What is Open Culture’s Mission?

Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. Web 2.0 has given us great amounts of intelligent audio and video. It’s all free. It’s all enriching. But it’s also scattered across the web, and not easy to find. Our whole mission is to centralize this content, curate it, and give you access to this high quality content whenever and wherever you want it. Free audio books, free online courses, free movies, free language lessons, free ebooks and other enriching content — it’s all here. Open Culture was founded in 2006.

Who is Behind Open Culture?

Dan Colman, the lead editor, is the Director & Associate Dean of Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program. Before that, he served as the Managing Director of AllLearn, an e-learning consortium owned by Stanford, Oxford and Yale, and as the Director of Business Development and Editorial Manager at About.com. He received his PhD and MA from Stanford, and his BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The common thread running through his career is his interest in bringing relevant, perspective-changing information to large audiences, often with the help of the internet. Get his full bio here.

Seth Harwood writers regularly for Open Culture about how digital technologies (ebooks, ebook readers, audio podcasts, etc.) are changing the publishing world. Seth graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2002 and currently lives in Berkeley, CA.  He teaches English and creative writing with Stanford Continuing Studies and the City College of San Francisco. His first novel, Jack Wakes Up, received major media attention after he built a large online following by serializing it as free audiobook podcasts. This led to Jack Wakes Up being published in May 2005 by Three Rivers (Random House). You can find more free audiobooks, including all of these stories, as well as his blog, at sethharwood.com. Seth’s email address is seth@sethharwood.com .

Eric Oberle provides very generous technical support for the site. Without him, you would be getting 404s instead of regular doses of intelligent media.

Fred Hsu, the developer behind the Open Culture iPhone app, works as a Technical Marketing Engineer at Cisco Systems, and dabbles in iPhone programming in his spare time.  He is a committed technophile and enjoys finding and using innovate technology, particularly when its for a good cause. You can find him on Twitter at @fredshu.

Is the Site Affiliated with Stanford University?

This site is not formally associated with Stanford. The ideas/views expressed here belong to Dan, or others. But, in all cases, they are private ones.

How Can I Contact Open Culture?

Feel free to drop us a line at mail@openculture.com.

Can I Advertise on Open Culture?

Yes. You can get more information here.

Do You Have a Privacy Policy

Yes, read all about it here.

Can I Recommend Materials to List on Open Culture?

Yes. If you would like us to add links to relevant parts of our site, you can suggest materials/links via email and we will be happy to review them. Please read over our editorial guidelines and then let us know where you think your material should be listed, and try to provide all of the information that will help us list your material. For example, if you want us to include a link in one of our podcast directories, please look at the appropriate directory and include all of the information that we typically include in our entries.