“With Academic Commons, we seek to form a community of faculty, academic technologists, librarians, administrators, and other academic professionals who will help create a comprehensive web resource focused on liberal arts education. Academic Commons aims to share knowledge, develop collaborations, and evaluate and disseminate digital tools and innovative practices for teaching and learning with technology. If successful, this site will advance opportunities for collaborative design, open development, and rigorous peer critique of such resources.”

This in from Mashable…

Ever had one of those moments when you really wished you knew how to do something specific? If only there were someone you could ask…

Thanks to the social web, particularly niche blogs and expert-driven communities, it’s easy to find knowledge, insights and guidance direct from the pros, no matter what the topic area. In fact, online tutorials and how-to sites have been around almost as long as the web itself.

Here’s a run-down of more than 60 great how-to sites and guides covering everything from building a mashup to being more productive, creating a website and more.

See the list

This in from Mashable…

Lon S. Cohen is a writer and social media strategist. He is @obilon on Twitter.

Never before in history has it been easier to glean from the knowledge of others who will give it away to you for free. It’s equivalent to getting higher education. I’m talking about Masters level stuff. And it’s all available right there on Twitter. I call the people I follow who contribute above and beyond the basic answer to “what are you doing?” my professors of Twitter.

Keep reading…

This from Open Culture…

The open education movement got a little stronger this week with the launch of Academic Earth. Run by Richard Ludlow, a new social entrepreneur only a couple of years out of Yale, Academic Earth brings video lectures from leading universities into a centralized user-friendly site. What you’ll see here is an impressive early implementation of where Academic Earth plans to go. Take content-rich videos from universities, organize the videos well, make the visual experience attractive, add personal customization functionality and the ability to engage with the content, and you have a very useful service to bring to the world. I first started talking with Richard back in the fall and am really glad to see his site now ready for show time. Check it out in beta and watch it grow.

Academic Earth

This in from Open Culture…

in Most Popular | January 17th, 2009

Every now and then, we like to remind those who subscribe to Open Culture via rss feed or email that our site hosts large collections of cultural and educational media. In total, these collections offer thousands of hours of enriching audio and video, and it???s all free. You can download most all of it straight to your computer or mp3 player. To access these materials, simply bookmark this page, or visit our site. And if you would like to forward these resources to friends, or mention them on your own web site, we would certainly appreciate it.

Free Audio Books
Free University Courses
Free Foreign Language Lessons
Educational YouTube Collections
Arts & Culture Podcasts
Music Podcasts (includes a good amount of free classical music)
News/Information Podcasts
Science Podcasts
Travel Podcasts
Technology Podcasts
University Video Collections
University Podcasts – General Directory
University Podcasts – Business School
University Podcast – Law School

This from Open Culture…

in Psychology | January 21st, 2009

Speaking at the TED conference in 2007, Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and now Outliers: The Story of Success) introduces you to the food industry’s pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce, which ultimately tells you something essential about human choice and happiness.

This in from BoingBoing…

Andrew sez, “The National film Board of Canada (NFB) has opened up its vault – more than 700 films, clips and trailers are now available on the film board’s new website launched today. From entertaining shorts and cartoons, to deeply moving or disturbing documentaries – they’re all there for free, with more being added every week.”

Hell yes. This is how public money should be spent. And yes, they have The Big Snit, my all-time favorite NFB short.

National Film Board of Canada

This from Science Commons and BoingBoing…

Making the Web Work for Science

Science Commons designs strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web-enabled scientific research. We identify unnecessary barriers to research, craft policy guidelines and legal agreements to lower those barriers, and develop technology to make research, data and materials easier to find and use.

Our goal is to speed the translation of data into discovery – unlocking the value of research so more people can benefit from the work scientists are doing.

Find the post here

Read the BoingBoing post and comments here

This from LifeHacker…

Even in this golden age of Big Internet Companies Acquiring Everything In Sight, there are still a few independent, small webapps out there that don’t get the attention they should for their useful functionality. Every once in a while we get tired of writing about the same big name webapps everyone knows about, so today we’re turning the spotlight away from the obvious greats and taking a look at online tools that may have flown under your radar. Here are our top 10 picks of underhyped webapps that should get more attention than they do.

Check out the list