Just in Time for Summer Vacation

Hey, you. Put down that trashy romance novel/thriller/sci-fi book you’ve been waiting to dig into. School may be out for summer, but learning happens all year round at iTunes U.

Sigh.

There are more than 60 colleges and universities that offer podcast courses, lectures from resident and visiting researchers. And that number recently increased by a dozen—mostly from international locations.

Not every podcast available is universally interesting—I’ll probably skip the University of Otago (New Zealand) library tour offered in Mandarin and Maori—but the prospect of taking a few free courses from Harvard and Yale is appealing. Um, well, at least in theory.

First up: Walter H.G. Lewin’s MIT lectures on everyday science, which has earned rave reviews.

But now that I’ve got this new plan for the summer, I’m not sure when I’m going to find the time to read Cheese Problems Solved or Old Tractors and the Men Who Love Them. And it tortures me.