I was looking through the podcasts on iTunes today, hoping to find something new and interesting, and noticed that Concordia University seems to leave most of the class materials they put up open to anyone. They have introductory Greek and Hebrew lectures (audio and video both).
Just fire up iTunes, go to the store (you don’t have to buy anything), follow the “iTunes U” link, then to Concordia. The “Exodus and the Torah” class has several lectures on textual criticism (which I’ve not listened to).
I noticed quote a few cool things on iTunes lately. They are starting to get a little more eclectic. Just another way Apple will eventually take over the world! Look out Bill! If they are brave enough to make their next OS so that it can operate on any hardware (namely PC hardware), they will slaughter the Microsoft guys. And yes…I do have a PC (three actually) and a Mac, but I prefer the Mac hands down, even though I’ve been a PC user for years.
Thorough? I only looked through a few of the lessons to be sure they were openly available. It has been a while since I’ve needed elementary instruction in Greek. I think the Condordia podcasts would be good for someone who wanted to jump right into Koine but who hadn’t previously studied some highly inflected language in school (Latin, German or Russian, say). The resolution on the chalkboard could be better.
An awful lot of the flakiness of PC operating systems comes from the Wild West World of hardware vendors. By making their own hardware Apple has much better control over the user’s computer experience. I can’t imagine them giving that up.
I agree–but they may not have a choice. When the Intel Macs came out last year, it was two weeks before hacks were freely available to let Windows run on them. I imagine it’ll be a similar period after Leopard (OS X 10.5) comes out next month before you’ll similarly be able to run it on a PC. I wouldn’t, for the very reason you mentioned, but you know there are people who will. Apple may have to just issue lists of approved components and combinations thereof, and telling everybody if they stray from that list it’s at their own risk. They have been using a lot more standard, commodity parts in recent years, anyway.
Using Mac-on-Linux one can fake the Apple ROM chip with a file (which is basically a dump of the contents of the chip). So even that tactic has been surpassed (though hardly anyone cares to run System 7 these days).
As for the Greek instruction, my roommates and I spent the better part of Saturday night making fun of how incredibly bad it was. It saddens me and sickens me, because I know that the quality of instruction offered by Concordia is average. Like far too many Classics professors I know, he is condescending, unpleasant, and clearly very angry about something I cannot determine. And the whole syllabus is really atrocious fundamentally — naught but a glorified reference grammar.
Shouldn’t college students be doing something else on a weekend night, like drinking or wenching or something?
It saddens me and sickens me, because I know that the quality of instruction offered by Concordia is average. Like far too many Classics professors I know, he is condescending, unpleasant, and clearly very angry about something I cannot determine.
This seems awfully harsh, and little to the point. Granted I only sampled randomly, but I saw nothing that would impair the studies of autodidacts looking to supplement their books, and much that would help if they managed, like so many US students, to get through school without ever being expected to know what a direct object is.
I just listened to the lesson on vowels and I liked the awareness that his pronunciation is conventional, which is sometimes missing. My favourite part though was the quick run through of the Modern Greek pronunciation: “this is pronounced ee, this is pronounced ee, this is pronounced ee, this is pronounced ee, …”
One of my linguistics teachers had a severe speech impediment which gave grounds to a joke featuring her discussion of the three phonemes: “f”, “f” and “f”.
I just found several lectures on iTunesU devoted to Homer, Vergil et al.
Sorry I didn’t track the exact locations, but you’ll find this stuff on the Stanford and UC Berkerly links. Look through the humanities or literature links for each of these schools.
Now that I’ve found this stuff, I regret to inform the forum community that I’ll be spending some time away from Textkit until I’ve listened to all these wonderful lectures available for free. Thanks, Annis, for bringing this to my attention.
I’ve been digging on the sci-fi podcasts that they are offering. There are a lot of complete books, some read by the author that are quite good. It makes my 15-30 minute commute in the mornings quite nice.
So far I like…The Secret World Chronicle, by Mercedes Lackey
I started listening to Taken Liberty, a Tale from the Arbiter Chronicles, but like so much sci-fi out there, it was overtly sexual…like that’s all they talk about in the first couple of episodes. BUT…the story line was pretty compelling.
I also started listening to Jim Kelly’s Free Reads, but frankly…his voice bothered me, and he has just the slightest of a lisp…that was enough that all I could hear was his vocal imperfections…
In the off chance there are people who don’t know of it already, a great podcast that frequently covers classical topics is In Our Time (also available through iTunes). They have started off the new season with Socrates.
