May 25, 2010

When Alexander the Great to set foot on the west coast of Egypt in 332 BC, he was stunned by the beauty of nature. “Here is my dream city would be built”, he said. Alexandria,a city, then became the capital of Egypt for nearly 1000 years. It is inhabited not only by the Egyptians but also those who live around the Mediterranean Sea such as Turkey, Italy, and Greece, Alexandria – along with Athens in Greece and in Syria-Anthiocia growing rapidly become the intellectual center of Alexandrian Empire that stretched from India to Egypt.

Unlike the City of Thousand Mosques in Cairo or Luxor, the Ancient Egyptian city Pharonic period, Alexandria was almost entirely the character of the West. Naturally some people call it a European city stranded in Egypt. Its location is near the coast, air cool, clean and orderly to make Alexandria a favorite summer vacation spot.

Among the heritage that are still Hellenic, today we can still find the world’s first legendary library, Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

Aristrophanes manuscripts in the library Calligio Romano Rome, tells how the Egyptian library was built in 300 years BC. (more…)

May 11, 2010

The University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley) routinely records a variety of faculty lectures every semester and publishes it on the internet since 2001. The recording was done with audio and video. This kind of regular publication of content for audio / video called a podcast.

Especially for UC Berkeley, they named it  For those who are interested can go directly to the home page and download the lecture you want. Bids his courses – average only at the beginning of the semester, but there are quite varied subjects: molecular biology, politics, communication sciences, physics and even philosophy. I myself just listening to lectures so far biology, but the professor deserved thumbs up. They could deliver lectures with a solid and clear in time – average one hour, and some even have a can communicate with a few jokes to entertain. If you use iTunes or another program that can download podcasts directly, you can sign up to RSS feeds from the relevant subjects and new content will be downloaded instantly once they are published.

UC Berkeley is not the only university that opened classroom content to the world. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is also having the program Open Course Ware (OCW). But unlike such webcast.berkeley where we participate in the lecture hall, the concept of OCW is a publication of the material – material that used to lecture at MIT. (more…)