iTunes U
I was always rather ambivalent towards Apple's products. I love their design, easy-to-use interfaces and accessibility, and I was also impressed by the way that the iPad and Macbook managed to make having a computer 'cool'. Thanks to Jobs and co, a laptop was no longer the accessory of a besuited workaholic desperately mining every last ten minutes of their life in search of 'productivity', or the insecure computer geek who cannot bear to be parted from their copy of Netbeans and access to Slashdot.
What I wasn't so happy about was the way Apple put the brakes on independent development via a rigorously-policed Appstore, and the way one couldn't easily USB an iPad to a PC laptop and drag/drop files between them, but then I'm a born tinkerer and plugger-inner who finds things like that annoying, and was mildly concerned that this closed architecture would set an unholy precedent. I've always been fond of the way Microsoft gives away free dev tools for both the Xbox and PC and bags of tutorials, and especially fond of the way Linux practically encourages you to take it apart and make your own OS. I like that kind of thing.
Anyway, a couple of days before Steve Jobs died, I discovered something rather lovely. I was disabling an installation of iTunes on my PC because it kept trying to 'do things' (update itself, update Quicktime etc.) when I discovered something called 'iTunes U'.
iTunes U is a section of iTunes that sits alongside the TV show bit, the music bit and the film bit, and it contains lectures from various universites, such as Stanford, Oxford and the Open University.
Luckily the iTunes software itself is a free download, and the stuff on iTunes U is also free. You don't need to sign up for anything or create a profile either. The downloaded files are just .mp3 or .mp4 files that sit in a download folder (by default C:\Users\[username]\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Downloads\iTunes U), and they have no DRM.
This means you can happily put and use the material on your Creative Labs mp3 player, your mobile phone or your Windows laptop. You don't have to watch them in the dreadful Quicktime, you can use whatever media player you like, and you can also pass them on to friends.
To my mind, this is what the internet should be about. Our culture and society is immeasurably richer when we have the option of learning whatever we like easily and for free. It's no substitute for studying at a university and having access to the library, attending seminars and having 121 tutorials with a member of faculty (it would be unfair to expect the same 'density' of information in a 20-minute video), but a bunch of online videos and sound files that can be carried around in a little box is definitely a step in the right direction.
For my part I had a happy evening watching lectures on Medieval English, Cosmology and one on Metaphysics and Epistemology. Wonderful stuff.
What I wasn't so happy about was the way Apple put the brakes on independent development via a rigorously-policed Appstore, and the way one couldn't easily USB an iPad to a PC laptop and drag/drop files between them, but then I'm a born tinkerer and plugger-inner who finds things like that annoying, and was mildly concerned that this closed architecture would set an unholy precedent. I've always been fond of the way Microsoft gives away free dev tools for both the Xbox and PC and bags of tutorials, and especially fond of the way Linux practically encourages you to take it apart and make your own OS. I like that kind of thing.
Anyway, a couple of days before Steve Jobs died, I discovered something rather lovely. I was disabling an installation of iTunes on my PC because it kept trying to 'do things' (update itself, update Quicktime etc.) when I discovered something called 'iTunes U'.
iTunes U is a section of iTunes that sits alongside the TV show bit, the music bit and the film bit, and it contains lectures from various universites, such as Stanford, Oxford and the Open University.
Luckily the iTunes software itself is a free download, and the stuff on iTunes U is also free. You don't need to sign up for anything or create a profile either. The downloaded files are just .mp3 or .mp4 files that sit in a download folder (by default C:\Users\[username]\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Downloads\iTunes U), and they have no DRM.
This means you can happily put and use the material on your Creative Labs mp3 player, your mobile phone or your Windows laptop. You don't have to watch them in the dreadful Quicktime, you can use whatever media player you like, and you can also pass them on to friends.
To my mind, this is what the internet should be about. Our culture and society is immeasurably richer when we have the option of learning whatever we like easily and for free. It's no substitute for studying at a university and having access to the library, attending seminars and having 121 tutorials with a member of faculty (it would be unfair to expect the same 'density' of information in a 20-minute video), but a bunch of online videos and sound files that can be carried around in a little box is definitely a step in the right direction.
For my part I had a happy evening watching lectures on Medieval English, Cosmology and one on Metaphysics and Epistemology. Wonderful stuff.
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