Almighty Dad | A stay at home dad blog

How many times have you been with a group of people who begin talking about a subject that you just don’t know enough about to form an opinion on?  It’s happened to me. I’m a smart guy, I double majored in History and Spanish in college and I’m reasonably informed on world events.  Yet for everything I know there are at least 10 other things I’m ignorant about.  Do I really want to buy a whole book on Confucianism just so I can engage in a conversation and not sound like an idiot.  No, not really.  But, what if I could learn just a little bit about Confucianism, just enough to form an opinion and to know if it’s something I’d like to learn more about?  Enter iMinds.com.  These folks have had the brilliant idea of compiling a library of subjects and compressing them into 8 minute lessons for listening on a portable mp3 player or on a computer.  They launched in September of this year and have already amassed a respectable collection of subjects which, according them, will continue to grow at a regular pace.  And, yesterday they rolled out a new series for kids, iMinds Junior.  I had to give it a try.  Here’s my impression:

The Subjects:

Just for giggles today I bought one of the Generalist collections (there are 6) from the iMinds website and put it on my desktop for a listen.  As advertised, it’s an eclectic mix of general knowledge stuff.  The subjects I got were Confucius, Crop Circles, D-Day Invasion, Film Noir, Fireworks, Joan of Arc, Meteorites, Penicillin, Stockholm Syndrome, US Federal Reserve and Whaling.  I’d call that about as general a collection as could be created.  The generalist collection is a random selection of topics pulled from the entire range of iMinds categories.  There are also more specific collections.  For instance, the Science and Nature category contains the following audio files: Astronomy, Man on the Moon, Aurora Borealis, Yellowstone National park, The Pacific Garbage Patch, Meteorites, Wind Power and Evolution.

For the Kids:

The whole reason I even started doing a search this afternoon is because I was looking for homeschooling stuff to use for my kids.  I found iMinds and started poking around their collections until I found iMinds Junior.  I wrote a quick e-mail to them thanking them for thinking of the kids.  They wrote back and said I had good timing because iMinds Junior was just released yesterday (November 3^rd as I write this). Wow, that is pretty good timing.  My two boys and I listened to the file concerning mountains and mountain ranges.  We learned about Mt. Everest and Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay.  We learned about the Andes and a bit about how mountains are formed through plate tectonics.  It was 6 minutes of concentrated learning. It was not so long that the boys lost interest, but it was long enough to pack in plenty of interesting knowledge for them.  I listened to the file about volcanoes by myself, and that too seemed it would be just right for my 6 year old.

Why 8 Minutes?

Think about all the waiting around we do in our lives.  There are lines for everything, and it’s a giant waste.  It feels a little like the waiting place from Dr Seuss’ Oh, The Places You’ll Go!.  Heck, iPods were invented for that very reason.  People want to divert themselves with music while they wait for a bus or while they queue up at the post office.  You could listen to a few minutes of music on your little distraction device or you could listen to something informative. I figure since you’re waiting and wasting your life away anyway you might as well get something out of it other than crappy music.  At least the spoken word doesn’t suffer from being in mp3 format (reference dynamic range compression).

What I learned:

I listened to two of the adult topics today by myself, D-Day and Penicillin.  I know a lot about D-Day and almost nothing about penicillin.  I wanted to know if the topic I knew a lot about gave a good overview of the main points and taught what was relevant for somebody who knows next to nothing. It does.  Don’t be fooled though, you won’t become an expert by listening to an 8 minute lecture on D-Day.  But, you will learn some interesting facts and get insight into what D-Day was all about and how it fits into history.  If you want to learn more you’ll know what to look for.  Penicillin was a great topic for me.  I keep forgetting that Alexander Fleming was the guy responsible for its discovery.  I also didn’t know that he wasn’t actually the person who isolated it (which was done 10 years later at Oxford), and that it was American pharmaceutical companies with the support of the government that mass produced it.  See?  Now I can say something intelligent about penicillin.  I couldn’t have done that before.

iMinds was created as small bits of the most relevant information on specific topics.  For people who have large chunks of time to sit around and do nothing there are long books to read.  iMinds is for people who don’t have that kind of time but who do have segments of time throughout the day where they find themselves waiting around. The creators of this product probably didn’t envision it as a helpful homeschooling tool, but it is.  I want to expose my kids to many different subjects and let them choose what they are most interested in learning more about.  Junior iMinds is perfect for that.  I’ll say it again though; you will not become an expert by listening to these files.  You will learn something though and you’ll feel better for it.

Disclaimer: I was given access to the iMinds online database for the purpose of forming an opinion.  I was not given the product for download though; I bought the generalist collect myself for my own use.

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