iTunes U - free learning from the World

How Apple Makes It Happen

www.apple.com

Apple's iTunes is one of the more popular music and video software programs. This has been driven by the remarkable popularity of the iPod range of content players.

What some teachers may not know is that it's also home to iTunes U, a free and growing library of online podcasts, video seminars and other material. Although it's aimed primarily at undergraduate level, nonetheless there's a lot of great material that can be used and adapted for secondary (K12) classes.

Apple has just announced that the UK's Tate gallery, plus France's Chateau de Versailles and Fondation Cartier have made content freely available to download.

One of the great advantages of iTunes U is that content can be taken away by students and viewed on PCs and iPods. Thus, this creates some great opportunities for individual learning assignments, either as homework or as part of a larger project.

iTunes is free to download onto a PC or Mac, and by subscribing to a feed from iTunes U, subscribers receive automatic updates straight into a mailbox within iTunes. 

It's a useful and free learning resource that's certainly worth a look-see.

Britain's got an online hit

The latest surprise from the annual talent show, Britain's Got Talent, is the way 47 year old Susan Boyle has become a global hit, and that's from only her audition!

The Scottish singer's remarkable rendition of I Dreamed A Dream from Les Miserables left the judges and viewers stunned.

What's more interesting is that while the show has been pulling in around 10 million viewers, the YouTube clip of Susan has so far rated more than 5 million hits on its own. 

At the same time, a large survey by The Office for National Statistics found some revealing changes to Briton's viewing habits:

Around half (49%) of all eight to 17-year-olds with internet access have a profile on a social networking site

• Ownership of a home computer has risen from 29% in 1998 to 70% in 2007

• Web use is higher among men than women but, overall, 34% listen to the radio or watch TV on the web and 12% use file-sharing sites

• Less than half (44%) of people in the UK read a national daily newspaper in 2008 compared with 72% in 1978

Evidently there are rapid changes happening and it will be interesting to see how educators keep pace with this societal change, when it comes to incorporating and reflecting these variations into classroom activities.

French don't fancy punishing file sharers, Fox News does

Two stories have caught my eye.

Firstly, since I'm now working from home in France, I was intrigued to read that the French National Assembly have rejected a proposal, approved by the Senate, to cut off the internet connections of those caught illegal file sharing three times. The proposed legislation would have seen offenders receiving a warning email, then a letter, before losing their access.

The Assembly argued that the proposal might have led to innocent consumers losing their web connections, should a hacker use a legitimate service to download illegally. Thus, an issue about protecting commercial rights has been overcome by concerns for individual liberties. It will be interesting to see how far similar proposals get in other European countries.

Meanwhile, film critic Roger Friedman has been forced to resign from his post as film review for Fox News in the States, after he blogged about using an illegally downloaded version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Friedman claimed it was easier to do so, rather than haul himself out to a preview screening. Unsurprisingly, both the film studio concerned and his employer saw the situation rather differently.

There's no doubt that the cultural shift towards viewing content as always free, that has penetrated deep into the psyche of youth culture, is spreading into other strata of society. However, the notion of shared public access to content, regardless of who made it and for what purpose, is going to remain a thorny issue for some time to come.  The rise of the read/write web means that many of us now produce multimedia content freely for home use. Educating our young about the entitlement of creative professionals to be able to charge for their creations is one of the challenges facing educators involved in delivering Digital Literacy programmes.

If we fail to make it clear that content can't always be free, then the future of creative industries in years to come may be rather bleaker than we would prefer.

Stephen Fry on Twitter

A nice video post from Stephen Fry about why he likes using the micro blogging service Twitter. For those of us involved in education his final comment, about using Twitter as an interactive source of information, is perhaps the most interesting, in terms of using Twitter within a learning context.

Watch the video, provided by the BBC, here.

The read/write web and students' learning

A fantastic short video, that gives a really good overview of how teachers can use free online interactive tools to empower students to work collaboratively.