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iPhone and Open Educational Resources
You may have caught Andy Ihnatko, the technology columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, on the CBS Early Show, touting the latest gadgetry for back to school. He led off with the iPod and played a clip of Walter Lewin’s Electricity and Magnetism video lectures from MIT OpenCourseWare.
As it so happens, I got my first chance to play with an iPhone this weekend as well, and yes, they’re way to expensive to make a difference in the short term for people with limited incomes, but they and other devices like them will get cheaper, and they are definitely the first handheld platform I’ve seen that really makes learning from open educational resources a viable experience.
I checked out many of my favorite OER sites, including MIT OCW, MERLOT, Connexions and Korea University OCW (an eduCause site). All of them behaved flawlessly, and the ability to view PDF documents with ease makes the OCW sites very useful on the platform. The iPhone will make the most connected more so, but as the technology becomes cheaper ($200.00 at a time?), it and other devices will have an increasing impact.
