Learning the iPhone

No longer will students ever hear "No cell phones in class!"

At least, not in these classes. 

Leading the way with the iPhone, Stanford University offered a class over this winter term called Music256B: Mobile Music (Music, Computing, and Design II)... coincidentally taught by Professor Ge Wang, the same man who assembled the Stanford MoPho [see previous entry].

University of Maryland isn't far behind with their Fall 2010 class-  CMSC498I: Selected Topics in Computer Science: Programming the iPhone. 

I'm no where close to being a computer science major or knowing half of the things these students will be learning about, but both classes are extremely interesting examples of how our society is adapting to the technology we have created. It is interesting to think that the iPhone became public only TWO YEARS ago, and already college universities and established professors are instructing courses entirely devoted to it. It seems weird to think that we have created this iPhone, but now we are trying our hardest to keep up with it... it's as if it has a life of its own. 

I think the classes are great though- informative technical classes like this are necessary in today's world. They give us perspective on our current technological progress, and (hopefully)   points the next generation of these engineers in a productive direction. I would see it as foolish if we kept introducing these life-changing pieces into our lives like the iPhone, iPad, iPod, iTouch (apple really runs the world...) while everything else remained exactly the same. It would be like all the cars in the world running off solar power, but we never bothered to remove any of the gas stations. So I am glad to see us taking steps, even if small ones, to adapt the rest of our lives to the technology which has had such an impact on the way we do everyday things...


Food for thought: If society is slow/hesitant to change the way things are done, yet we are solely responsible for the development of such life-changing technologies....  are we setting the pace too fast for ourselves?