Apple - Education - iTunes U

Jeanne just emailed the faculty tech liaisons about this, and I'm posting it here, because I'll lose it in my email:

Apple - Education - iTunes U:

"iTunes U* is a free, hosted service for colleges and universities that provides easy access to your educational content, including lectures and interviews 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."

Seems to good to be true... where's the catch? Here's some more text from the site:

"Instructors can easily post and change content on their own without impacting the IT department and allow students to upload their own content to share with professors or with the class. All content is stored in an Apple-hosted repository that can be browsed and searched, and configured to provide open or secure access as needed."

SSUG Notes for January 13

I have some notes from yesterday that are still a mess... Here are some notes that I just took:

Bryan Alexander is talking right now at the SSUG. One of the things he showed: a page on NITLE's new site that is a great starting point for a number of technologies.

Other things he is talking about...

Characteristics of Web 2.0 applications:

• they tend to use AJAX


• Focus on Microcontent: small pieces pulled from different sources to create a single page


• About connecting people


• "Continuous Beta"... constantly being developed


• There is a tension between centralized and decentralized technology
  
  
  • dispersed applications, but large corporations (like Yahoo) are slurping them up

Implications:

• We have to become more nomadic in the way we live on the web... in the way we store information on the web:
  
  
  • Be prepared to export your stuff into other technology (e.g. OPML)
  
  
  • Things move rapidly on the web, and we need to be able to move quickly with it


• With the rapid development of technology comes more irrational fears of it


• Copyright issues will also become more hazardous

Mobile Technology

• Mobile technology is a large part of Web 2.0, and the United States is still behind much of the world in this area. Examples:


• Many projects right now are tying information to geographic locations
  
  • Art Mobs
  
  
  • 34 North 118 West Project
  
  
  • Yellow Arrow

Wednesday Evening Writing Exercise < Ssug < NITLE Wiki

I'm at the SSUG (Social Software Users Group) meeting in Wooster, Ohio today. Last night we had some nice conversations and this writing exercise, the results of which are recorded on a wiki.

All the World's A Podcast

Saw this on the new NITLE blog:

A Web Monkey Guide to Podcasting

Web Monkey's tutorials helped me out with HTML and other web technologies when I was first learning it long ago. So, I'm thinking this is definitely worth a look.

New NITLE Blog: Liberal Education Today

Looks like NITLE has a new blog, which replaces the old NITLE blog and the CET blog.

Liberal Education Today

I've already subscribed!

Looks like the website is all new as well.

The Geospatial Web

On Point, a Boston-based NPR show, had an interesting segment this morning entitled The New Sense of Place about "the geospatial web." Some of the sites that were mentioned:

• Yellow arrow


• Memory Maps (a mashup of Flickr+GoogleMaps)


• Dodgeball


• The Google Earth Community


• Peter Morville's Blog (findability.org)

UPDATE:

A full list of the sites mentioned has been published on the OnPoint website. My thanks to Rekha Murthy (the show's producer) for the pointer.

BTW (and this is probably obvious to my fellow Wheatonites): I originally posted this here, because the show points to trends in the digital world that are related to the work our students and faculty have been doing with GIS at Wheaton.