the least dumbed down thing on television or radio. You can stream or download. Also good are the collected Reith lectures going back to 1999.

See, there can be more to the Internet than flame wars and pornography… now if only the Open University would transfer their old television programmes to the web!