Kind of a cool initiative over at Stanford University, where they’ve created a special section of the Apple iTunes music store to distribute audio and video content to the world and to their own. Their overview says the initiative has two parts:
- a public site, targeted primarily at alumni, which will include Stanford faculty lectures, learning materials, music, sports, and more.
- an access-restricted site for students delivering course-based materials and advising content.
Now, I’d like to see the Getty, MoMA, the Metropolitan Opera, the Guthrie Theatre, the San Francisco Symphony, and a few other cultural types take a shot at the same idea. There’s still a few gigabytes on my iPod that crave cultural content.
Then try the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s website (http://www.milwaukeesymphony.org/)! In a very recent cutting-edge move, Milwaukee’s the first American orchestra to make many of its live performances/recordings available through iTunes. If it’s “cultural content” you crave, the MSO’s website will give you a good start toward satisfying it.
Awesome! Agreed, it would be nice to see a broader application. Still, even just Stanford itself offering the lectures…I’m not an alum, but I do love picking up random lectures on NPR, and I’m a huge fan of THE TEACHING COMPANY and B&N’s PORTABLE PROFESSOR materials. And this is an even more convenient format. Love it!
As a Stanford bum, I’m delighted to see this material migrate online. As a professional working with students interested in entrepreneurship, I’m keenly interested in rendering course content in new ways to fit their lifetsyles. This little post is inspiring 🙂
so… are there any particular lectures/lecturers you’d recommend?
I think the iTunes stuff is an option, not a requirement – I thought I read somewhere about an alternate interface to the content. But, even so, iTunes is free, and available for MacOSX and Windows, so even if it’s used for nothing else than to grab the stuff from Stanford, it’s not the end of the world…