iTunes U is Apple’s portal for accessing free educational Material. The offerings range from books to podcasts and video instructional series. I thought I’d look around to see if there was anything of interest to the fungally inclined. This, after attending a really great demo by an Apple rep on all the really cool material available on Itunes U. This ought to be great!

As is so often the case, Mycology seems to get short shrift. A search for “mushrooms” yields, uh, nothing. “Fungi?” A textbook with, like, ONE chapter about fungi. “Fungus?” Hm. How about “mycology?” Well there is something. A series called MLT 230: Parasitology and Mycology by Ruth Negley has about 100 minutes of relevant material given in seven segments. It’s audio only. The sound quality is acceptable and it provides a good overview of medical mycology from a mostly clinical perspective. Not bad.

What’s weird is that after a short wait, a few more things started showing up in the searches, but nothing to get excited about.

Fungus Among Us (don’t laugh) is a Collection of vintage mycology books from days of yore. Titles like Atlas des Champignons Comestibles et Vénéneux by L. Dufour (1861-1942) have been scanned and uploaded in PDF format. The pages load really slow, but the image quality is excellent, so if you are interested in classic mushroom books, you might like them. Not to mention, these volumes are long out of copyright so you can do what you wish with the images. There are sixteen volumes in the collection including classic works by Fries, Persoon and Farlow.

What else? Not much. Some basic environmental learning geared for 4th graders is called 4th Grade: Fantastic Fungus. This collection (it is labeled a “course”), from Boyne City Public Schools, offers 21 “modules” with titles like “May is Morel Month,” “Jack in the Pulpit,” (not a fungus), “Trillium,” (also not a fungus) and a bunch of loosely organized stuff relating to morel hunting. I found it hard to navigate and make sense of. Delete.

That is about it. I wish I had better news. It wouldn’t take much to improve upon this lot and do the world of science a big favor. Somebody, please!