Online Presentations

Educational Online Presentation/Lecture Sites

The following websites offer some very good educational videos:

There are some interesting presentations online:

TEDTalks

TED stands for Technology Entertainment Design and the talks are (mostly) interesting, fascinating and almost never boring. While the physical conference attendance costs a lot of money, selected talks are freely available as Vidcast (e.g. in iTunes as TEDTalks (video)) or on the website of TED.

Interesting presentations

Royal Institution Christmas Lectures

Lectures about a single topic presented for all audiences — something like TEDTalks with a strong focus on science and readily understandable. Held since 1825, the presentations from 1973 are available as webcast (login necessary) although a few also are on YouTube. Something to watch on Christmas besides the tree.

Justice course of lectures by Michael Sandel

Sandel asks the question “What’s the right thing to do?” and uses contemporary examples to illustrate different moral positions by philosophers like Bentham, Mill, Kant, Aristotle, Rawls. His low-key “presentation style” (a mixture of lecturing and highly-but-indirectly structured discussion) is remarkable, very interesting, very stimulating, and a good example that even formal education in philosophy does not have to be boring. You can find the lectures here:

Authors@Google

To give the users of YouTube high quality content, the people at Google invite authors to let them talk about their work with Authors@Google. While this may sound like advertising, the talks can be quite interesting.

Interesting presentations

  • Joe McNally
    He talks about his life as a photographer and his book “The Moment it Clicks” (probably sponsored by Nikon, since he uses and advertises their equipment quite often).
  • Neil Gaiman
    Very good author (e.g. Sandman, Stardust) talking about his works — he starts slow but he has an interesting humor.
  • Chris Anderson
    Author of the book “The Long Tail” — like his book quite interesting.

Single Presentations

The following presentations are not part of a series but single presentations that are on the web.

  • Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams by Randy Pausch
    “Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” was a presentation at the Carnegie Mellon University by Randy Pausch. Having being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer Ranch, an academic with zest for life, talks about what was important in (his) life and why. It is surprisingly upbeat and extremely interesting.

  • “Fatal attraction of technology” by Viktor Mraz
    The sound quality of the video is taxing but he uses an excellent metaphor and covers quite a range of very interesting topics.

Physics for Future Presidents

Most of us will never be in the questionable position of having to decide on important matters without understanding the physics behind it, but Prof. Richard A. Muller’s interesting and easy to graph lectures “Physics for Future Presidents” convey an “understanding” of knowledge that can’t hurt. While some of his lectures might be biased, they are interesting and might offer you an insight in physics that the school could not give you. You find the courses on his website or on Google Video or (partly?) in iTunes (iTunes Store => Podcasts => Search function).

Chance Lecture Series

The Chance Lecture Series is one of the oldest online presentations series I have seen and it is impressive what they already did 1997 (way before YouTube). They use RealPlayer (which essentially takes over your system) so that’s the downside to it, the upside is watching interesting videos and seeing the slides at the same time as .html-files with graphics.

Interesting presentations

  • “Probability and Statistics in Gaming” by Olaf Vancura, Harvard University (1997)
    An incredible presentation about the difference between theory and practice (you can win in Roulette) and the difficulty to analyze games of chance.
  • “How to Display Data Badly” by Howard Wainer, Educational Testing Service (1997)
    Contains two of the most powerful graphics I have every seen (wildfire and Napoleon’s army).
  • “Streaks in Sports” by Tom Gilovich, Cornell University (1997)
    Are there hot and cold streaks in sports?
  • “The Risk to Civilization from Extraterrestrial Objects” by Clark Chapman, Southwest Research Institute (1998)
  • “Benford’s Law — It’s a Secret Law of Numbers (Increasingly Being Used by Auditors)” by Mark Nigrini, Cox School of Business (2000)
    Obvious if you think about it but still an interesting presentation.
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