iTunes U and Discoverability

I’ve been personally involved in the iTunes U space for quite some time … first as a member of the Apple Digital Campus group and then as a pilot University. For the longest time I have maintained that iTunes U is a good thing on a whole bunch of levels. iTunes itself is a very well designed cross platform media manager and player. It just works … the integration with the iTunes Store takes the platform to a whole other level and that little iPod thing completes the eco-system. Most of what iTunes U gives us is very solid as well — protected content areas that only faculty and enrolled students can access, subscriptions, public content areas, and really anything else that the iTunes Store can give you. It is a very nice environment that students and faculty find easy and intuitive to use and navigate.

My two biggest issues to date have been the inability to engage students in any sort of conversation (other than having them create a podcast rebuttal and upload it) and the inability to really navigate and find podcasts easily from the outside — I’ll call that last piece, discoverability. If you are in a given University’s iTunes U space, life is fairly easy, but what if you are a student sitting on the outside and have no idea how to get to your files? You can’t fire up a browser and google for it … you have to know the right URL to get iTunes to launch and go to the iTunes U site at your school. It has been a problem. To compound the issue, it has been nearly impossible to find a way to easily take advantage of all the killer public content available across all the various iTunes U sites. Want some content from Penn State? Better know the URL … ditto for Stanford, University of Michigan, and so on.

Today (or yesterday …) that has changed. Apple rolled out an iTunes U directory from within the public iTunes Store. Jump over to Apple’s Education site, click the link to launch the iTunes Store and take a peek at the little sites directory in the upper left … notice that last item? Yep, it is a public landing page for a select group of iTunes U spaces. Finally I can easily show people what various spaces look like, access content from top schools, and feel like we are part of the iTunes Universe. I think this will help in a bunch of ways. One big one is the ability for Higher Education to get prominent placement in the World’s top online music and podcast directory. Not too shabby, thanks Apple!

Game On!

By my own admission, I am not much of a gamer. Back in the day when I was a kid I would play text based games by Infocom on my 128K Mac … after that, I’ve stayed away from computer games for the most part– small amounts of time here and there, but serious addictions. Sure, I’ve had game consoles, but other than my Wii I haven’t gotten the fever like most of my friends have since way back in the day. We’ve been doing a lot stuff in Second Life, but like we said in ETS Talk 25, SL isn’t a game.

The last couple of weeks I have been into a game though — not a million dollar production, but a simple little Flash game called, Desktop Tower Defense. I was at my sister’s tonight for a picnic and all the guys were talking about it. Let me say it is good. Two things make it perfect in my mind … the first is the simple game play. Those of us raised on the simplicity of the Atari 2600 know that one button is enough. The second thing that makes it really interesting is the social component. They make it really easy to set up a group and play against your friends. Just really smart stuff.

Looks like people are noticing. I came across a nice little post over at Giga Om that nails it. We need to be thinking about games in education, but we cannot ignore the simple options out there. Things don’t have to be over the top to work. Desktop Tower Defense is the proof.

The FaceBook Platform

I have only been following the rumors related to FaceBook’s newest jump as an outsider — the FaceBook Platform. Twice in the same day I am linking to GigOm … this time a very well composed post explaining the new deal. From what I am making of it all, the FB will allow partners (whatever that means) to write specific apps that live on top of the FB. In other words, the FB could be looked at like an OS and these new apps can rest on its foundation. I am guessing this will let normal people (at some point) tap the power of the FB’s data (and user profiles) to create new things that may only have interest to a subset of the users. This does all sorts of things if I understand it correctly, but one thing it does do is allow people to leverage the unbelievably active user base to create niche applications for specific vertical opportunities.

What this means to me is that I could write an application that linked FB traffic with say a course management system of sorts. Layering on top of the FB a whole host of CMS style tools — discussion, quizzing, assignment posting, and really anything else … and the students would never have to leave the FB. If I can do that, then maybe I would consider using the profile power of the FB to get at some very interesting content delivery options … this is all just happening to me in the moment here, but I am thinking of allowing course materials to be presented to you at different levels depending on profile parameters — foreign language students who say they’ve visited France may very well get more advanced podcasts of content to translate as an example. Students don’t spend hours in our spaces like they do in the FB and in the FB they are spending some of that time crafting their profiles to better match either their real or stated identity. Update, this morning while hitting the feeds I bumped into one of the first apps to run on top of FB, Project Agape. It is essentially a “Causes” engine that now has deep integration with the FB. Very interesting stuff.

I need to do more reading and more investigation, but it seems to me that the Marketplace FB just released last week may be one of these such applications. I don’t know that, but it would seem to make sense. I wonder what all this will mean for dedicated social sites who work to grab the typical FB demographic? If I can (or choose) to live in the FB, constantly crafting and honing my profile, why would I go to Flickr to share my pictures? Why would I need to blog outside the environment? Why for that matter, would I need to go to Google to find something? I know the web is the platform we all live on today, but there is something here.

Sorry for the rambling train wreck, but I need someone to help me think about this.

23 Things and ETS Talk

A tip of the hat to Veronica Diaz from Maricopa on this little find … the 23 Things open course designed and delivered from Glendale Community College in Arizona. Not much to say here, but fantastic. It is an open, self-paced eLearning course that guides learners through 23 things they should know about Web 2.0.

It got Brad Kozlek and I talking quite a bit about it today and we think this and our follow up thoughts will be featured this week on ETS Talk. Speaking of ETS Talk, I came across a very nice post about our little podcast show from Mike Briggs at Sun. Blows my mind that people are listening!

We Know This – Kids are Digital

Running through the feeds this morning I came across a post over at GigaOm related to a tech panel the author, Liz Gannes, moderated recently. What makes it an interesting post is that the panel was made up of teens. We’ve been telling folks on campus and beyond about the habits of the net generation, but this post nails it. When people outside the academy begin discussing the traits of these kids I think we’ll see great acceptance that what we say about them is true. I get the feeling that most of the time people think we are inflating the characteristics of this population. But for what it is worth, I am more of a believer that the current group of young people in and getting set to enter college are a special bunch. To me it means we can offer more interesting technical opportunities that they will use to support their time in higher education — if we can gather some mind share from the place they all seem to love, the FaceBook.

5/23/2007: Presentation: Penn State Libraries

I have been invited to give a talk to the people in the Penn State Library. It was slated to be related to social tools, but I have opened it up a bit to focus on the platforms for digital expression available at PSU. I hope to give the group some background on who our students are and the kinds of things they are interested in.
Video of the presentation is available.

Social Stuff at PSU

Tomorrow I am presenting to folks from the PSU Libraries. Originally this was going to be a small discussion, but it appears as though it has turned into a bigger deal. The talk will be available via the Libraries use of Media Site Live (Windows Media Player required) so tune if you are at all interested. The talk is tomorrow at 9 AM here on the east coast.

I think I’ll probably reuse much of what I did at Maricopa with a little more hands-on demo time. We shall see how it all shakes down. What I am hoping for is an active audience and lots of conversation. Again, we shall see. Should be fun!

My slides are available over at my PSU Blog.

As a Public Service, Let Me Repeat that RSS Rocks

I am an idiot. I have been a mad RSS fan for years … I’ve used it to get access to the things I want to read for so long I’ve forgotten what it means to really “surf” the web. RSS Enclosures got me excited from day one, but I have never really grasped what so many others have gotten for far too long — that RSS is pure content. I somehow missed the notion that RSS can provide more than my reader with reusable content — anything in that feed can be used anywhere else.

A couple of weeks ago I watched a screencast by Brian Lamb that gave me the RSS ah-ha moment I had been missing … he showed how simple it is to reuse content across sites from RSS. He used Allan Levine’s Feed2JS site to take a feed and return a simple javascript to allow me to embed that any other place on the web. It seems so simple, but it took watching the screencast to really grasp it. I probably showed that screencast and the resulting technique to 20 people in the last 2-3 weeks … it got me thinking about another little thing that we’ve been talking about for quite some time.

With the Blogs at Penn State pilot fully underway, we wanted a way to easily pull together all the blogs from ETS and display them as a meta blog — a staff perspectives site so to speak. I didn’t want to have to install another tool on one of our servers, I just wanted an easy way to make it all go. Enter Google Reader and its ability to share any content as a meta blog that you have in a tag. So, in Brian Lamb style, I threw together a very quick and dirty screencast showing how to use Google Reader to organize and share a mashed-up meta blog of content under a single tag. Once you start to see how this works, the ability to leverage the XML content of any feed becomes immediately obvious. We actually spent a bunch of time talking about it in the ETS Talk Podcast 24 a couple of weeks ago.