Then came another piece of news. Apple has released a new iTunesU app that lets students access enhanced university courses … for free. Once you download the app, you can select courses that combine audio/video lectures with supporting materials: books and articles (sometimes free, sometimes not), transcripts of lectures, exercises, slideshows, useful software and beyond. Some courses preloaded in the free app include:

American Revolution – Joanne Freeman, Yale
Colonial and Revolutionary America – Jack Rakove, Stanford
Core Concepts in Chemistry –  Stephen L. Craig, Duke
iPad and iPhone App Development – Paul Hegarty, Stanford

These courses now appear in our collection of 400 Free Online Courses, which aggregates free courses available on iTunes, YouTube, and the web.

Apple Releases Free iTunesU App & Enhanced University Courses (Plus Textbooks) is a post from: Open Culture

Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Steve Jobs (click image below to get a free audio copy) covers a lot of ground in 571 pages. By design, it’s broad and comprehensive, but it doesn’t always go deep. One facet of Steve Jobs’ life that doesn’t get much coverage here was his relationship with Kobun Chino Otogawa (1938-2002), a Buddhist priest who taught Jobs the way of Zen and shared his passion for art and design. The two became close — close enough that Kobun presided over the Steve Jobs-Laurene Powell wedding in 1991. This relationship receives a fuller treatment in The Zen of Steve Jobs, a new 80-page graphic novel that uses stripped down dialogue and bold calligraphic panels to tell this story. The book was authored by Forbes writer Caleb Melby, and the artwork provided by the creative agency JESS3. The video above gives you a good introduction to the imaginative work. h/t BoingBoing

The Zen of Steve Jobs: A New Graphic Novel is a post from: Open Culture

It’s not just any ebook. Based on the 1968 film, this ebook features animated illustrations, 14 video clips from the original film, audio functionality that magically turns the book into an audio book, and various interactive elements. You can “read” the book (download it here) on any iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. Our apologies in advance if you use other devices.

The Yellow Submarine will be added to our collection of Free eBooks, which features 250 classics, including texts by Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Joyce, Nabokov, Austen, Nietzsche and others. Also don’t miss our equally large collection of Free Audio Books.

Related Content:

The Beatles’ Rooftop Concert: The Last Gig

Jimmy Page Tells the Story of Kashmir

The Beatles Complete on Ukulele

Download The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine as a Free, Interactive eBook is a post from: Open Culture

Back in 2009, Stanford University started recording lectures given in its iPhone Application Development course and then placing them on iTunes, making them free for anyone to view. The course hit a million downloads in a matter of weeks, and now, two years later, here’s where we stand. The course remains the most popular item on Stanford’s iTunesU site, having clocked in 10 million downloads. And the school has released a new version of the course that focuses on iOS 5, the latest version of the iPhone/iPad operating system. You can download the course on iTunes (in HD video or standard-definition video) and start creating apps on your own.

The iPhone Application Development course is now listed in the Computer Science section of our big collection of Free Online Courses. There you will find 40+ free courses that will teach you to code….

via Stanford News

Create iPhone/iPad Apps in iOS 5 with Free Stanford Course is a post from: Open Culture

In late October, Computerworld unearthed a lengthy interview with Steve Jobs originally recorded back in 1995, when Jobs was at NeXT Computer, and still two years away from his triumphant return to Apple. Filmed as part of an oral history project, the wide-ranging interview begins with Jobs’ childhood and his early school days, and it all sets the stage for Jobs to muse on the state of public education in America. He began:

I’d like the people teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I work for, making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Why should they work at a school for thirty-five to forty thousand dollars if they could get a job here at a hundred thousand dollars a year? Is that an intelligence test? The problem there of course is the unions. The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it’s not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can’t teach and administrators run the place and nobody can be fired. It’s terrible.

Asked what changes he would make, Jobs continued:

I’ve been a very strong believer in that what we need to do in education is to go to the full voucher system. I know this isn’t what the interview was supposed to be about but it is what I care about a great deal…. The problem that we have in this country is that [parents] went away. [They] stopped paying attention to their schools, for the most part. What happened was that mothers started working and they didn’t have time to spend at PTA meetings and watching their kids’ school. Schools became much more institutionalized and parents spent less and less and less time involved in their kids’ education. What happens when a customer goes away and a monopoly gets control … is that the service level almost always goes down.

And so the answer. Vouchers, entrepreneurship and market competition:

I’ve suggested as an example, if you go to Stanford Business School, they have a public policy track; they could start a school administrator track. You could get a bunch of people coming out of college tying up with someone out of the business school, they could be starting their own school. You could have twenty-five year old students out of college, very idealistic, full of energy instead of starting a Silicon Valley company, they’d start a school. I believe that they would do far better than any of our public schools would. The third thing you’d see is I believe, is the quality of schools again, just in a competitive marketplace, start to rise. Some of the schools would go broke. A lot of the public schools would go broke. There’s no question about it. It would be rather painful for the first several years…. The biggest complaint of course is that schools would pick off all the good kids and all the bad kids would be left to wallow together in either a private school or remnants of a public school system. To me that’s like saying “Well, all the car manufacturers are going to make BMWs and Mercedes and nobody’s going to make a ten thousand dollar car.” I think the most hotly competitive market right now is the ten thousand dollar car area. You’ve got all the Japanese playing in it. You’ve got General Motors who spent five million dollars subsidizing Saturn to compete in that market. You’ve got Ford which has just introduced two new cars in that market. You’ve got Chrysler with the Neon….

The full transcript appears here. Or, if you want to watch the interview on video, you can jump to Computerworld, where, rather lamely, you will need to register before watching the actual talk. Bad job by Computerworld.

Related Content:

Download Free Copy of Steve Jobs Biography; Plus Interview with Author

Steve Jobs Demos the First Macintosh in 1984

Steve Jobs Narrates the First “Think Different” Ad (Never Aired)

Steve Jobs Muses on What’s Wrong with American Education, 1995 is a post from: Open Culture

Apple has posted on its web site the celebration of Steve Jobs’ life that it held last Wednesday. And, at least for me, one of the more poignant moments comes when Norah Jones takes the stage (around the 23 minute mark) and sings a moving version of Bob Dylan’s Forever Young (29 minute mark).

Jobs always had a special affection for Dylan’s songwriting. According to Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Jobs and Steve Wozniak bonded over Dylan’s music as young men. “The two of us would go tramping through San Jose and Berkeley and ask about Dylan bootlegs and collect them,” Wozniak recalled. “We’d buy brochures of Dylan lyrics and stay up late interpreting them. Dylan’s words struck chords of creative thinking.”

Later, when Jobs created the famous “Think Different” ad, he made sure that Dylan was among the 17 rebels featured in it. (Watch the never-aired commercial narrated by Jobs himself here.) Apple also helped underwrite the production of Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home. And, even down to his last days, Jobs’ personal iPod was packed with iconic music from the 60s – the Beatles, the Stones and, of course, Bob Dylan too. Enjoy, and for good measure, we’re adding a song from Coldplay’s performance, which comes later in the celebration.

Other songs played include Vida la Vida, Fix You and Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall.

Norah Jones Sings Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” in Honor of Steve Jobs (Plus Coldplay’s Performance) is a post from: Open Culture

Just a few short weeks after the death of Steve Jobs comes a 627 page biography by Walter Isaacson, the former Managing Editor of TIME and CEO of CNN. Isaacson first discussed writing the book with Jobs seven years ago and has since interviewed the Apple CEO more than 40 times. Now, appearing on 60 Minutes, he talks publicly about the new book simply called Steve Jobs. It hit bookshelves yesterday and already stands atop the Amazon Bestseller list.

The 29 minute interview (Part 1 here, Part 2 here) gives you a feel for the book that’s willing to tell the good, the bad and the sometimes ugly of Jobs’ life. If you’re looking to get your hands on the biography, give this some thought: If you sign up for a 14-day free trial with Audible.com (click on this link or the banner below), you can download pretty much any audio book in Audible’s catalogue for free. And that catalogue now includes Isaacson’s unabridged biography. Once the trial is over, you can continue your Audible subscription (as I did), or cancel it, and still keep the free book. The choice is yours.

Note: CBS didn’t allow the 60 Minutes interview to appear on external sites like ours. Hence you will need to watch the interview on YouTube itself. We provide the links above.

Free: Download Copy of New Steve Jobs Biography is a post from: Open Culture

One last Steve Jobs’ remembrance seems completely fitting for our site. You’re probably familiar with Apple’s famous “Think Different” advertising campaign from the late 1990s, and particularly the legendary TV commercial that featured 17 iconic figures: Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Branson, John Lennon, Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison, Muhammad Ali, Ted Turner, Maria Callas, Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchcock, Martha Graham, Jim Henson, Frank Lloyd Wright and Pablo Picasso.

Most of these “crazy ones, misfits, rebels and rule breakers” have been featured on Open Culture throughout the years (click the links above), and what make this ad special is that Steve Jobs narrates it himself. The original TV ad — the one that made it on air — had Richard Dreyfuss doing the voiceover…

Find more Crazy Ones in our collection of 275 Cultural Icons.

Steve Jobs Narrates the First “Think Different” Ad (Never Aired) is a post from: Open Culture

Between 1968 and 1972, Stewart Brand published The Whole Earth Catalog. For Kevin Kelly, the Catalog was essentially “a paper-based database offering thousands of hacks, tips, tools, suggestions, and possibilities for optimizing your life.” For Steve Jobs, it was a “Bible” of his generation, a life -transforming publication. Speaking to Stanford graduates in 2005, in what Ken Auletta has called the “Gettysburg Address of graduation-speechism,” Jobs explained why he drew inspiration from this intellectual creation of the 60s counterculture:

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

The good news is that The Whole Earth Catalog and some related publications are available online. You can read them for free, or download them for a fee. We suggest diving in right here, in Fall 1968, where it all begins. Enjoy….

Note: If you’re having problems find your way around the site, check out the Twitter stream for the The Whole Earth Catalogue. It includes links to various online editions. We’ve also added the text to our collection of Free eBooks.

The Whole Earth Catalog Online: The “Bible” of Steve Jobs’ Generation is a post from: Open Culture

We originally posted this video back in 2009, and it seems like the right time to bring it back. It captures the first of many times that Steve Jobs thrilled audiences with the promise of what technology could deliver. The video takes you back to January 1984, when Jobs demoed the first Macintosh. (The event was famously promoted by Ridley Scott’s commercial during the Super Bowl. See below) A young Jobs, sporting a bow tie and a fuller head of hair, could barely hold back his smile and some tears, and the crowd simply couldn’t contain its enthusiasm, giving Jobs a five-minute standing ovation. That’s where the video ends, fading happily and suitably to black. We’ll miss you Steve. Read the New York Times obit here.

For another great Steve Jobs moment, don’t miss his inspiring Stanford 2005 graduation talk where he discussed his approach to living and urged the young graduates to “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.” So far as commencement speeches go, it’s hard to beat this one.

Both video mentioned above appear in our Cultural Icons collection — a media collection that features great artists and thinkers speaking in their own words.

Steve Jobs Demos the First Macintosh in 1984 is a post from: Open Culture