Adventuring - The Bear Creek Commentaries

--- Video adventuring ---

Again, although this blog primarily urges the reader to get away from their TVs and computers and experience their world actively as immersive adventures, we can't get away from the fact that, today, cyberspace is part of our world. I've talked about programming and using software to explore concepts and I've talked about opencourseware and other video lectures as fun and interesting ways to learn and to prepare for real world adventures.

Documentaries offer another form of learning, usually a little lighter than the extensive lectures and courses. They can also present another kind of adventure.

TV offers a variety of documentary venues - channels like the National Geographic, Discovery, and History channels, to name a few, but I like the Internet sources. Several websites provide access to documentary films that you can "surf" through and find surprising gems. I've noted that MIT uses the Internet Archive as a repository of video lectures. It also uses iTunes U. I might add that YouTube also hosts a huge variety of educational features.

Here are some addresses:

Internet Archive https://archive.org
iTunes U - You have to have iTunes and you can access iTunes U from there.
YouTube https://www.youtube.com

Repositories will often have a search bar. Internet Archives let's you filter a search for particular kinds of media. That's really helpful when you're looking for films and there are thousands of items to scan through.

If you go to the Internet Archives and just type, say, "psychology" into the search bar, you're going to get all the video lectures available and a lot of other stuff, even if you filter out everything but films. To surf through the documentaries, search on "psychology documentary" and "psychology documentaries".

Video lectures offer in depth presentations of topics. Documentaries tend to be narrow in scope and, usually, geared toward general audiences, but can be surprisingly entertaining.