TOUCH...a killer whale?

Spent the earlier part of the week in Cali. Surprisingly, it was pretty friggin' cold. Glad to be home.

So anyway, I was there for some Campus Resellers Meeting at Apple. And if you haven't heard by now, the BTS program is (drum-roll please...):
Buy a Mac and get a free (after mail-in rebate) 8GB nano OR 8GB touch. AWESOME!

Now, I'm a avid nano girl, so I had my skepticism about the touch. Why would anyone need it, you know? But we did get a demo of the updated iTunes U store front (led by some kid from Apple who talked as though he had 12 cups of espresso coursing through his veins), and I was reminded of the following story:

Last year Big Red's class all had to do projects on sea critters. Dave chose orcas. After plowing through all the 1st grade reading material he'd been fed, he hopped on to iTunes and found some Seaworld and Nat'l Geographic podcasts about them. Which he watched again. And again. And again.

His favorite was this once where 2 orcas caught a sea lion and tossed the thing back and forth like a volleyball. Boys...

Anyway, fast forward a bit and I found myself selling fried noodles along side his teacher at the school fair. She mentioned he was very enthusiastic about his project but didn't take it too well when she told him to take the part about orcas having camouflage out of his paper. "It wasn't in any of the books we had in our room, and I can't just let him make stuff up," she said. I laughed out loud and said, "Mrs. Uyeda, he's not making that up - he learned that from watching a Seaworld video! Homeboy's not gettin' creative on you - he's been doing independent research!" She felt so bad she personally apologized to him later.

But my point is, if my (at that time) 6 year old child can use iTunes as an effective learning tool, YOU PEOPLE out there in UH-land should, IN THEORY, be able to learn and accomplish amazing things on the fly with a touch. And when you get some downtime from saving the planet, there's always YouTube. Pretty funny stuff they got there!