Wired 13.01: The BitTorrent EffectWired has a great article about BitTorrent and its creator, Bram Cohen.

Last night I read this and began to think in terms of how this technology could be used in education. For example, last spring our 3rd, 4th and 5th grade students put on a production of The Wizard of Oz. One of our parents did a nice job of taping the production and then created a DVD. Copies were made and sold and such. Am thinking now of going over to school this afternoon and putting the whole thing up as a torrent. Not so much because I think many folks want to see the production, (though it was really pretty good as elementary school productions go...) but rather just to mess around with this stuff. Everyone points to illegal uses, but read the article and I believe you will see the idea behind it is brilliant. We have more and more big files that we want to share, this technology provides a very good method of doing so.

Note: I see that Alan Levine just posted about it at Cogdogblog and has some ideas of how it can be used in an education setting.