Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Classical Mechanics made popular by Walter Lewin

As you might know, my lectures are recorded and archived ever since 2004. I really do know, how difficult it is, to fit the lecture into the exact 90 minutes frame, to develop a dramaturgy to get the student's attention. But, looking at MIT Prof. Walter Lewin's lectures on Classical Mechanics (MIT 8.01) you really can become frustrated -- well at least as being a lecturer myself. From the listener's perspective, Walter Lewin's lectures are really great! Each single lecture follows an escalating dramaturgy leading into some astonishing experiment - often with Prof. Lewin being part of the experiment himself.

Let it be a life threatening pendulum experiment (here you can jump directely to the experiment in the video), or his funny safari costume for 'shooting the monkey'. The videos are profesisonally produced - no wonder, MIT invested 100.000 $ per lecture series. Each hour of Lewin's lectures requires 40 hours of preparation -- at least if you want to keep his quality standard.

Of course, simply by watching lectures at youtube or yovisto you don't learn. This fact holds since the times of Sokrates. You need practical experience under the guidance of a teacher. But hey, it's also pure fun to listen to Prof. Lewin and there's a lot to learn, esp. for teachers....

Yovisto has indexed the entire 35 lectures of 8.01 Classical Mechanics. By registering at yovisto, you can place tags and comments to every single point of time within Lewin's videos as well as you can bookmark only the highlights out of his lectures.