Seeking an elite education? Download it onto your iPod
| December 17, 2007 |  View for printing |
ARTHUR MARQUIS, a retired federal attorney, listens to philosophy classes from UC Berkeley on his iPod as he walks in Long Beach. The classes are available by downloading free podcasts from iTunes. (KAREN TAPIA-ANDEREN Los Angeles Times) BAXTER WOOD is one of Hubert Dreyfus' most devoted students. During lectures on existentialism, Wood hangs on every word, savoring the moments when the 78-year-old philosophy professor pauses to consider a student's comment or relay how a meaning-of-life question had him up at 2 a.m.
But Wood is not sitting in a lecture hall on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, nor has he met Dreyfus. He is in the cab of his 18-wheel big rig, hauling dog food from Ohio to the West Coast or flat-screen TVs from Los Angeles to points east. The 61-year-old trucker from El Paso, Texas, eavesdrops on the lectures by downloading them for free from Apple Inc.'s iTunes store, transferring them to his Hewlett-Packard digital media player, then piping them through his cabin's speakers. He hits pause as he approaches cities so he can focus more on traffic than on what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead, then shifts his attention back to the classroom.
By Michelle Quinn I Los Angeles Times
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