Top 10 Tools for a Free Online Education

10. Teach yourself programming

Coding, whether on the web or on the desktop, is one of those skills you'll almost never regret having. Coincidentally, the web is full of people willing to teach, and show off, programming skills. Whether you're looking to knock out a modest Firefox extension or tackle your first programming language, there's no requirement to run out and buy the thickest book you can find at Barnes & Noble. Google Code University, for instance, hosts a whole CSE program's worth of straight-up coding lessons in its bowels. We've pointed out a lot of other programming resources found around the web, so you should be able to get started in almost any project. As for the random, unexpected, seemingly inscrutable bugs, well ... welcome to the fold.

9. Get a Personal MBA

"MBA programs don't have a monopoly on advanced business knowledge: you can teach yourself everything you need to know to succeed in life and at work." The Personal MBA site occasionally updates its list of dozens of helpful business books, designed to teach both the nuts-and-bolts money stuff and the kind of thinking one needs to get ahead in sales, marketing, or wherever your interests lie. A business school can offer networking, mentoring, and other perks, but nobody can teach you enthusiasm and business savvy—except yourself.

8. Learn to actually use Ubuntu

Too often, newcomers to Ubuntu, the seriously popular Linux distribution, find that their questions about any problem great or small is answered with a curt "Search the forums," or "Just Google it." From experience, that's like telling someone there's maple sap somewhere in that forest, so here's a nail and get moving. With a brand-new installation sitting on your computer, few resources are as straight-forward and comprehensive as the Ubuntu Guide, which is packed with common stuff like installing VLC and getting VLC playback, but spans across topics including Samba and remote printing configuration. Author Keir Thomas also offered Lifehacker readers a little preview of his Ubuntu Kung Fu in two excerpts that tweak one's system into a faster, more efficient data flinger.

7. Get started on a new language

Nobody's pretending you can talk like a local without some immersion experience. But there's a lot of resources on the web for honing an already-sharpened second language, or at least picking up some of the vocab and nuances. Learn10 gives you 10 vocabulary builders delivered every day by email, through iGoogle, through an iPhone page, or most any other way you'd like. One Minute Languagespodcasts its lessons and lets newcomers stream from the archives. And Mango Languages has about 100 lessons, shown to you in PowerPoint style with interstitial quizzes, to move you through any language without cracking a book. Not that books are bad, of course, but this is stuff you can crack out during a coffee break.

6. Trade your skills, find an instructor

As Ramit Sethi put it in our interview, many people don't realize the value of the skills they do have, whether it's something as simple as higher-level English or software lessons for those in need. A site like TeachMate capitalizes on the inherent disparities in our interests, letting someone willing to teach a bit of, for example, Russian language get cooking lessons in return. If a site like TeachMate doesn't quite reach you, try Craigslist, which, especially in a recession, is brimming with people looking to trade skills instead of cash.

5. Academic Earth and YouTube EDU

We have to guess that having a giant, searchable database of free academic lectures was just too good an idea for two different web firms to pass up. Academic Earth has been described as a Hulu-like aggregator for lots of major universities' content, and offers the slicker and more navigable front-end for them, as well as allowing embedding and sharing with no restrictions. YouTube EDU might have a broader reach, and the player and format might be a bit more familiar to most. Both sites offer both individual lectures and full course series, and are definitely worth checking out.

4. Teach yourself all kinds of photography

Sites like Photojojo and Digital Photography School are oft-linked resources around Lifehacker, and for good reason. They let the uber-technical shooters run wild in forums and discussion groups, but focus the majority of their front-page posts on things that beginning DSLR shooters and moderate consumer-cam photographers can grasp and mix into their daily camera work. Of course, we've compiled and sought out our own digital photography advice at Lifehacker, including photographer Scott Feldstein's guide to mastering your DSLR camera (Part 1 and Part 2), and our compilation of David Pogue's best photography tricks, plus ours. Then there's the simple pleasures of posting on Flickr, seeking out Photo by Marcin Wichary.

3. Get an unofficial liberal arts major

Whole-mind learning doesn't end the day you declare a major and start sending out resumes. A huge number of universities offer up some of their most unique and fascinating resources for free online, posting up databases, image galleries, and all kinds of stuff you wish you had time to dig through during your undergrad years. Learn everything you ever wanted to about Picasso at Texas A & M's Picasso Project. Indulge your inner geo-geek with super hi-res images from Hirise at the University of Arizona. Tour the world's spaces in 3D with The World Wide Panorama at UC Berkeley. Wendy Boswell discovered those resources and way more in her discovery of the .edu underground, and you can find a lot more down there, too.

2. Learn an instrument

If being dropped off at the music store/mall/piano teacher's house wasn't a memorable part of your childhood, you might dig the digital age's equivalents a lot more. Guitar players, in particular, have a lot of places to turn for video, audio, and graphical teaching tools. Adam rounded a lot of them up in his guide to learning to play an instrument online. If you want to build a foundation for learning any instrument, though, Ricci Adams' Musictheory.net has Flash-based tutorials that offer a gentle tour through keys, time signatures, modalities, and the other ins and outs of notes and chords.

1. Learn from actual college courses online

A huge number of colleges, universities, and other degree-granting universities are going all open-source these days—giving away the actual guts of their courses, while retaining their revenue stream by awarding degrees only to those who pay. In this day and age, though, programming, marketing, design, and other self-taught skills are pretty valuable, however you came by them. Whether you're looking to break into a field or just augment your skill set, dig into our guide to getting a free college education online, which we then updated a bit with Education Portal's list of ten universities with the best free online courses. Just think about it—at home, with your coffee and comfortable chair, you're far more awake than the average co-ed who totally should have hit the hay a bit earlier last night.

Where do you turn when you have to teach yourself something? What skills or topics would you like to see more coverage of on Lifehacker, or just anywhere on the web? Help us plan a curriculum in the comments.

RON COBB FIRST EARTH HOUR LOGO CREATOR

Ron Cobb (born 1937) is an American cartoonist, artist, writer, film designer, and film director.

By the age of 18, with no formal training in graphic illustration, Cobb was working as an animation "inbetweener" artist for Disney Studios in Burbank, California. He progressed to becoming a breakdown artist on the animation feature Sleeping Beauty (1959). (This was the last Disney film to have cels inked by hand.)

After Sleeping Beauty was completed in 1957, Disney laid off Cobb and he spent the next three years in various jobs — mail carrier, assembler in a door factory, sign painter's assistant — until he was drafted in 1960 into the US Army. For the next two years he delivered classified documents around San Francisco, then, after signing up for an extra year to avoid assignment to the infantry, was sent to Vietnam in 1963 as a draughtsman for the Signal Corps. On his discharge, Cobb began freelancing as an artist. He began to contribute to the Los Angeles Free Press in 1965.

Edited and published by Art Kunkin, the Los Angeles Free Press was one of the first of the underground newspapers of the 1960s, noted for its radical politics. Cobb's editorial/political cartoons were a celebrated feature of the Freep, and appeared regularly throughout member newspapers of the Underground Press Syndicate. However, although he was regarded as one of the finest political cartoonists of the mid-1960s to early 1970s, Cobb made very little money from the cartoons and was always looking for work elsewhere.

Among other projects, Cobb designed the cover for Jefferson Airplane's 1967 album, After Bathing at Baxter's. He also contributed design work for the cult film, Dark Star (1973) (he drew the original design for the exterior of the Dark Star spaceship on a Pancake House napkin).

His cartoons from the 1960s and 1970s are collected in RCD-25 (1967) and Mah Fellow Americans (1968) (both Sawyer Press), and Raw Sewage (1971) and My Fellow Americans (1971) (both Price Stern and Sloan). None of these volumes remains in print.

In 1972, Cobb moved to Sydney, Australia. Independent publishers Wild & Woolley published a "best of" collection of the earlier cartoon books, The Cobb Book in 1975. A follow-up volume, Cobb Again, appeared in 1978.

In 1981, Colorvision, a large-format, full-colour monograph appeared, including much of his design work for the films Star Wars (1977), Alien (1979), and Conan the Barbarian (1982), the first feature for which he received the credit of Production Designer. Cobb has also contributed production design to the films The Last Starfighter (1984) and Leviathan (1989), as well as conceptual designs to other features, including Real Genius (1985), Back to the Future (1985), Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), Total Recall (1990), True Lies (1994), The Sixth Day (2000), Cats & Dogs (2001), Southland Tales (2006), and the Australian feature Garbo, which he directed. Cobb contributed the initial story for Night Skies, an earlier, darker version of E.T.. Steven Spielberg offered him the opportunity to direct this scarier sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind until problems arose over special effects that required a major rewrite. While Cobb was in Spain working on Conan the Barbarian, Spielberg supervised the rewrite into the more personal E.T. and ended up directing it himself. Cobb later received some net profit participation.

During the early '90s, Ron worked with Rocket Science Games. His designs can be seen most notably in Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine (1994) and The Space Bar (1997), in which he designed all the characters.^[1][2]

Cobb also co-wrote with his wife, Robin Love, one of the (1985–1987) Twilight Zone episodes.

A Call for an International History of Journalism

A Call for an International History of Journalism
Mitchell Stephens
American Journalism
There is, to be blunt about it, no such thing as a history of American journalism. The development of American journalism was influenced – if not transformed, if not determined – in every period by developments outside of America. To pretend otherwise, as we too often do in our courses and our writings, is to distort history. American journalism did not, in any sense, develop alone.
This fact about journalism history does not have to be understood historically. It is plain enough in our own era. In what country today do the media evolve in isolation?
The United States may currently be the major source of forms of communication that wander across borders. However, the United States is certainly not immune to having its own borders transgressed. People – Rupert Murdoch and Tina Brown are examples – have brought strategies here from elsewhere. Corporations – Bertelsmann, Murdoch’s News Corporation – have made significant incursions. Ideas are borrowed from foreign publications, foreign television shows, foreign Web sites. Would, to pick a notable example, NPR be possible without the BBC or CBC?
It was, of course, ever thus. Indeed, this point would have been as obvious to American journalists in earlier centuries as it now is to journalists elsewhere in the world, who feel the influence of CNN or Newsweek. For America then was much more the recipient than the source of ideas.
My favorite example currently hangs on my living room wall. I purchased it for a couple of hundred dollars a few years ago. It is a small and not particularly rare newspaper called Domestick Intelligence, Or News both from City and Country and published in London on August 5, 1679. This newspaper was of significance in England at the time, both for its emphasis upon local news and its precocious sensationalism. (My copy includes a story about a man who was stabbed in a bar fight.)
However, my interest in Domestick Intelligence derives primarily from its publisher. The name printed at the bottom of the second and last page is "Benjamin Harris." In other words, this newspaper was published by the man who would, eleven years later, publish America’s first newspaper. That newspaper, Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestick, looked quite a bit like its older brother on my wall. It can best be understood, as can its publisher, as a product of late-seventeenth-century London journalism.
And this is hardly the only evidence of the absurdity of delaying the start of the history of journalism, as we too often do, until 1690, when a newspaper first appears in England’s American colonies. As Félix Gutiérrez has reported, a news publication, though not a periodical, had been printed in Mexico City in 1541. (This too, of course, was the younger sibling of much older European newsbooks.)
The word that probably appeared most in the titles of early colonial newspapers was "gazette." Boston’s first newspaper was the Boston Gazette; New York’s first, the New York Gazette; Maryland’s first, the Maryland Gazette; and Benjamin Franklin took over and made a success of the Pennsylvania Gazette. This too, of course, was a borrowing from Europe. The most influential newspaper in France in the seventeenth century was the Gazette de France. The most influential newspaper in England in that century was the London Gazette.
Indeed, this is a word that turns up over and over again throughout the history of the newspaper. Russians actually call their newspapers "gazeta." The word can be traced back to handwritten newssheets – sometimes known as gazzette – distributed weekly, as I have shown in my book A History of News, in Venice as early as 1566.
Venice in the mid-sixteenth century is, consequently, one place a history of journalism, at least newspaper journalism, might begin. I believe a genetic examination of every newspaper in America, along with every newspaper published anywhere in the world today, would turn up some DNA that can be traced back to these handwritten weeklies.
The content of American newspapers in the colonial period and beyond consisted primarily, as we know, of items taken from European newspapers. To be an American newspaper printer in 1760 in a port city, consequently, required pouring through as many English, French and other foreign newspapers as it was possible get off the ships. Those papers were generally more advanced in reporting methods, in typography, in design and in writing style than American newspapers. They remained so into the nineteenth century. Our editors, consequently, borrowed more than stories from them. European newspapers provided the forms from which American journalism was cast – and recast.
Consider just the most obvious contributions from just one country: England. London had a "penny press" before New York had a "penny press." Reporting developed in London many decades before it came to America. ("To report" was a British term for taking shorthand, and the first regular American "beat" – police court – was inspired, in part, by police court coverage in London.) America’s tabloids were unabashedly based on London’s tabloids. (The term itself was borrowed from the British pharmaceutical industry.) And a late-twentieth-century wave of tabloid journalism in the United States might arguably be traced to the purchase of the New York Post by an Australian who had mastered the art form in London.
Given the extent of European influence upon the American press it is certainly not surprising that the three men who might reasonably be labeled the most creative forces in American journalism were all men who had an opportunity to look at European newspapers before they were loaded onto ships. Two – James Gordon Bennett Sr. and Joseph Pulitzer – were, as were so many great American journalists, immigrants to this country. The third, Benjamin Franklin, spent formative years in England.
To attempt to separate the history of American journalism from developments overseas seems, therefore, as foolish as attempting to separate the history of journalism in Ohio or Kansas from what was happening in Boston, Philadelphia and New York. Yet we do – over and over again. There are relatively few American journalism historians who are familiar with the history of English or French or German or even Mexican journalism. A kind of ignorance – which would not be tolerated in literature departments, in theater departments, in art departments, in science departments – is routinely accepted in journalism departments. American journalism history is dangerously and unflaggingly parochial.
However, in this too, although we may be the worst offenders, we are not alone. I have met Dutch and French journalism historians who know an awful lot about the history of, for example, English journalism, but not more than a handful of them. Most English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese or Italian journalism historians are specialists only in the history of journalism in their own countries.
As a result, we have a lot of local journalism histories that underplay or ignore the countless notions that drifted across borders in what has always been a cosmopolitan business. As a result, countless potentially instructive parallels remain unexplored. As a result, many of the major stories in this history – stories that are inescapably multi-national – remain untold.
The development of the direct ancestors of the newspaper in early-modern Europe – before and after the Venetian gazettes – is an example. I have done some (primitive) work in this area. There is much more to do. But it is research that will require comparison of early news publications in Italy, Germany, Belgium and Holland, at the very least.
The printed newspaper is at the heart of all of our journalism histories. German researchers recently found evidence that one of what we had thought of as the two earliest European printed newspapers, Johann Carolus’s Strasbourg weekly, had actually begun publication four years earlier – in 1605. In some fields this is news that would instantly race around the world. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes decades to find its way into journalism history textbooks in the United States and elsewhere outside of Germany.
Our narrowly nationalistic journalism histories, in other words, not only obscure crucial connections and lineages and ignore telling comparisons, they leave us unable to approach fundamental questions. We must internationalize our conferences, our journals, our graduate programs and our research. Journalism has never been held back by borders. It is time for journalism historians to begin crossing them.