There are a few interesting discussions about Apple’s iTunes U initiative are worth reading.

Jon Udell stresses the limited accessibility of podcasts to non iPod/iTunes users. More importantly, he talks about the importance of doing more with the course feeds than just listening: linking, tagging, blogging, playlisting….That is the kind of intellectual activity that Stanford wants to encourage, isn’t it?.

CogDog is skeptical of iTunes U also but points out the reality of many institutions:

On the other hand, our community college has NO infrastructure in place for every day mortal faculty to put rich media online. We have no streaming servers, no podcast publishing platform available for all of Maricopa. We are not Michigan, Stanford, MIT. And we are considered more advanced with technology for community colleges. The current strategy is dumping video and audio files on the web server (and at some of our colleges they have small disk quotas). So the option that Apple may host stuff, a lot of stuff, for free, and more than just lectures, but student work, digital video, is tantalizing. I cannot fully ignore it. Yet.

Gardner Campbell critically examines the perceived merits of iTunes U: “wouldn’t be nearly so concerned about iTunes U if I were more confident that folks in higher education saw it for what it is, and if Apple’s iTunes U campaign weren’t so much of a piece with its larger campaign to make truth, virtue, individualism, and innovation into corporate brands.”

D’Arcy Norman writes a very pragmatic posting that the alternatives to iTunes U, at this time, are not so simple.

Tama’s eLearning Blog points out that iTunes U could be a useful service but shouldn’t be the only hosted service. Tama also picks up on Udell’s concerns:

iTunes U is thus somewhat at odds with the ease that a lot of social software provides when having conversations across posts, podcasts and other digital flotsam. Sure, that might be a good thing for some people (I know that locking podcasted lectures behind a university-specific interface will ease the concerns of many academics about the intellectual property), but it’s also important for any university podcast system to be linkable and accessible for content that they want to make publicly available (also an important part of good university PR). iTunes U doesn’t cover all our needs, but it can be part of the podcasting solutions. Just not the only part. And, as always, we should be working toward finding/thinking/creating the next step…

In a postscript to iTunes U Gardner asks and answers, “Will institutions, especially starved-for-cash public schools, be willing to fund home-grown open alternatives when they can make money on a home-branded, outsourced, turn-key operation like Apple’s? I doubt it.” In a comment to this posting, Brian Alexander asks a legitimate question: “how come academia hasn’t come up with this on our own?”

Coming from a totally different direction, Mills Kelly at edwired writes about the increasing number of history courses being podcasted and the concerns of some teachers:

When I talk to colleagues about podcasting and ideas like iTunesU, some are intrigued, but most worry that podcasting a class will lead to significant declines in classroom attendance. After all, if a student can listen to/watch class without attending, why would he (or she)?

This anxiety is important, but not for the reason given by those feeling anxious. What’s really at stake here is a bigger problem…if students will choose to skip class and just listen/watch, then isn’t there something wrong with the class? If our classes are so dull that a student might just as well access them while on the treadmill or the bus, then I submit it’s time to teach differently.

Technology planning
I have my doubts as to whether iTunes U is the right platform for universities to adopt in their long-term use of digital media. (Indeed, that’s an understatement). iTunes U is both the beneficiary and result of technology planning (or the lack of it) in higher education.

In many cases, the decision to use iTunes U will come from a senior administrator who had a persuasive visit from Apple reps. (I’m reminded of being at an institution when a VP in computing made the decision that the university would use the IBM Digital Library Software to create a digital library; no input from the library, the decision was just based on good sales tactics by IBM).

Yet, many of us also have been on year-long technological task forces and planning groups in universities that didn’t result in anything. Universities have the bad tendency to overly examine a topic, developing the best conceptual solution, writing a grant to develop the grandest standards-based technical solution, and - five years later - still be no further ahead.

Technology planning is largely about deciding where an institution needs to focus its resources. If anything, iTunes U can get an institution kick-started down the path of distributing digital audio content.

The danger of iTunes U is that university administrators might become complacent and assume that Apple will solve all of higher ed’s issues with digital media. Universities, especially those adopting iTunes U, should be actively examining the long-term future that digital media will play in teaching, learning, and research. Yep, that sounds like one of those infamous technology planning task forces. But the discussion needs to be taking place within our institutions. And that discussion needs go beyond just podcasting course lectures, that’s only the beginning. There’s all sorts of content, both audio and video, that universities should be developing. There are all sorts of uses of that content that universities should be exploring.

As Udell asked, there needs to be more discussions about the types of intellectual activity that can be facilitated through digital media; more specifications as to what technological capabilities are needed to realize those activities. Maybe iTunes U will evolve, maybe Apple will eventually abandon it. Regardless, the distribution of digital media content created within higher education and the use, linking, and re-mixing of that content is not solved solely through iTunes U.

In a CNI podcast David Seaman, Executive Director of the Digital Library Federation, talks about the concept of malleable content and that in the next generation of library services: “the content itself needs to behave in slightly more flexible ways…simply visiting content online is not the way to drive innovative uses.”

(I’ve written before about Seaman and his thoughts on the malleability of content).

Seaman points out that the next generation of library services also is not all about technology. A lot of it depends upon changes in library policies and the behavior of users.

I do strongly agree that what Seaman calls malleable content is one of the most important issues facing academic and research libraries. Indeed, rather than continuing to massively digitize collections, as much effort needs to be put into making that digitized content more useful. As Seaman says, “while mass is good and necessary, making that content malleable when it hits our teachers and scholar is necessary.”

In the podcast Seaman also talks about DLF initiatives such as Aquifer, OAI, DOI, and electronic resource management.

In another interesting CNI podcast interview Charles Henry, Vice Provost & University Librarian at Rice University, talks about the humanities cyberinfrastructure and that it’s not all about the technology:

people with the requisite skills to work with faculty, to work with researchers, to create the kind of digital architecture where massive amounts of information, multimedia information, can be brought together and queried most effectively for the discovery of new knowledge, so it-s a pretty complex set of issues that converge on this term.

Henry points out the need for national coordination in cyberinfrastructure developments, particularly across disciplinary boundaries – even across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. “Needs of scientists, humanists overlap quite a bit…rather than have disaggregated activity going on, a more central approach on campus and nationally to these shared interests.”

While agreeing that there is a strong legacy of publishing printed books in the humanities, he states that “many disciplines will soon become completely dependent upon digital resources. These resources are creating different strategies, different questions posed.”

He points out that there’s the opportunity for libraries to continue working more collaboratively in order to develop national (I would say, international) digital libraries that can be federated.

Finally, Henry points out that a weakness of libraries is their isolation from scholarly societies and the isolation of librarians on campus as a separate group. Henry calls for more programmatic integration into scholarly societies. That’s an interesting approach. Librarians should certainly be attending the scholarly conferences in their disciplines rather than just attending library-related conferences.

Also, unfortunately, it seems that at some campuses the academic librarians are still so focused on integration simply through giving librarians faculty status and tenure, which definitely is not the solution.