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.

New Media and Learning in the 21st Century is a small article in the Jan/Feb 2006 issue of EDUCAUSE REVIEW by Lev Gonick - the CIO of Case Western Reserve University. Gonick writes about new media literacy and MediaVision, which is a search tool for the first-year courses captured on video. Other universities also are developing similar projects to capture lectures, courses, and other academic activities on digital video. It’s an endeavor that I expect will become increasingly popular.

Students are spending two to three times more hours on their subject matter and are able to watch and search for key concepts, to outline subjects, and so forth. In some courses, historic benchmarked performance data is shifting positively for the first time in decades. When students are surveyed about MediaVision Courseware, they say it is “cool.” But, like wireless access, such courseware is simply de rigueur. For them, integrated streaming media courseware is an entirely normal extension of how they live, play, and learn.

Gonick also says something clearly aimed other administrators:

…it will be the ways in which we leverage the latest generation of infrastructure for teaching and learning that will differentiate and distinguish academic institutions.
….

The next decade may well be seen by future historians as transformational. The internalizing of the institutional imperative to absorb and project future success through new media will change the dynamic forever. Clearly, old patterns of hierarchies, research traditions, and teaching and learning practices will not disappear overnight. However, just over the horizon, many of the contradictions experienced during the first evolutionary phase of the new media revolution will be resolved. The prestige of our institutions may well depend on that.

I’ve recently finished reading an entire semester’s worth of entries of the blog for the course History 696: Introduction to History and New Media, taught by Mills Kelly at George Mason University. It looked like a very interesting course, conducted as a graduate seminar with students required to post entries on the course blog. Not only is it a good example of the use of a blog in the classroom, it offers some interesting insights on digital scholarship as well as pointers to worthwhile web sites.

From one of the grad students:

Digital scholarship becomes exciting for its makers in a more selfish way as well. It allows the scholar to present more of his or her research and ideas. Not in some tacked on, rarely looked at appendix (everyone knows you don’t even need your appendix!), but in an integrated, and, consequently, more relevant fashion. Both textually and graphically, the medium creates a facility for transmitting knowledge which other forms lack, and provides a freedom of presentation to the scholar previously unavailable. It also upsets the hierarchy of publishing, opening access to new and untapped audiences, while encouraging old ones to experiment with new forms. While its definition is far from solidified, it is clear digital scholarship has promise.

The line that really stands out in that statement on digital scholarship is “Both textually and graphically, the medium creates a facility for transmitting knowledge which other forms lack, and provides a freedom of presentation to the scholar previously unavailable.”

A look at some of the other grad courses that history students at GMU are taking, such as “Digital History Documentary Filmmaking” and “Creating Digital History”, should make one wonder what type of information resources and technology support services these future faculty will be needing and expecting from their universities.