As we have for the past several years, Encyclopaedia Britannica has made a substantial donation to the Today Show’s 2008 holiday gift drive. This year we gave them hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of EB products, including software and free subscriptions to Britannica’s online sites, which will go to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Each year the company’s donation provides valuable knowledge products to kids who would otherwise not have them.

Britannica’s Steve Gilberg made a brief appearance on the show on Tuesday, December 9, to talk about the company’s donation.

Steven Chu—director of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a professor of physics at U.C. Berkeley, a 1997 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics, and author of Britannica’s entry on spectroscopy—has been tapped by President-elect Barack Obama to be his Secretary of Energy.

He joins on Obama’s team another Berkeley colleague and Britanncia contributor, economist Christina Romer, author of the economic sections of Britannica’s extensive article on the Great Depression. Professor Romer will be chairing the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Reposted from the Britannica Blog

Coming to a library near you:

Beginning in January of next year, Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World will be available electronically, in its entirety, at libraries and institutions. Through an agreement between Britannica and Ingram Digital, the Great Books will be accessible through Ingram’s industry-leading MyiLibrary e-book platform.

The electronic Great Books will contain precisely the same contents as the printed version, with hypertext links from entries in the Syntopicon—the idea index—and the places in the text those entries refer to. The digital corpus will be fully searchable.

If your library doesn’t subscribe, you will have the option of purchasing the electronic version of the Great Books yourself. We’ll have more details when the product becomes available next month.

The Art of Reading
Another new Great Books product we’re delighted to announce is a series of long-lost videos on the art of reading with Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, which will be distributed by the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas.

Adler’s How to Read a Book was an off-the-charts bestseller when first published in 1940. In 1972 he and Van Doren collaborated on the book’s third edition, and a few years later they sat down for several conversations on the book’s main themes. The result was a series of thirteen videos that Britannica issued in the late 1970s.

Somehow, those videos got lost in the sturm and drang of the past three decades, and they would have remained forever so had it not been for the intrepid sleuthing of the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas, which tracked down what may have been the only extant set and made it possible for them to be reissued today on a single DVD.

We’re happy now to work in partnership with the Center to make these intriguing conversations available again. To get more information about the DVD, watch a sample, and place an order, go to:

www.thegreatideas.org/HowToReadABook.htm.

Reposted from the Britannica Blog

The prestigious Nobel Prizes are awarded annually on this day (Dec. 10) in twin ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo. Britannica has been fortunate to have more than 110 Nobel Prize winners write for the encyclopedia and its related products, and in honor of today’s occasion, here’s a link to three of these posts by our many Nobel Prize-winning contributors:

• President Jimmy Carter (Peace, 2002): “Camp David Accords“
• Jody Williams (Peace, 1997): “International Campaign to Ban Landmines“
• Marie Curie, the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize (Physics, 1903; Chemistry, 1911): “Radium“

[Reposted from the Britannica Blog]

Revisiting (yet again) those classics that refuse to die

In 1948 a panel of distinguished Chicagoans held a symposium on one of Plato’s dialogues on the stage of Orchestra Hall and invited the public to attend. What in the world were they thinking? Plato? The public? Epic fail, you figure, right?

Think again. Every seat in the house was filled, and 1,500 people were turned away.

This odd colloquium was part of Great Books Week in the Windy City, an event the like of which it is hard for us even to imagine today. In those days the classics were hot. Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, and all the others who would later be reviled as “dead white men” were for a time there all the rage. Thousands of Great Books reading groups cropped up across America. Celebrities from boxer Gene Tunney to actress Julie Adams (Creature from the Black Lagoon) were caught pawing over the august tomes of Lucretius, Pascal, and Rousseau. The beautiful people jetted out to Colorado for Great Books seminars at the Aspen Institute. Encyclopaedia Britannica published Great Books of the Western World and sold 50,000 copies of the pricey set in one year alone.

And then it ended.

Sales declined, reading groups folded, and everyone, it seemed, went back to watching TV. “The Great Conversation,” as it was called, and as the companion volume (below) to the Great Books is titled, had ended.

What happened? Why did the popularity of the Great Books tank? Or perhaps the proper question is: Why on earth were they so popular in the first place?

Whatever the questions, they’re raised anew by A Great Idea at the Time, by Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam, a book that explores “The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books” with panache and no small measure of vitriol. Here at Britannica we’ve enjoyed this entertaining and highly readable history of the Great Books movement, even if it does direct considerable snark at some of our corporate forbears, notably Mortimer Adler, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and William Benton.

This week at the Britannica Blog we’ll revisit the Great Books, those works that New Yorker film critic David Denby termed “indestructible” for their ability to survive eternally, despite censorship, intellectual fashion cycles, and putative irrelevance, to continue giving pleasure and enlightenment to many people in every generation.

We’ve invited an assortment of latter-day Great Bookies to discuss the place of the classics in the world today and probe some of the issues about reading and liberal education that linger fifty years after the height of the Great Books “craze,” as the Wall Street Journal recently called it; and fifteen years, give or take, since the so-called “canon wars” of the eighties and nineties ended, more, it seems, from battle fatigue among the combatants than a decisive victory by either side.

Please tune in each day this week to watch the conversation and, as always, take part in it by leaving comments of your own.

[Reposted from the Britannica Blog]

Christina Romer wrote section of Great Depression article. 

President-elect Obama has named Britannica contributor Christina Romer (shown here with her husband, David Romer) to head his Council of Economic Advisers. Professor Romer teaches economics at the University of California at Berkeley and authored the economics section of our Great Depression entry. Her husband is also a professor of economics at Berkeley.

Richard Pells, professor of history at the University of Texas, Austin, authored the social and cultural sections of our entry on the Depression.

(Posted originally on the Britannica Blog)

Congratulations to Michael Wesch, a member of Britannica’s editorial board, who has been named a “professor of the year” by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Details below in this news release from Kansas State University.

Wesch selected as Carnegie/CASE national professor for resesarch/doctoral universities

MANHATTAN, KAN. — Wired Magazine calls him “the explainer.” His classes are so popular students submit applications to enroll. Now Kansas State University’s Michael Wesch adds another honor to a long list: He is the winner of the national professor of the year award for research and doctoral universities from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

Carnegie/CASE is honoring Wesch, a cultural anthropologist and media ecologist, today in Washington, D.C. He is the third K-State professor selected as a national winner in the research and doctoral university category. K-State is the only research/doctoral university in America, public or private, to have had three national winners, and the only Kansas school to have even one national winner.

K-State President Jon Wefald said, “We are very proud of Michael Wesch and delighted he has joined the elite group of national professors of the year for research/doctoral universities. He is earning well-deserved honors from many quarters for his outstanding ability to communicate effectively with students.” . . .

Wesch launched the Digital Ethnography Working Group, a team of undergraduates exploring human uses of digital technology. Coinciding with the launch of this group, Wesch created a short video, “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us.” Released on YouTube on Jan. 31, 2007, it quickly became the most popular video in the blogosphere and has now been viewed more than 7 million times and has been translated into more than 10 languages.

Wesch has won several awards for his work with video, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award and the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Media Praxis from the Media Ecology Association. He is also a member of Britannica’s Editorial Board of Advisors and regularly blogs on that site, http://www.britannica.com/blogs/author/mwesch

His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education and numerous other national publications. . . .

Full text of news release

Students at every level, from grade school to grad school, face dramatic changes in the institutions they attend thanks to new digital technologies. PCs, the Internet, whiteboards, presentation software, and other high-tech devices, once considered educational aides for the library, the media lab, and the home, are increasingly a central part of the classroom curriculum itself, with results that have yet to be fully understood.

The new classroom is about information, but not just information. It’s also about collaboration, about changing roles of student and teacher, and about challenges to the very idea of traditional authority. It may also be about a new cognitive model for learning that relies heavily on what has come to be called “multitasking.” Many educators voice ambivalence about the power of educational technologies to distract students and fragment their attention.

Do the new classroom technologies represent an educational breakthrough, a threat to teaching itself, or something in between? Utopian and dystopian visions tend to collide whenever the topic comes up.

To explore the question intelligently we’ve asked several experts on educational technology to join us this week for a forum on the subject at the Britannica Blog.

Participants include (among others):

Tuesday

Michael Wesch / Post: “A Vision of Students Today (& What Teachers Must Do)”

Dubbed “the explainer” by Wired magazine, Wesch is a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University who studies the impacts of new media on human interaction. He has turned his attention in recent years to the effects of social media and digital technology on global society. His videos on technology, education, and information have been viewed over six million times and are frequently featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences. Wesch is a member of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s editorial board.

Mark Bauerlein / Post: “Turned On, Plugged In, Online, & Dumb: Student Failure Despite the Techno Revolution”

Professor of English, Emory University, and former research director for the National Endowment of the Arts. Author of the recently published The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30.

Wednesday

Steve Hargadon / Post: “Moving Toward Web 2.0 in K-12 Education“

Director of the K12 Open Technologies Initiative at the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) and founder of the Classroom 2.0 social network. Hargadon blogs, speaks, and consults on educational technology, free and open-source software, Web 2.0, computer reuse, and computing for low-income people.

Dan Willingham / Post: “Why Web 2.0 Will Not be an Integral Part of K-12 Education”

Professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. He writes the “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” column for American Educator magazine.

Thursday

David Cole / Post: “Why I Ban Laptops in My Classroom”

Professor of Law, Georgetown University, legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, and a commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Former staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he litigated a number of major First Amendment cases.

Michael B. Horn / Post: “Technology Can Have a Positive Impact on Education: Deploy It Disruptively!”

Michael Horn is the Executive Director, Education and co-founder of Innosight Institute, a non-profit think tank devoted to applying the theories of disruptive innovation to problems in the social sector. He recently coauthored Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (McGraw-Hill: June 2008) with Harvard Business School professor and bestselling author Clayton M. Christensen and Curtis W. Johnson, president of The Citistates Group. The book uses the theories of disruptive innovation to diagnose the root causes of schools’ struggles and suggest a path forward to customize an education for every child in the way she learns.

Monday

Howard Rheingold / Post: “R.I.P.: Lectures, Notes, and Tests (Scrapping the Old Ways)”

Respondents and Commentators

John Seely Brown, “Chief of Confusion”: Writer and scholar on innovation in education and other fields, co-author of The Social Life of Information, The Only Sustainable Edge, and other books. Visiting scholar at the University of Southern California, independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation. Formerly Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

Karin Chenoweth, author of It’s Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools, is currently with The Education Trust, a national education advocacy organization. Chenoweth previously wrote the Homeroom column for the Montgomery and Prince George’s Extras of The Washington Post, which gained a national readership for its focus on schools and education.

Kevin Hogan, Editorial Director, Technology and Learning magazine.

Kathy Ishizuka, Technology Editor, School Library Journal.

Joanne Jacobs, author of Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the Charter School That Beat the Odds. After 19 years as a San Jose Mercury News columnist and editorial writer, she left in 2001 to create one of the first education weblogs, at joannejacobs.com.

Tim O’Brien, Online Editor and Author with O’Reilly Media, covers technology, science, and politics for O’Reilly News. Tim supported pedagogical virtual reality efforts at the University of Virginia in the middle 1990s, and now supports the development of a globally distributed K-12 learning system.

Howard Rheingold, a well-know writer, speaker, and observer of all things digital, is, among many other credits, the author of countless books, including Smart Mobs. More about Howard here.

Joyce Kasman Valenza, Library Information Specialist, Springfield Township High School in Erdenheim, Penn.; writer of School Library Journal’s Never Ending Search blog; and a former columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Valenza is prolific speaker and writer on issues relating to libraries, technology and education has won many professional awards.

As always you, the reader, are welcome, too.

Please come, read, and tell us what you think.

Britannica.com Week in Preview: September 8-14

With the end of two weeks of political theater that we call conventions in the United States, now we can finally focus on things that are important–such as the 25th birthday on Sunday of British diva Amy Winehouse. In song she refused to go, but in May she finally succumbed and said yes to Rehab. But rehab didn’t stop her from winning a Grammy–the show even set up a special satellite performance in London for her to accept the award, because she couldn’t obtain a visa to travel to the United States.

Among the other features on Britannica’s homepage this week are:

September 8: Duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duhhhhhhh. Monday is the 83rd anniversary of the birth of the late Peter Sellers, who played the magnificently inept Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther and appeared in Dr. Strangelove (pictured below). Monday is also the 579th anniversary of Joan of Arc’s attempt to take Paris and the 504th anniversary of the unveiling of Michelangelo’s David in front of the Palazzo Vecchio.

September 9: George W. Bush’s favorite member of the axis of evil, North Korea, turns 60 on Tuesday. The proclamation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea by the country’s Eternal President, Kim Il-sung, set the stage for the Korean War. Speaking of war, War and Peace author Leo Tolstoy was born 180 years ago Tuesday. And, now back to communists and founders; China will also be marking an anniversary–32 years since the death of Mao Zedong, who founded the People’s Republic of China.

September 10: Who was the first American president? George Washington, you say? No. It was John–not John McCain (he’s not that old)–Smith. Maybe I am stretching the definitional bounds a bit, I know. But, still, it was 400 years ago Wednesday that John Smith became president of Jamestown Colony, the first permanent English settlement in North America. And, 20 years ago tennis star Steffi Graf completed the tennis Grand Slam by capturing the U.S. Open (she added Olympic gold three weeks later). And, happy birthday to golfer and Britannica contributor (our Masters Tournament article) Arnold Palmer, who turns 79 years young.

September 11: Thursday Americans remember the 9/11 attacks of 2001. Britannica looks back at the events of that tragic and world-changing day. Thursday also marks the 33rd anniversary of Pete Rose becoming Major League Baseball’s all-time hit leader when he broke Ty Cobb’s record of 4,191 career hits. And, it’s happy birthday to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, who turns 43, and the 123rd anniversary of the birth of English writer D.H. Lawrence.

September 12: Well, it wasn’t exactly to infinity and beyond, but it was to the Moon. It was 49 years ago Friday that the Soviet Union launched Luna 2, the second of a series of Soviet lunar probes and the first spacecraft to strike the Moon. Also, the Philippines was in a political tussle a year ago, when former president Joseph Estrada was convicted of plundering–only to be pardoned a month later. China and Houston will be celebrating basketball star Yao Ming’s 28th birthday; he may not have won gold in Beijing last month, but he has done much to popularize the sport in the country.

September 13: An aloof ruler who spent lavishly and exacerbated his country’s economic problems. Hmmm…who could that be? Depending on what country you’re from, you probably have a different answer, but it was on this day in 1598 that Philip III, who was such a ruler, was crowned king of Spain and Portugal. Saturday is also the 67th birthday of Oscar Arias, president of Costa Rica and a Nobel Peace Prize winner who helped negotiate a Central American peace agreement and wrote an essay on the Lessons of the 20th Century for Britannica.

September 14: And, finally, wrapping up the week, everybody’s favorite (or not) cartel, OPEC, turns 48 this week; its birthday present was being spurned by Brazil, which opted last week not to join the multinational organization. As Americans debate abortion and other issues surrounding pregnancy in the upcoming presidential election, feminists (and others) celebrate the 129th anniversary of the birth of Margaret Sanger, who is credited with originating the term birth control. And, finally, the Mexican-American War was brought to an end 161 years ago Sunday as Mexico City fell to advancing American forces.

This and other information is available this week via Britannica’s homepage. Or, you can search the site to read other articles of interest. I’ll be back next week with another preview of Britannica’s weekly content.

[Reposted from the Britannica Blog]

Britannica.com Week in Preview: August 18-24

Two years ago it became a little smaller world, and many of us were grumpy about it. On August 24, 2006, the International Astronomical Union sent the textbook and reference world into a tizzy when they demoted Pluto to a dwarf planet. Dwarf planet/smaller world? Perhaps someone at the IAU had some Disney fetish when they came up with this new classification? You know it’s a tough economy when even a planet can get laid off. Well, not to worry, the demotion sparked a cottage industry, and many scientists, businessmen, school children, and lawmakers have spent the better part of two years trying to restore Pluto to its former glory.

Other features this week at Britannica.com’s homepage include:

August 18: On Monday film director Roman Polanski turns 75. His Chinatown (1974) reinvigorated the moribund film noir genre, and several later films, including The Pianist (2002), received wide acclaim, though Polanski’s life evoked controversy after he fled to France in 1977 after pleading guilty to having sex with a minor. Mongolia isn’t often in the international news, but this week it’s in celebratory mode. Last week Tuvshinbayar Naidan captured the country’s first Olympic medal, and it was on this day in 1227 that the great Mongolian warrior-ruler Genghis Khan died. Though he lived 800 years ago, he continues to cast a huge shadow over the modern world, and he even had time to make a cameo appearance in the film Night at the Museum in 2006. Also on Monday, twos are wild as the Bay of Smokes, Reykjavík, celebrates the 222nd anniversary since it was designated the administrative capital of Iceland; and it was this day in 1587 that Virginia (I was actually born in what is now North Carolina) Dare became the first English child born in the New World.

August 19: Bill Clinton was a controversial figure as president, and this year he became embroiled in a controversy over race during the Democratic primary. All may not be forgiven and forgotten, but as Bill prepares for his convention speech next week in Denver the former president celebrates his 62nd birthday. Am I alone in wondering what gift Barack Obama will be sending? Tuesday is also the 125th anniversary of the birth of one of the queens of fashion–Gabrielle Chanel; she ruled over Parisian haute couture for almost six decades. It was the beginning of the end for Mikhail Gorbachev and the beginning of the beginning for Boris Yeltsin on this day in 1991, as hard-line communists staged a coup against Gorby. Also on Tuesday, Afghanistan celebrates its 89th anniversary of independence from Great Britain.

August 20: Soviet communists may have been unsuccessful in 1991, but they sure were successful in 1968. It was 40 years ago that Soviet troops crushed the Prague Spring liberalization in Czechoslovakia–a country that still exists sometimes in the words of one presidential candidate. With the conflict in South Ossetia, many historians are harkening back to Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. It was also 33 years ago on Wednesday when the Viking 1 spacecraft was launched; after its 7 year mission was completed, it had mapped and analyzed large expanses of the Martian surface. Though he died young, architect Eero Saarinen (born 98 years ago this week) left a lasting impression as one of the leaders in a trend toward exploration and experiment in American architectural design during the 1950s; though his TWA terminal at JFK Airport in New York City was a major achievement, I wonder if he would be quite proud of being associated with what was allowed to become a pretty drab spectacle on the interior.

August 21: As John McCain and Barack Obama prepare for their conventions and debates, we can be pretty sure that they won’t reach the rhetorical (or historical) quality of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which kicked off 150 years ago in Ottawa, Illinois. Those seven debates ran three hours long each, and apparently reporters weren’t there to ask ridiculous questions such as this gem from the 2008 Democratic debate by ABC moderator George Stephanopoulos to Barack Obama: “But do you believe he’s [Obama’s erstwhile pastor Jeremiah Wright] as patriotic as you are?” With fabrications about Obama continuing to swirl (13% of Americans continue to believe Obama is a Muslim) and even making their way into a #1 NYT best seller, one has to wonder if these debates would have had the same historical impact if cameras were there and reporters able to moderate. Communists just didn’t have a good time this week in 1991. While communists were attempting to oust Gorbachev in the U.S.S.R., they were losing their grip on Latvia, which declared its independence 17 years ago Thursday. Also on Thursday, music fans remember Count Basie, one of the giants of jazz, who was born 104 years ago.

August 22: Friday marks the 144th anniversary of the Geneva Convention, which gave international recognition to the Red Cross. The neutral organization has been awarded three Nobel Peace Prizes, and the use of its symbols during the rescue of Ingrid Betancourt and other hostages held by the FARC in Colombia led to charges that the government’s actions might jeopardize the organization’s relief efforts. It was also 19 years ago this week that the Ryan Express notched his 5,000 strikeout. Nolan Ryan eventually retired at age 46 with 5,714 K’s.

August 23: While U.S. basketball star Kobe Bryant prepares for what he hopes will be the gold medal match on Saturday, he will be celebrating a birthday. The soon-to-be 30-year-old phenom has already played 12 seasons in the NBA and is 24th on the NBA’s all-time scoring list. Queen Noor of Jordan, wife of former King Hussein, turns 57. She is engaged in many philanthropic efforts, particularly land mine elimination, and a few years ago she wrote a piece for Britannica on their danger (see The Hidden Dangers of Land Mines). Miscarriage of justice? Eighty-one years ago Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. Historians continue to debate their guilt–on the 50th anniversary of their execution Massachusetts governor Mike Dukakis issued a proclamation stating that Sacco and Vanzetti had not been treated justly and that no stigma should be associated with their names. Saturday also marks the 399th anniversary of Galileo’s presentation of his design for the telescope to the Venetian Senate.

August 24: Pluto’s status as a planet occurred two years ago; Pompeii’s destruction occurred 1,929 years ago. On this day in 79 CE, the Roman city was buried in an ocean of ash after the eruption of Vesuvius. Also on Sunday is the anniversary of the births of former Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.

This and other information is available this week via Britannica’s homepage. Or, you can search the site to read other articles of interest. I’ll be back next week with another preview of Britannica’s weekly content.

[Reposted from the Britannica Blog]