Hello everyone, over the last couple of months a group of us have  
created the Alternative University Project to offer free learning  
opportunities to individuals in the community, free of cost.

The project has grown quite significantly since we started, we  
currently have 15 courses available. Some have already begun and  
others are beginning soon; these courses are discussed below.

We encourage you to participate in developing the project with us. You  
can participate by coming to our meetings, taking a course, teaching a  
course, joining a discussion, or any other way you think that would be  
helpful.

Although we are developing the project to exist on a permanent basis,  
it could also be used as a way for students to continue to learn if  
Concordia and McGill enter the current student strike.



Please visit our website at www.altu.ca
or write to us at: course.proposal.inbox@gmail.com




PLEASE CIRCULATE THIS WIDELY!!!










If you would like to attend one of our FREE courses, please visit the  
website listed above.


There are two courses beginning next week. See below.




1 - Digital Activism: Cryptography and Anonymity for Activists

As online communication and information technology becomes more vital,
activists find technologies as simple as social media and as obscure as data
encryption to be key for political action. Why do activists need to care about
digital security? We discuss the history, past cases, and the dangers that
activists may face online from various factors, including surveillance  
and data
theft, as well as the tools they have at their disposal to use the Internet
securely. We also discuss the legal dimensions of digital rights, and the
techniques in which digital activism has affected the world in the past year.

We'll go more in-depth on different facets of digital security:  
Anonymizing our
Internet connection and bypassing censorship with Tor, using Cryptocat and OTR
for secure IM, Using GPG to send secure email and to encrypt files, encrypting
our hard drives against search and seizure, and more.

To register - please visit http://altu.ca/moodle/course/view.php?id=16 or
e-mail Nadim at nadim@nadim.cc







2 - Me-Me the Meme-Machine!

So this will be a fully online course that would ideally involve about 20-30
minutes of your time every day, half spent combing facebook/the web  
for awesome
memes, and half spent checking out what other student's have been finding and
writing about

My interest is mostly with political memes, because I think they're such and
energy-dense form of communication that I think they can be really powerful

But I'm really into all sorta memes, whatever it is someone thought it was
funny/witty/important enough to spend a bit of time making and memeing it, and
so through this course I guess i hope to get some sense of the collective
unconscious of the english-internet-literate part o this world. Or in less
hippy (and more academic) terms, to do a society study by looking at memes...

speculations as to how to bring people to higher states of critical
consioucness through memeing= very welcome in this class

far less self-important things- such as laughing at funny captioned pictures,
also = very welcome here

all are welcome!

To register e-mail Alex at ajhbriggs@gmail.com or visit
http://altu.ca/moodle/course/view.php?id=17