The Intelligent iPod

I am discovering an immense world of learning accessible to anyone with an iPod and a computer. Most podcasts can be downloaded free, though some are available at a small cost.

Some of my favorites:

Terra -- a series of fairly short (approximately 15 minutes) episodes with beautiful photography devoted primarily to natural history and science, especially geology. Once you have viewed one of these episodes, you may want to keep it or you may feel that you won't need to see that particular one again. If you want to keep it, you can burn it to disc using your computer. There are some episodes so beautifully filmed that I know I will want to view them again and again. (FREE)

Anthropology 1010. Taught by Joylin Namie, Ph.D. This is one of the finest video courses I've found. Dr. Namie is a fine lecturer and her combination 0of social and cultural anthropology is fascinating. The course was shot in a studio setting with selected students in a small audience. If she mentions something theoretical, she always explains with specific examples, sometimes with video sequences. For instance, when she describes what one can learn about a sub-culture just by looking, she shows videos of herself skydiving with a group of other skydivers, then teases from the video and the brains of the students ion the classroom a lot of information one might otherwise not discern. The fact that this course was videoed in a special setting with us in mind sets it off from many other online courses. There's a course on Roman history I won't name (NOT the one I'll write about later) that has such terrible technical quality that it is scarcely intelligible. Obviously Dr. Namie took the teaching function of this presentation seriously and did everything she could to make this as effortless as possible. Unless your sense of curiosity and wonder is did, you'll find this course fascinating. (FREE)

CUNY offers a series of dozens of lectures available for free on a wide variety of subjects. One that impressed me enormously is called "Civil War Stories." Conventional wisdom says that the Civil War was caused by slavery. But just how ? The lecturer spent several years pouring through letters and other material by both Confederate and Union soldiers as well as by slaves (Did you know that 10 % of the Union Army was African-American ?) and uncovered the motivations this enormous variety of people had for fighting. It isn't as simple as you might think, and part of the reason dates back to the American Revolution and what it represented to these soldiers. I've listened to this lecture twice and I'm keeping it on my iPod because it is fascinating. And CUNY offers so many free lectures that this will boggle your mind as you peruse the list. (FREE)

Walking With Dinosaurs is a series of six 30-minute programs from the BBC that were shown on the Discovery Channel. If you're a dinosaur fan I cannot recommend this series highly enough. Each program examines prehistoric life at a particular point in time, usually following one or two individual dinosaurs either through life or perhaps just a year. Do you remember those magical moments in "Jurassic Park" when the dinosaurs were front and center ? Each one of the programs in Walking With Dinosaurs focuses on dinosaurs, not on paleontologists -- there isn't a paleontologist visible in the series. And the recreations of dinosaurs and their lives are so realistic you would think the producers of the series had arranged to send their cameras back in time to film the actual beasts. I think these six episodes are available either at $1.99 or $2.99 each, I forget which. Considering the cost of going to an actual movie, the price isn't out of line.

Books from Audible.com Here's a great resource for anyone who enjoys listening to books, whether they are commuting, just lying in bed at night after the lights have been turned out, or maybe just sitting in a sidewalk cafe and sipping one's coffee as he people watches. Some of the books cost $20 - $25 if you order them alone, but there is another, much less expensive way to get them. For about $9.95 (if I recall correctly) and then after the first three purchases for about $14.95 (again, if I recall correctly), you can subscribe to a whole year of one-a-month book purchases. They download easily into your iPod library, and yoiu can add them to or remove them from your iPod any time you want. I've been listening to Robert Graves' "I, Claudius" recently. The version of "Sir Gwaine and the Green Knight" is wonderful, as are the complete "Canterbury Tales." One of the nice things about the "Sir Gwaine" version is that it has been translated into a very beautiful, modern English version, but is also followed by a reading in the original Anglo-Saxon. Unless you are an English scholar specializing in the literature of this period, you won't want to listen to more than a few minutes of the Anglo-Saxon version. But just hearing what one of the predecessors of modern English sounded like is interesting.