Did Anyone Get The License Plate of that Existentialist?

Love this article from the LA Times on the iPod Lecture circuit.

Here's a quote:

"BERKELEY -- Baxter Wood is one of Hubert Dreyfus' most devoted students. During lectures on existentialism, Wood hangs on every word, savoring the moments when the 78-year-old philosophy professor pauses to consider a student's comment or relay how a meaning-of-life question had him up at 2 a.m.  But Wood is not sitting in a lecture hall on the UC Berkeley campus, nor has he met Dreyfus. He is in the cab of his 18-wheel big rig, hauling dog food from Ohio to the West Coast or flat-screen TVs from Los Angeles to points east.The 61-year-old trucker from El Paso eavesdrops on the lectures by downloading them for free from Apple Inc.'s iTunes store, transferring them to his Hewlett-Packard digital media player, then piping them through his cabin's speakers. He hits pause as he approaches cities so he can focus more on traffic than on what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead, then shifts his attention back to the classroom."

I think this is amazing.

(Though I hope they don't put up any of my old stats lectures on iTunes.  The snoring and drooling on my desk may distract the truckers.)

Comments

[Kelly]

Timely. I've lately been obsessed with the Stanford Technology Ventures Program lectures via "iTunes U."

MIT was ahead of the curve making all of their course material available online - but iTunes U has the win for accessibility, for two reasons:

First, as an aggregator, they become the go-to place to download content that's usually hosted elsewhere on the web (ie. Stanford's own site.) The source here matters less to me than the subject I want to learn about. With one search I can retrieve relevant lectures from multiple schools, ie. guest lectures on Entrepreneurship from Wharton, Harvard and Stanford.

Secondly, the podcast is a killer format for its mobility and flexibility. We can thread digital audio through almost any output really easily. And the no-hands, no-eyes nature of audio content couldn't be more seamless or efficient, as your friend Baxter discovered on his long haul toward sunrise.

You gotta try it sometime. The good lectures are really, really good, and the bad ones you can just fast forward - a feature, perhaps, you could have used in Stats?