Last week, MIT OpenCourseWare officially released its LectureHall iPhone app. Put simply, the free app gives you mobile access to MIT video lectures. It even lets you download lectures straight to your phone (handy for times when you may not have connectivity).

Looking to design apps for the iPhone or iPad? Stanford University now has a course online that will help you do just that.
Simply called Developing Apps for iOS, the course features 20 video lectures (the last installment was uploaded just this week) and, somewhat fittingly, they’re all available on Apple’s iTunesU.

The new Fotopedia Heritage app for the iPhone and iPad lets the world come to you. (Download here.) Drawing on 20,000 curated photos taken by thousands of photographers from the Fotopedia community, this FREE app lets you visit (at least virtually) 890 UNESCO World Heritage sites.

Today’s ruling is bound to get a lot of buzz, but probably for the wrong reasons. According to new rules set forth by The Library of Congress (which oversees the Copyright Office), iPhone owners can now legally “jailbreak” their device and download software that Apple/AT&T disapproves of. That will get the headlines.

A quick heads up: Today the National Film Board of Canada released a free iPad app (download it here), providing users free access to thousands of documentaries, animated films and trailers. All films (including some in 3-D) can be streamed over Wi-Fi and 3G wireless networks. And you can even download and watch a film offline for up to 48 hours.

AskPhilosophers puts real philosophers at the service of the general public. Have a big, lofty question that only a professional philosopher can tackle? They’ll answer it on the web. And now on the iPhone. This new, free app (designed by Amherst College) lets you access their Q&A archive on the go.

Writing in The Guardian, Victor Keegan, a longtime journalist and poet, talks about his new iPhone app, City Poems. The newly released app will run you $2.99 on iTunes, which makes it less than open, I know.

Last year, Stanford University gave iPhone owners around the world a boost when it released a free iPhone App Development course (find it on iTunes). Millions have since downloaded the lectures, and many new iPhone apps have been created as a result.

Today, we’re rolling out a sizable collection of Free eBooks, most of them classics, that features major works written by James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Nietzsche and others. (We have even thrown in a little Paulo Coelho.

During the lazy days of summer, we quietly launched a new, free iPhone app. Now summer is fading, people are getting back to work, students back to school, and it’s time to get the word out. This app takes our intelligent media collections and let’s you listen to them on the go.