The University's on-line educational venture, Harvard at Home, now offers a dozen capsule versions of seminars, talks, and courses. Designed to give alumni a sense of intellectual happenings around campus, the vignettes cover a range of topics, including physics, library science, global health and AIDS, literature, and biography.
Most recently available on line is "Beethoven's Ninth: Then and Now," an edited version of an Alumni College weekend led by music professor Thomas F. Kelly. "It is spying on real-time events," he says of the segment. Viewers and listeners at home can learn almost as much about the composer as they would have had they attended the event, he says--except that some of the music is missing. An added advantage, he jokes, is that "if I get boring, they can fast-forward to the next segment. Or if they can't understand my fast talking, they can play it over again." In the vignette entitled "Oliver Cromwell: Commoner to Lord Protector," Mark Kishlansky, Baird professor of history and associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, explores Cromwell's rise to power, complete with battle maps and a timeline. Mexico's secretary of foreign affairs, Jorge Casteñeda, a guest speaker at the Kennedy School, can also be seen and heard lecturing on "Border Connections: Mexico-U.S. Relations."
Harvard at Home is accessible through www.haa.harvard.edu, where one registers for the password-protected alumni website Post.Harvard. A menu on that site links users to Harvard at Home.
