Research Fellow, PF
On ParaMOOC2018 and the Publicly Available Recordings
Course still open to enrollment …
The annual Parapsychology Research and Education free online course (also known as ParaMOOC2018), which highlights the scientific study of psychic phenomena, completed the live sessions of lecturers by active researchers on February 24th, 2018. As of Monday, February 26th when Dr. Carlos S. Alvarado and I held the closing session of the live portion of the course, 340 individuals had enrolled in the course. The benefits of membership include access to the PowerPoints of the guest speakers, additional articles, PowerPoint poster session presentations, as well as selected lectures from guest speakers from the 2015 though 2017 iterations of the course. If you’re interested in joining us click here to access the enrollment page. For those who complete the course, Certificates of Completion and Certificates of Completion with Distinction are available signed by Lisette Coly, the President of the Parapsychology Foundation. Information on how to achieve the certificates is available in both the Opening Session (January 16th) and the Closing Session (February 26th, 2018). Enrollment will remain open until August 31st, 2018.
Recordings of the individual sessions still open to the public …
This year, to encourage more interested individuals to drop in and attend the lectures, we made the individual live sessions by guest speakers available to the public. The good news is that, just like the live sessions, the recordings are available to the public.
The list below includes links to all of the recordings. Some of the sessions suffered from technical problems owing to the internet stability and bandwidth of some of the speakers. If you click the links below to watch a recording and encounter some technical difficulties, just skip ahead until you hit the portion of the video that doesn’t have those problems. Only a few of the talks had this problem, unfortunately these include three of the UK talks, two of which are at the beginning of the series.
These videos from the 2018 iteration of the ParaMOOC won’t be uploaded to the Parapsychology Foundation’s YouTube Channel until 2019 in all probability, so we hope you’ll take advantage of the links below.
The list of links to the publicly available recordings …
- Robert McLuhan (Society for Psychical Research), The Psi Encyclopedia: A Window on Psychical Research.
- Dr. David Vernon (Canterbury Christ Church University), Dark Cognition: Evidence for Psi and Implications for Consciousness.
- Dr. Sonali Bhatt Marwaha and Dr. Ed May (Laboratories for Fundamental Research), Dualism and Psi: An Invalid Hypothesis.
- Dr. Carlos S. Alvarado (Parapsychlogy Foundation), Parapsychology and the Study of the Mind: Changing the Historical Record.
- Dr Jessica Utts (University of California-Irvine), The Significance of Statistics to the Study of Mind-Matter Research.
- Dr. George Williams (Federal Communications Commission, USA), Are Different Standards of Evidence Warranted When Evaluatiing Ps Research?
- Dr. Penny Sartori (Swansea University), The Transformative Power of Near-Death Experiences.
- Dr. Callum E. Cooper (University of Northampton), Anomalous Experiences and Bereavement.
- Dr. Thomas Rabeyron (University of Nantes), Anomalous Experiences, Creativity, and Mental Health.
- Dr. Leonardo Martins (Coventry University), Anomalistic Psychology, Parapsychology, Psychology of Magic and Psychology of Religion: An Integrative Proposal to Deal with the Complexity of the Paranormal.
- Dr. Julie Beischel (Windbridge Research Center), A Survey of Secular American Mediums.
- Dr. Margaret M. Moga (Indiana School of Medicine), Magnetic Activity and Healing.
- Dr. Alexander Moreira-Almeida (Federal University of Juiz de Fora), Scientific Investigation of Chico Xavier’s Mediumship.
- Dr. Morris Freedman (Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, Canada), Mind-Matter Interaction and the Frontal Lobes.
- Dr. Dean Radin (Institute of Noetics Science), A Disturbance in the Force: Exploring Collective Consciousness at Burning Man.
Opening and closing sessions, the weekly discussion forums that were available from January 22nd through February 26th, and the last-Sunday-of-the-Month discussion forums—the next one on reincarnation research, presented by Bryan Williams (Psychical Research Foundation) and Carlos and I—are available only to enrollees. Scroll up to the top of this section to pick up the link to enroll.
As always those of us involved in the ParaMOOC series of courses are grateful to the speakers for preparing and presenting talks on some aspect of their current work, and to our students, especially those who were able to attend the live sessions and participated in the discussion after each talk, as well as those who watched recordings but contributed to the course culture through the course-wide chat feed. We also want to extend out thanks to all of those who commented and posted on the course, and forwarded our Facebook notifications or retweeted our Twitter notices about the individual sessions! ParaMOOC2018 would have been as successful as it has been without your contributions!
What’s New on the Parapsychology Foundation YouTube Channel
Before I get into the list of what’s been uploaded to the Parapsychology Foundation YouTube Channel since our last video listing, we’d like to thank all of the folks who answered our call to subscribe to the channel over the recent months. YouTube, whch handles an enormous amount of videos on a daily basis, changed it’s policies towards monetization of channels at the beginning of the year. YouTube now requires individual channels to have 1000 subscribers, 40,000 or more hours of video viewing from the previous 12 months, and over 10,000 lifetime views in order to be eligible. While the primary goal for the Parapsychology Foundation’s YouTube channel is to make new and legacy video available to those of you who are interested in the scientific and academic side of the field, because the PF is a not-for-profit now in its 67th year, a secondary hope was to obtain a bit of an income for the Foundation’s programs from the channel as well. When YouTube announced the new rules for monetization, the PF YouTube channel exceeded comfortably the requirements on lifetime views and previous year viewing hours, but was still a few hundred folks short of the subscriber requirement. We went into a big push for more subscribers on our socal media, and in the ParaMOOC sessions as well, and the response was fantastic. Well before the eligibility deadline, we topped 1000 subscribers and are monumentally grateful to all of you for subscribing! We also recommend that you click on the notification bell once you’ve subscribed, to make sure you don’t miss any of the videos going up. Lisette Coly’s thank you to all our subscribers is on the list below.
The last time we made a list of the activity on our YouTube Channel was in August of 2017. What follows here is a list of the new videos.
On September 6th, 2017, the first presentation of the November 2016 Book Expo was uploaded to the channel. The presentation by Dr. Imants Baruss (King’s College, Western University) and Dr. Julia Mossbridge (Institute for Noetic Science), focused on their book, Transcendent Mind: Rethinking the Science of Consciousness. Their talk was a fascinating combination of chatting with each other about their process and the purpose of the book with a lively discusson with the attendees of the live session. To see this video click here.
On September 18th , 2017, the second presentation from the 2017 PF International Affiliates Conference: New Faces in Parapsychology was posted. Csongor Matyi, nominated by PF International Affiliate for Hungary, Dr. Zoltán Vassy, reported on the research he conducted for his master’s thesis some years ago, as well as talked about the current course he teaches and the type of research he’s planning for the future. To see this video click here.
On October 5th, 2017, PF Leadership Through The Years, was uploaded. This brief film was made by Anatasia Damalas, the 4th generation of the family to work for the Foundation. It includes a variety of photos of the PF’s founders, Eileen J. Garrett and the Honorable Frances P. Bolton, of Eileen and Robert Coly who steered the Foundation from 1970 through the early 2000s, and of Lisette Coly’s years at the helm. The description provides a link for those who would like to donate to help support the PF’s future grants, awards and programs. To see this video click here.
On October 16th, the third and final talk for the 2017 PF International Affiliates Conference: New Faces in Parapsychology was posted. Nominated by Professor Wellington Zangari (University of São Paulo) and Dr. Fátima R. Machado (InterPsi, USP), the PF International Affiliates for Brazil, post-graduate student Gabriel Teixeira de Medeiros reviewed his dissertation research on out-of-body experiencers, comparing them to non-experiences on a variety of demographic and personality characteristics. To see this video click here. The Closing Session of the same conference was also uploaded a couple of days later, on the 18th of October. To see that video click here.
On November 7th, the Opening Session of the PF Lyceum Forum on Physical Mediumship was uploaded (the link to the video is here), followed on November 10th by the first presentation of the Forum by Dr. Carlos S. Alvarado, Physical Mediumship: Brief Historical View. To see this vdeo click here.
On November 19th, the first talk of the PF International Conference on the Study of Medumship was uploaded. The conference was the last on-site single-subject conference of the Foundation, held in Charlottesvlle, Virginia, over the last weekend of January in 2005. PF Research Fellow Dr Carlos S. Alvarado presented A Brief of History of Mediumship Research. To see this video click here.
On December 16th, an archival clip of an interview conducted with Eileen Coly, then President of the Parapsychology Foundation, was uploaded. To see this video click here. Mrs. Coly ranged over the past and then present of the PF as well as discussed her hopes for the future.
The first video upload of 2018 was a PF Classic Perspectives Lecture, Parapsychology in the 21st Cenury, presented by Dr. Robert L. Morris, then the Koestler Professor of Parapsychology at the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Morris talked about the founding of the Professorship, the work of the Koestler Parapsychology Unit, and the cultural context in which both experiencers and researchers find themselves. To see this video click here.
On January 27th, in gratitude for hitting the 1000 subscriber mark, Lisette Coly, uploaded a brief thank you video to all the subscribers to the channel, past, present and future. To see this video click here.
On February 1st, the second presentation of the November 2016 Book Expo was uploaded but missed going live, so I pushed it live earlier on the 7th. In that presentation, Titus Rivas and Rudolf Smit presented their book written with Anny Dirven, The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences. Originally published iin Dutch, the volume provides a systematic look at some of the best evidence from NDE research. The presentation of the book was followed by a lively discussion with the attendees. To see this video click here.
Finally, on March 1st, another Classic Perspectives Lecture was uploaded. From the late 1990s, the well-known author and psychic, Dr. Alan Vaughan, presented Doorways to Higher Consciousness, a talk about intuition and psychic functioning. To see this video, clck here.
As we go forward we will still be uploading as often as possible. Anna Damalas is still focusing on new ideas and the classic legacy video that goes back many years, including the rest of the presentations from the 2005 Charlottesville conference. I’ll be working on the PF Forum on Physical Mediumship, hopefully alternating that with the Parapsychlogy Research and Education series (ParaMOOC2015, 2016 and 2017). And of course, we still have some new content projects on the burners as well.
If you’d like to help the Parapsychology Foundation in its various efforts on behalf of and to support the scientific and academic study of psychic phenomena, please don’t hesitate to hit that donation button below. No donation is too small! And of course, head over the the PF YouTube Channel, hit the subscribe button and the notification bell and join us on our journey!