What's going on? Just when you thought young people today were dumbing down and feeding on a diet of "education lite", along comes a hardcore physics professor to prove us wrong
Walter Lewin, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), now tops the iTunesU download chart with his blend of equations, enthusiasm and experiments involving himself. Edutainment? Well, good teaching has always involved a good dose of showmanship. MIT makes his lectures available for free on its open courseware site.
Lewin's worldwide popularity is helped by his close resemblance to the eccentric inventor Dr Emmett Brown in Back to the Future, but the very fact that Apple launched an academic version of iTunes earlier this year suggests that there is a public appetite for ideas.
Reporting the opening of iTunes academic version in May, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that delights such as Hubert Dreyfus's hour-long lecture at Berkeley on "What Is Existentialism?" would be competing for the ear of the young as he expounded the thoughts of Dostoevsky, Kirkegaarde and Nietzsche.
In the UK Lewin's success was foreshadowed in the 1970s by the Open University, even though in those pre-download, pre-recording days you had to watch men in flares and kipper ties explaining complicated ideas at inconvenient times of the night.
The OU doesn't seem to be throwing up a new generation of academic performing stars, which is a pity because whatever the opposite of education lite should be called, it's never really gone away.
