Peter Bradwell
Researcher
Peter Bradwell is a researcher at Demos. He is interested in the ways that information and knowledge is shared between people, and between people and government...
at 1:50pm on Tuesday, 22nd April 2008
Last weekend I got pretty excited by 'iTunes U' - an area of iTunes that lets Universities in the US share audio and video from their lectures, talks and events. You can subscribe to courses, listen to one-off debates, and hear some of the leading thinkers in a range of fields dispensing their vast wisdom. Thinking about this in the context of sites like the splendid School of Everything, it's another alternative way to learn, and to share knowledge.
I particularly enjoyed this - an introductory but quite in-depth and engaging talk about the relationship between democracy and the market by Yale president Richard C. Levin. Having listened to this, I am still not convinced by flat world talk. And I am hopefully about to make my journey in to work 600% more interesting (but, you might say, 20% less useful than when I got by on Cyndi Lauper and the Metro) by getting stuck in to this course about Existentialism in Literature and Film from Berkeley's Professor Hubert Dreyfuss. I was thinking about following this up with a sort-of distance learning law course from New York Law School. It's great for the geek with spare travel time.
I am no advocate of the way iTunes distributes music and video necessarily, and I am technically a year late to the party (it opened for the UK in May last year), but it just seems like a really excellent and incredibly exciting resource of ideas, organized in a really accessible way. I am not clear about the terms of access and distribution (whether I can just send this on to friends in ways I couldn't legally with the music from iTunes), but nearly all of it seems to be free, and in mp3 format.
It would be great to see a similar place for UK universities to distribute their archives. Is there one available? It would be interesting to know why not and what the different constraints are here in the UK.
I particularly enjoyed this - an introductory but quite in-depth and engaging talk about the relationship between democracy and the market by Yale president Richard C. Levin. Having listened to this, I am still not convinced by flat world talk. And I am hopefully about to make my journey in to work 600% more interesting (but, you might say, 20% less useful than when I got by on Cyndi Lauper and the Metro) by getting stuck in to this course about Existentialism in Literature and Film from Berkeley's Professor Hubert Dreyfuss. I was thinking about following this up with a sort-of distance learning law course from New York Law School. It's great for the geek with spare travel time.
I am no advocate of the way iTunes distributes music and video necessarily, and I am technically a year late to the party (it opened for the UK in May last year), but it just seems like a really excellent and incredibly exciting resource of ideas, organized in a really accessible way. I am not clear about the terms of access and distribution (whether I can just send this on to friends in ways I couldn't legally with the music from iTunes), but nearly all of it seems to be free, and in mp3 format.
It would be great to see a similar place for UK universities to distribute their archives. Is there one available? It would be interesting to know why not and what the different constraints are here in the UK.
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