[...] D’Arcy Norman points out that publishing content in iTunes U is better than not publishing it at all, and that in the end Apple doesn’t own exclusive rights to the content, so institutions are free to put the content up in any other way they want and in any format they want. [...]

Yes Apple are enabling but only so far as the Uni’s are a good channel for them. Once it becomes trivial and their sales revenues don’t raise above a certain level or a larger fish comes along to eat them up and/or the technology changes so that another model comes in - you immediatley have legacy problems.

Daily Udate — January 26, 2006

Here’s our take on news that matters for Thursday, January 26. Today’s theme is evolving education and here are a some links to headlines about technology that is changing the way we live and learn.

Gaming — Dance Dance revolution is making a s…

[...] As I stated previously Dave Winer and Kevin Yank aren’t. Martha isn’t. Brian isn’t. Gardner isn’t and still isn’t. D’Arcy says not so fast. [...]

Podcasting - cont’d

De faculteit Rechten heeft al laten zien hoe van het fenomeen podcasting een functioneel onderwijselement kan worden gemaakt. Voor een goed voorbeeld hoeven we dus niet over de grenzen van de UL te kijken. Dat wil niet zeggen dat elders…

I thought iTunes would only sync or even talk intelligently to an iPod. I guess one could move files over to any device that is recognized as an external hard drive, but without the library structure from iTunes one is left to do the organizing “by hand”–or am I missing something here? (Always a possibility. :-))

I thought iTunes would only sync or even talk intelligently to an iPod. I guess one could move files over to any device that is recognized as an external hard drive, but without the library structure from iTunes one is left to do the organizing “by hand”–or am I missing something here? (Always a possibility, mind you. :-))

iTunes has, AFAIK, always supported other players. They stopped marketing this when the iPod took off though…

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93548

[...] Last week there was a healthy discussion about the pros and cons of iTunes U (here and here for a start) and after a bit of a think over the weekend, I’ve got some further thoughts. D’Arcy Norman in “iTunes U. Critiques - it’s not as simple as that” makes a number of positive points about Apple’s service. Probably the most important part of D’Arcy’s post is the last paragraph: I just talked with someone at Apple who would know - and iTunes U supports any file format that iTunes can grok - you can publish .mp3 (or .wav, or .aiff, or Apple Lossless) audio, .mp4 video, even .pdf files (that’s how album art is handled) as well as the “default” formats of .aac etc… This means there is no lock-in to having an iPod as portable playback device (and even the .aac files can be converted by iTunes to .mp3 now). Having cross-platform playable formats such as mp3 is, in my opinion, a huge plus because it does allow other players and platforms to handle the files (sure, you need iTunes to access those files initially, but having flexibility with them thereafter and no DRM is hugely important). Gardner Campbell, however, remains unconvinced by the service and in a “Postscript on iTunes U” makes the extremely important point that while there won’t be a technical lock-in to the service, financial realities may create a practical lock-in anyway: 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. Apple doesn’t need de jure exclusive rights. We’ll essentially give them away, de facto. Much better PR that way, and the company gets to express its astonishment at any dissent, for after all no one forced us to put all our content in iTunes U. I think after consideration, I’m falling half-way between the two perspectives. I do think iTunes U has potential to be a very useful service, especially for publicly accessible university podcasts because the potential traffic charges could be huge, especially for well respected professors giving public lectures and the like. I also think that iTunes U could be a useful host for course content. However, it should not be the only host. If using iTunes U stops many universities exploring alternative services and developing their own, then Apple is pulling a Blackboard/WebCT. However, having recently learned from those lessons (and almost-done-mergers), I suspect many universities will using both iTunes U and in-house solutions for other formats/options. Along those lines, Burks Oakley pointed me to an important post by Michael Meiser whichs extends a post from Jon Udell both of whom focus on the difficulties of linking to and referencing material via the iTunes interface. As Jon Udell points out: It was an ironically circular exercise. I started at itunes.stanford.edu, which is just a web placeholder for the JavaScript code that launches iTunes and points it at the special Stanford area of the iTunes Music Store. Then I subscribed to some of the Stanford feeds in iTunes. Capturing the URLs of those feeds was way harder than it should be, because iTunes displays them but won’t let you copy them. Those feed URLs are, of course, extremely nasty-looking, e.g.: https://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/ITCSBrowse.woa/wa/ Subscribe/Feed_StanfordPublic-1770144-1770152–1770196_visitor $40indigo.apple.com_1137336780-95c4e56efabeb87e7982db034895cbd2eb6312de You’d have to nuts to write something like that down. Well, I guess I am, because I did. My reasons were partly selfish. I want to be able to get directly to the audio URLs contained in those feeds so I can automate conversion to MP3. Why? I like to listen to long lectures while running, and my iPod isn’t the preferred device in that situation. My Creative MUVO is lighter, and when I drop it or get it wet I don’t have to worry so much. More broadly, I want these freely available lectures to be able to spark the sort of web discourse that I’m sure Stanford intends them to. URLs are the currency of that discourse. If I want to refer you to Robert Dunbar’s global warming talk I should be able to link you directly to it. Discussion about the talk should be discoverable on the web by way of that URL. Here’s what shouldn’t have to happen, but currently does: I heard an interesting talk about global warming by Stanford’s Robert Dunbar. I wonder what you think about it? To listen, make sure you have iTunes installed, and then go to itunes.stanford.edu in a browser. From there, click the link to open iTunes. Then click on Faculty Lectures. Then scan the list for “Is Global Warming Real” or “Robert Dunbar”. So anyway, after laboriously capturing those feed URLs and posting them to del.icio.us, I turned around and subscribed to them in … wait for it … iTunes. It’s a decent podcatcher, after all, and I’m technology-agnostic. I’ll use anything for its strengths, while working around its weaknesses. The workaround, in this case, was simply to expose the feed URLs, and through them, the individual lecture URLs, to public discourse: linking, tagging, blogging, playlisting. That is the kind of intellectual activity that Stanford wants to encourage, isn’t it? 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… [...]

I’m guessing that some of the content on the Stanford iTunes store is “enhanced podcasts”, i.e. podcasts with chapters and images or other types of media attached. Granted this is Apple proprietry technology, thus one of those things that’s going to force you to use iTunes/iPods, but there’s very good reasons an educator would want to go this route. Enhanced podcasts would allow instructors to sync up their class slides, provide links to resources, etc., in a fairly easy manner. As D’Arcy pointed out, you can use other audio formats if you want to. Or you may want to add educational value to your content by making it an enhanced podcast. I’m not certain this is the case here, but I do know instructors who are more than willing to make some consession to go proprietary in order to gain that advantage, at least until a better solution presents itself.

It might not require “proprietary” formats to have enhanced podcasts for long. I say “proprietary” because the .m4a format is part of the MPEG4 spec. It’s only proprietary because nobody else has implemented it.

Regardless, it may become possible to do the same thing in standard MP3 files:
http://www.id3.org/id3v2-chapters-1.0.txt

D’arcy:
Regarding iTunes and mp3 player compatibility, your link is to the iTunes OS X version compatibility. The Windows iTunes compatibility page states that iTunes only works with an iPod (or you can burn an MP3 CD…)

See:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93377

Ah. Hadn’t realized the non-iPod compatibility stuff was MacOSX-only. Still, if you’re using .mp3 as the format to publish to the iTunes U, it’s pretty easy to drag the resulting files into any portable player.

Actually, as soon one who is using iTunesU, it is easier than that. You don’t even have to use iTunes to get iTunesU content. All the content can be retrieved by RSS from any podcatcher, so a Juice/WMP/iRiver combo will work; all you need is the URL of the cast. That assumes you are using MP3, of course. I looked at the interface to Stanford’s public face and it is a bit different from ours. When I launch our portal to iTunes and enter one of the topics/classes, below the subscribe button is the URL of the RSS feed for that area that can be copied and pasted. If you look at the feed info for a Stanford feed in iTunes and type that very unfriendly URL into Juice, it works just fine.

So it you pass the URL on onto your end users, there is no iTunes required to use iTunesU. We made it clear to Apple, we would suggest use of iTunes, but we needed a solution that did not require iTunes, so we can accommodate people who are iTunes-less, like our linux users.

There are benefits to using iTunes, like being able to listen to content without downloading it. Depending on how the instructor wishes to track access to the content, she/he can either pass out a single URL, or ask the students to one time log in through the iTunes route to retrieve their unique URL. In this way, we know if it being used or get an idea of whether people are sharing URLs they were asked not to share. Authentication is handled by the campus, and Apple does not get any student’s personal information.

Also, let me restate that there is no DRM. There were a couple projects that really wanted it for the content they had, and Apple said DRM is not part of the package.

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