Anyone interested in taking online courses together? Also, more on lecture calendars.

Part 1: Class Club
So, I've got this idea. Both MIT and (to a lesser extent) Harvard Extension have courses available for free online. This is a wonderful resource that should be taken advantage of more. Unfortunately, I have the attention span of a squirrel with a really short attention span. For all my best intentions toward self-improvement, I doubt I'd realistically get through a whole course just on my own, so what if I formed a "class club"? It's like a book club, but everyone commits to working through a class at some reasonable non-student pace, like a lecture a week (or, more realistically for me, every two weeks). We could discuss online, maybe even meet in person to watch like a TV group.

I am conflicted between thinking this is a very good idea and every fiber of my being not wanting to add another thing to my calendar. Just to see if this would be do-able, though, here are some of the classes that have caught my eye. Would anyone be interested and able to commit to a bi-weekly (or weekly) schedule?

COMPUTER SCIENCE / MATH
Introduction to Algorithms (fun fact: taught by a former housemate's dad)

Designing Mobile Technologies for the Next Billion Users (this is video from a hands-on course, so I'm not sure how useful it would actually be)

Bits (seems like an "advanced basics of CS" kind of thing)

Sets, Counting and Probability (not the most interesting to me, TBH, but the kind of thing I always wish I was better at)


LAW / PHILOSOPHY / SOCIAL SCIENCE
Justice (at least according to the website, this lecture series is kind of a big deal)

Introduction to Copyright Law (I keep complaining about it, so maybe I should learn something about it)

Poverty Action Lab: Evaluating Social Programs (this is maybe too practical to be of use to someone not directly involved, but then again the techniques they talk about might be more broadly usable?)

China: Traditions and Transformations (There are these billions of people with gobs of history and an ever-increasing role on the world stage, and I know practically bugger all about where they're coming from.)


...my dilettante-ness, let me show it to you. :) Edit Ack! And I didn't even get into the History section. There's a ton I want to know about there. Will resist adding more courses for now, but here's a ton of cool looking one-shot lectures. Alan Turing, anyone?

So, with the caveat that I might have to conclude that I just don't have the time/brain to spare, is anyone interested?


Part 2: Lecture Calendars
To follow up on my earlier post about finding live, one-shot lectures in the Cambridge/Somerville area, the most useful tool I've found so far is this, which lets you create a custom rss feed (why it's not ical or something like that I've no idea) of events.

http://events.mit.edu/rsssearch.html

I've created an LJ syndication of all of the science and humanities events at mitscihum if anyone's interested. It's currently empty, but iirc they usually take a while to populate.

Harvard also has something like this at...

http://events.college.harvard.edu/

I haven't dug into it as far, but it's a bit of a slog and there's no way I see to get a feed out of it, so it's less useful to me.