iTunes U

I find this absolutely amazing: http://www.apple.com/support/itunes_u/

You can watch entire courses from about 100 universities in virtually any discipline...free. MIT has been doing this for a while with OCW, and a few other universities followed suit. But there are so many today, and to see them all together in one place is really astounding. It really raises the question (which has been around since the beginning of the whole distance ed thing): what will happen to conventional brick-and-mortar classroom instruction? What does it mean to go to a top-tier university, when the essential product of that university is freely available? I'd say undergrads these days get a substantial portion of their education from textbooks and the web anyway. The classroom is mostly there to provide a framework and set the bar for evaluation. So now students have the option to watch lectures from the best teachers in the world. And they can repeat/pause/fast-forward...whatever. Even assignments and tests are posted online. So who needs a professor?

The really great thing is you can download these to your iPhone or iPod and watch them on the go, and you can even speed them up and cram entire lectures in 20 minutes. David in my lab has been watching a polymer rheology class from Michigan Tech at 2.5X. He's gone through an entire semester of lectures in a few weeks. This reminds me of when Neo first plugs into the Matrix and they download a bagillion martial arts styles into his brain. Except David emotes.

NCSU is conspicuosly absent. Come on, Tom Miller.

Berkeley Science Review

So, this semester I joined the editorial staff of the Berkeley Science Review. I'd seen the magazine around campus before and was always impressed with the quality of the articles. Now I understand why it's so polished: A LOT of effort goes into it. The articles each go through around 5 revisions. We meet with the authors one-on-one (typically more than once), all the editors read and discuss each article fairly thoroughly--once at the beginning and once at the end of the process, and each article gets combed over by 3 different editors, who provide feedback to the author at different stages. It's been a pleasure to work with the staff and the authors, and I've learned about research topics at Berkeley that I probably would have never had any exposure to otherwise. Our latest issue is out. You can check out the articles online: http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/

Also, the BSR recently won Best Publication of the Year from the ASUC (student association here at Cal). There are a lot of publications here on campus, so this is really an honor!