Now that I’m transferring “ownership” of my iPods to the new-ish (2010) laptop, it’s time to prune the “always on iPod lists.” There’s one for Jazz, one for Baroque, one for Renaissance and Sacred, and one for Classical, Romantic and Modern. To that I add this random one (and a similar one for Jazz, I think). After all, most of the time I’m on the move I listen to audiobooks and podcasts anyway.

(Edited: changed the rule; by a terrible oversight I hadn’t excluded Opera from the automatic playlist. That could have been ugly!)

My thoughts on iTunes U: It will help, but the problem in education is institutions

Making lectures (and supporting materials) widely available is good, but the idea that learning is some sort of procedure done to the student by the educator is flawed; learning is something that the student makes happen, by practicing the materials.

Walter Lewin does make physics fun to watch, but watching Lewin’s lectures won’t make anyone a physicist. Solving Lewin’s problem sets will. (Lewin may motivate people into doing the work necessary to become a physicist — and that’s a great contribution right there —but without slogging through the math no one becomes a physicist.) MIT’s rule of thumb is that learning is 1% lecture, 9% self study, 90% solving the problem sets.

Putting the lectures online — possibly in a mix of text, occasional talking head, interactive content, and links to references — is a good idea; instead of using the class time for them, we can use the class time for problem solving and discussion. This, of course is a major change to how education is practiced, so I expect most classes will continue almost unchanged.

Addendum: Some time ago I saw some new “smart classrooms” which were to be used for exec-ed; these classrooms had hundreds of thousands of dollars of presentation equipment and cheap, uncomfortable chairs. That’s upside-down: students’ discomfort will make a much bigger negative dent on their learning experience (and these are middle-aged students with the ailments that entails) than the minor positive of the high-resolution projectors and other machinery. Hey, I understand that the money might have been earmarked for technology, but chairs are technology too.

Will your intellectual creations survive 900 years?

A somewhat depressing thought for a knowledge worker: it’s very unlikely that my intellectual creations will survive even a small fraction of Hildegard von Bingen’s sacred music (it’s about 900 years old).

Of course, Plato laughs at 900 years, what with over 2350 for The Republic.

(Yes, that Classical label on genre is bothering me to no end; I’m likely to change it to Medieval or at least to Altemusik.)