The website Open Culture describes itself as The best free cultural & educational media on the web. A claim that certainly sounds worthy of investigation. In this posting we take a quick look at some of the articles posted on the site that may be of interest to the Bassetti Foundation.

At first glance the Open Culture site appears immediately vast. On the day of writing articles about music, literature, physics, current affairs, philosophy, politics and education are shown on the opening page.

Just to give a few examples one article is entitled ‘Michael Sandel: the lost art of democratic debate’ and features a video lecture recorded at TED 2010 in which Sandel argues that the world needs a better way of conducting political debate.

Another audio report accompanied by a photo montage addresses problems posed to marine life in the Gulf of Mexico by the BP oil spill (the problem of responsibility is ever present in news reports about this disaster) and also includes a link to the Natural Resources Defense Council staff blog SWiTCHBOARD.

One particularly interesting article is entitled Cognitive Consequences: A Conversation with Nicholas Carr. Carr is an author who in 2008 published an essay in The Atlantic entitled ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ in which he claimed that internet use is robbing us of our power to read and concentrate on long texts. He has now published a book entitled ‘The Shallows: what the internet is doing to our brains’ in which he describes numerous scientific studies that lend support to his claim that Web surfing has adverse cognitive consequences.

The book has caused so much debate that The New York Times is running a series entitled ‘Your Brain on Computers’ in which many different downsides of computer use are addressed. One long article in the series describes the near catastrophic breakdown of family life due to changes in brain functioning brought about by constant computer use.

Open Culture also offer links to free university courses and free foreign language lessons, where to legally download free audio or PDF books and a podcast tutorial.

A wealth of interesting links.