THE LAUNCH OF THE

BA Science Supercourse (Alexandria web site)

The Supercourse of Science was launched Jan 5-6, 2009, at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt by the co-leaders Ismail Serageldin of The Library of Alexandria, Ronald LaPorte of the University of Pittsburgh, Vint Cerf of Google, and Gilbert Omenn of the University of Michigan.  Its initial four foci of powerpoint lectures to be made available freely through the Internet for teaching purposes are Global Health, Agriculture, Environmental Science, and Engineering.  Each will have a “community of practice” to stimulate contribution of high-quality lectures and provide guidance and review on coverage of the fields.  The Library will be the repository and the secretariat for this global initiative, with financial support from the Swiss Development Corporation. 

The proof-of-principle has been established over the past decade with the Supercourse of Epidemiology, which has become the Supercourse of Global Health under the leadership of  founder Ronald LaPorte and Faina Linkov at the University of Pittsburgh and Eugene Shubnikov in Novosibirsk.  It comprises 3557 lectures, 58,000 teacher/professor users, and an estimated 1 million students reached in 175 countries.  Thirteen lectures have been received from 9 Nobel Laureates and 161 from 73 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine.  A symposium about the concept of the Supercourse of Science was held at the February 2008 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), at which several sections expressed interest in expansion into their domains of interest.

The current aims are to activate the four communities of interest, develop the secretariat, categorize the fields, and begin to build the sets of lectures. Evolution of content and formats will make these lectures helpful for research collaborations, as well as teaching at multiple levels of sophistication.  We will reach out to national academy members of other countries and to active scientists they recommend. We are eager for all to explore the resources already available at www.pitt.edu/~super1 and www.bibalex.org/supercourse.  Comments about the lectures are invited as part of the two-way engagement of users and contributors at the conclusion of each lecture in the websites. See Ismail Serageldin video on the Supercourse of Science at www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLnltG7c9tA.  Contact:  ronlaporte@aol.com.                                                                   

January 6, 2009, Alexandria, Egypt

SSC MoviE(44Mb)

The Library of Alexandria Supercourse: Expanding the Role of the Educator (lecture)

Bibliotheca Alexandrina Nobel Prize Supercourse

 Bibliotheca Alexandrina National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Supercourse 

Bibliotheca Alexandrina National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Supercourse

Bibliotheca Alexandrina Institute of Medicine (IOM) Supercourse

National Medal of Science.  Notable Laureates

Engineering Track (ICT)

  Health Track                                    Agriculture Track

Environment Track

Science and Supercourse lecture in Supercourse format

Web cast of Science and  Supercourse presentation

Other Science Supercourse Lectures

 Resources page  

     Google Translator      

Eric Marler has  harvested  the lectures from .edu domains, then discovered additional good scientific lectures from .int.  Also, he collected the scientific videos, and the lectures in Spanish and Arabic. There are over 3.7 million lectures identified and classified. The addition of Google Scholar by discipline site:edu not only fetches 000's of articles but reveals the key authors.   Eric found that Google scholar also has a new tool. If you do a search on say diabetes epidemiology, on the bottom of the page a list of 5 key authors are presented. The decision on "key authors" appears to be based on citations and page ranks.  These may represent the scientists at this time who are having the greatest impact on the web.  We thus are creating a most interesting hierarchy of importance, from Nobel Prize winners, the "Key Authors", the top rated lectures, the lectures having lower rankings. In addition, the option 'recent articles' selects articles after 2003 and allows one to set the years from as far back as 1995 or as far forward as 2008.  In turn, the year selected changes the set of key authors.

www.pitt.edu/~super1

WHO Collaborating Centre, University of Pittsburgh

Legacy lectures

Nobel Prize winners (70)

NAS Members (116)

IOM Members (84)

www.bibalex.org

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Meetings

AAAS Annual Meeting, 14–18 February, 2008  Boston

Biovision Alexandria 2008 12-16 April, 2008, Alexandria

Biovision Alexandria 2010 11-15 April, 2010, Alexandria

Biovision Alexandria 2012 22-25 April, 2012, Alexandria

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