The Tate has just become the first UK cultural institution to have its own page on iTunes U. This bit of iTunes was set up in May 2007 for educational institutions like universities and museums to publish their audio and video content on the iTunes platform. Some of the universities online include Stanford and Harvard. Museums include MoMA, Brooklyn Museum and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
The wealth of information on the TATE iTunes U page is staggering. Users can download audio recordings of past lectures, talks, interviews and symposia which go back all the way to 2006. There are 670 files in total, so you can spend an hour in the bath listening to practically anything from “Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism” to “Contemporary Art in the Middle East: The Politics of Space” via an hour-long chat with Jarvis Cocker or Armando Iannucci.
The page is pretty rudimentary but serves it purpose more
than adequately, containing links to other sites, such as Tate Liverpool or
Tate St Ives, which have more audio files of talks. The Tate logo currently
sits proudly in the middle of the iTunesU homepage. It’s a great way for the
Tate to increase its visibility as a dynamic and very active forum for some of
the world’s leading academic discussion. This project is also a fine example of
how cultural institutions should be looking beyond social networks and their
own websites to other accessible interfaces such as iTunes or wikisites such as
Wikipedia. You can find iTunesU in the lefthand column of the iTunes Music
store once in the iTunes programme.
Now this gave me a great idea. I am totally listening to lectures in the bath from now on.
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How does a gate-keeper on the creation of communities solve this? A formal approval chain for communities does not imply activity will occur there once created.
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