Friday, September 25, 2009

iTunes U - the Singularity is behind us

Despite my IOT habit, I've only today rediscovered iTunes U in iTunes 9...



This still brings tears to my eyes. As I (incorrectly - Bill Gates Sr only did the foreword) wrote in 2006 about an early casualty of tech churn ...
... I remember reading the book written by Bill Gate's father (yes, his father) called 'The New Papyrus'. It was all about the how the data CD would revolutionize the world. This was before the net became public. I was amazed by the CD back then, and I wrote a letter to a Canadian development organization on how it could dramatically change the delivery of knowledge to what was then called the 'third world'...
iTunes U, Aaronson’s MIT lectures on theoretical computer science, MIT OpenCourseWare, OpenAccess journals and the BBC’s In Our Time are now freely available to a good portion of the world. Even in poor nations, they are likely accessible in many universities.

I beat on Apple and Google all the time, but, really, the iPhone and iTunes U would stun a geek of 1986. We entropics do not appreciate how far we have traveled.

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