I read a post over at Macdailynews.com this morning that sort of bothered me a bit … its actually being reported from the full article available here. Here’s one of the quotes:

“Still, not all students are convinced. ‘They’re really useful to listen to music on – while I go running or on the bus – but mostly I don’t need them for my classes and I haven’t heard of anyone needing them. I think the program has a lot of room for growth. If the professors get more involved and know more ways to use the iPod during their classes, it would be really beneficial,’ says Katie Brehm, a freshman at Duke,” Rafael and Anderson report.”

I guess what bothers me is that the media isn’t reporting the real amazing parts of the story … there is so much going on behind the scene with the project that I can see why the reall word isn’t getting out. I have to say that Duke gets a serious thumbs up from me by having the guts to move into such a huge initaitve so quickly — talk about a living lab! At any rate, I did something I don’t usually do … I left a ranting comment at the site. Just thought I’d cross post it here …

I have been involved with the Duke iPod project as a part of an academic consortium working directly with Apple (I am not on the Duke faculty, but I am in higher education at another University) … we have been discussing the applications for some time and they are really doing some amazing things … it will take some time for it to really catch on. They have worked with Apple to create an academic version of the music store — it is a great idea and one that should grow as a model for content distribution.

Someone here said something like, all faculty have to do is record lectures and students will listen … well, I’ve been experimenting with that this semester with mixed results. The real power of the iPod is in its ability to do so much more — it can be used for assessment (with the built in ratings system), for creating “choose your own ending” style interactive scenarios that students can work through, and of course audio programs. With RSS enclosures, faculty can drop content directly on students’ desktops as they see fit.

The big rub in the Duke (or any other) project is that faculty have to take the lead to get the materials to students. When we release new instructional technology initiatives at my University, we focus our adoption efforts on faculty — students get it very quickly. Its faculty who have to take time, develop places for it in their classrooms and develop a comfort level with it. The bottom line is that Duke has made incredible progress on several fronts — their ability to work with Apple to build a customized “store,” building a support unit within the University, and for providing a vision for this type of mobile technology. The full effects and adoption will take several years — if it is going be successful. Sorry for the long rant.

So Apple came out with the long rumored iPod Photo yesterday … I, like all the other Mac folks out here were reading about the features well before it was announced and you know, until I really saw it and started to look at its specifications and features, I thought “whatever.” Then, when I saw how Apple actually pulled it off, kept the form factor close to the same and how it really works I started to think about how powerful an academic (and business) tool this thing can be.

I do a lot of traveling and I am always giving presentations … sometimes my trips take my across the country, but at the same time a lot of them are on campus, are day trips around the state, or other “down and back” endeavors. For the long distance, multi-day trips I would never consider leaving my 12″ PowerBook at home — it’s just too much a part of the whole travel experience (digital photos, email, music, web, DVD, etc). But, with this new iPod Photo, I can see instances where that’s all I have to take with me to do my presentations. I use Keynote as my presentation software — simply because it is so much better than PowerPoint … I need to look at it more, but I could see myself pulling jpegs of all my key slides for my presentations and simply run them via the iPod Photo … my pictures, my music, & my presentations all running from this little device that fits in my pocket. If you can do “On-the-Go” photo “playlists” then I could quickly assemble presentations from a whole slew of key slides I use. Cool.

I also read you can sync slideshows to audio … I have been playing with the whole podcasting thing for a couple of weeks now … I’ve even gotten it figured out how to route voice, music, iChat, and really anything else into an iPod for recording … my colleague, Bart Pursel and I are going to start a (maybe) weekly podcast this week or next, so stay tuned for that. Anyway, back to the idea … if I can exert some influence via my role in the Apple Digital Campus, I am going to push for a simple authoring tool to allow everyday people to create podcasts that can be synced with images — think digital photos, presentation slides, maps, or anything else that is graphical in nature. These little iPod Podcast Presentations could be wrapped up and served via a RSS enclosure so they could be delivered to your audience as often as you want — all automatically in portable way. I’ve done research with HP about doing these types of things with the Pocket PC, but the results were less than perfect — the devices just couldn’t hold their own and had too many features to be easy to use.

It would be great to have all my students using an iPod Photo — like the Duke project on steroids — so I could build short interactive iPod Podcast Presentations to cover all sorts of supplemental material. Let alone the commercial applications — Museum tours, city tours, University tours, just in time training applications — imagine if you are a network system support person and can’t remember how to repair a bad switch and you could pull up, on the spot, and interactive guide on the iPod Photo! Lots of cool applications there!

All in all, I am more impressed with the device than I thought I would be — almost surely because I like just about anything Apple does, but this one has some real potential outside of its intended purpose. When you combine this with the One-Click Assessment concept I’ve blogged about before, the iPod is shaping up to be a hidden jewel for technology integration in the classroom … I still agree with Steve Jobs that a portable video device isn’t what people want, but I bet if they came out with one I would (a) buy one, and (b) think ways to use it beyond watching illegally downloaded movies from Bit Torrent — not that I do that. And yes, I did buy one yesterday — all 60 GB of it. When it gets here, I’ll be taking it apart to see how it can be used to have a larger impact.