Honourable mentions in despatches (from Film Studies For Free's return to [indefatigable] active duty) for the following:
- Thanks to Mystery Man on Film and Kelly Sonora at the Online College Blog, FSFF heard of Jessica Merritt's article Reel Education: 50 Free Open Courses for Movie Lovers which lists 50 new freely accessible, online, practice and theory courses about films. There are some wonderful resources here. Below are links to some of the courses, but please do explore the full list:
Special Topics in Cinematic Storytelling: [MIT]
The Film Experience: [MIT]
Studies in Film: [MIT]
Topics in the Avant-Garde in Literature and Cinema: [MIT]
A Conversation with Filmmaker Mira Nair: [Harvard] - The vast majority of the above listed courses are provided by MIT OpenCourseWare. MIT OpenCourseWare is a free publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT. What a great initiative, FSFF thinks.
- Lots of updates have appeared in the last weeks to Film Studies For Free's list of Online and Open-Access Film and Moving-Image Studies Writing Of Note by Individual Named Authors, so do please (re)visit the list and bookmark it, if you haven't already done so. Two of the most wondrous links to be added to it from the point of view of offering up academic models for Open Access publishing are those to the websites of Dr Geoffrey Kantaris and Professor Paul Julian Smith, both based in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge. Muchísimas gracias for their generosity of spirit, as well as for their excellent work on Spanish-language film.
- Another great model worthy of interest and emulation is Spectacular Attractions, the blog by Dr Dan North, Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture in the School of English, University of Exeter. Dan has posted a great conference paper there on Cloverfield’s Obstructed Spectacle. It's a wonderfully illustrated piece of writing and has prompted some detailed responses from readers which are very much worth following, too. In response to one glowing comment, Dan deals with some of the concerns that academics have with self-publishing their work thus:
I did think about keeping the paper away from the blog, in case I wanted to revise it for publication, but I think it would be very heavily updated for a journal article, so it might constitute a whole new piece. And the comments I get here, as well as at the conference, would help me to make those updates [...] Academics shouldn’t just talk to other academics.
Please think about self-publishing your papers, people. And RESPECT to Dr North. - Thanks to GreenCine Daily for news of the latest online issues of film journals Criticine and Cineaste.
- Ed Howard at the wonderful website Only The Cinema has announced a new blog-a-thon, which will run from January 12-23, 2009 and will focus on the early films of Howard Hawks. Quite coincidentally FSFF came across a great blogpost on early Hawks -- In defense of The Front Page (1931) -- at the marvellous early cinema blog The Crowd Roars.
- Intute is a UK-based free online service providing access to the best Web resources for education and research, selected and evaluated by a network of subject specialists.The Intute Virtual Training Suite provides free Internet tutorials to help you learn how to get the best from the Web for your education and research. The tutorials are written and updated by a national team of subject specialists based in universities and colleges across the UK. HERE's a direct link to the Media and Communication tutorial.
- Like Intute, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is funded by the UK HE and FE funding bodies to provide world-class leadership in the innovative use of ICT to support education and research. JISC has just posted the following video of note: New animation: Intellectual Property Rights in the Web 2.0 world. Download it in QuickTime HERE