Addison Road

Dear Apple,

Love it. Love the whole thing. The Intel switch, the iLife suite, Keynote, dot Mac, iWeb, love it all. I’m a real big fan. Huge.

So here’s my question … can I please have dot Mac for free? I don’t mind paying for iWork, iLife, they are great bundles for a very reasonable price, but $99 a year for what is essentially an ftp server with tight OS integration seems absurd to me. Let me tell you how I will use my dot Mac account, and why you should give it away for free to educators.

I teach a course on how to use Logic Pro for audio production and scoring. I record my lectures, and publish them as podcasts (I’ll be making the jump to vidcast as soon as I find a simple way to record 60 minute screen captures with audio). I publish my lecture notes, and course schedule, and all of my assignments are downloaded from my site. I have a link section for social bookmarking to group research, and a wiki set up for coordinating class projects. My students spend an average of 20-30 minutes a week interacting with my course website in various ways.

These same students use MySpace and Facebook like feverish be-bop drummers use heroin. They have seen so many dancing kitty animated explosion gifs as website wallpaper that, for many of them, their ADD has become terminal, and can only be treated with liberal doses of alcohol and chronic. Since I teach at a Christian university, treating this condition medically presents something of a challenge.

Imagine 120 students who love the idea of building a web presence, all spending 20-30 minutes a week at a dot Mac site, one that has been well designed, easily integrates with their apps, and generally puts them in a zen-like state of appreciation for all things Mac.

I am one of only a handful of teachers at our University who have tightly integrated this kind of technology into our courses. I get requests from dozens of other profs asking how to do it, and once I start talking about WordPress, SQL databases, wiki, and ftp clients, their eyes glaze over. They see the value of integrating web-based information hubs into their courses, but the technical hurdles involved are daunting. It’s unreasonable to ask them to free up time and mental energy to master a set of ancillary skills that will need constant updating to be useful. Their time is better spent in continuing to master the set of primary skills that they are responsible for teaching.

Now, imagine if I could answer those requests by saying, “Here’s the deal - for about $110, you can buy iLife and iWork. Out of the box, they will be seamlessly integrated with something called dot Mac. You can drag and drop images to build a website, use Garage Band to record and podcast your lectures, with one button you can publish your visuals from Keynote. It’s Mac, it’s intuitive, it works exactly how you think it should work, every step of the way.” By dropping the $99 dot Mac fee for educators, you will sell a copy of iWork and iLife to every single faculty member at our school.

You do the math. I’m too busy helping our 20th Century Composition professor configure his SQL database so that he can ftp his lecture notes to his WordPress blog. He doesn’t know what any of those words mean, but he knows that his students will learn better if gives them his notes.

Sincerely,

Michael Lee
Senior Fellow,
Cult of Mac

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