It’s quite disturbing that I don’t have access to public information distributed by my school because I prefer to use an OS that can teach me something.

That’s a brilliant quote, and what more can I possibly add to it, but a big, resounding YES!!!

And the fact that these apple programs are more about consumption than learning is a big point to many people who praise the ease of applications overlook. Bravo!

It’s quite disturbing that I don’t have access to public information distributed by my school because I prefer to use an OS that can teach me something. Our best hope is that someone will figure out some way around the iTunes lock, cause apple obviously look at linux as a big threat.

@Cole,
I can see you argument, and I do agree to an extent, I just wonder why UMW, given its specific needs and community would need such a space given we don;t have 1200 students course, or even 200, and we do little or no video lectures and the like. it just seems like we are jumping on a bandwagon that we have already thought through and dealt with.

@Joss and Andy,

Thanks for the pointer to that discusion, it does take a pretty interesting take on the pros and cons, and I still tend to agree with Andy that have iTunes and a paralleled web-based delivery space for this content seems redundant, especially when you can have folks do it easier in one that the other. Moreoever, I’m not so convinced on traffic for these resources in Itunes, anyone tracking that? is it a proven advantage?

@Liam,
You r approach probably is the best, have a series of services that offer feds, and let them choose, but I also wonder how community emerges from that. In iTunes U it is obviously premised on the exchange model, but with SocialLearn, for examples, how do the social and conversational elements begin to emerge and become visible? Does the approach of letting folks get it from where ever work in tandem with a more robust syndication element for their content to be republished in a specific space that is exposed to the public? or is that not necessarily a condition? seems like that conversation is just as valuable, if not more, than the resource itself.

I contributed to the discussion thread that Joss refers to above, making a similar set of arguments to the ones in the original post here, though I focused a little too much on the Web Architecture which probably worked against me. That said, the arguments used against me were quite interesting and it is worth reading thru the thread.

For me, the biggest evidence that something is ‘wrong’ with the iTunesU approach is that universities usually end up building a parallel Web-based interface to all the same content. Often this is presented as a good thing (multiple routes to content – though my gut feeling is that it’s bad). The point is that if iTunesU wasn’t driven so heavily by a ‘lock-in’ mentality, that kind of thing wouldn’t be necessary.

On the other hand, the biggest evidence that something is ‘right’ with the iTunesU approach is the success with which it is used to drive content development and submission. This is very powerful (for both providers (faculty) and consumers (students)) and shouldn’t be underestimated. The idea that a similar level of buy-in and excitement could be generated by, say, uploading the same content to the Internet Archive is, frankly, laughable.

https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0908&L=JISC-REPOSITORIES&T=0&P=571

They discuss how iTunesU is fed by RSS content that you manage and that iTunesU is indexed by Google. There’s an equal amount of scepticism and advocacy.

Worth reading the thread in full.

I published content to iTunes recently using WPMU as the host. Very easy and is just another way for people to discover resources. I suspect that given the choice, students would prefer to download the videos from iTunes rather than the original website and then copy them to their device.

http://pencilsandpixels.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/download/

I wish one could then take that and at least embed a player via a simple html embed code in a sidebar. That would let people use the distribution network and allow free access in multiple locations.

And, additionally, what we are doing, once again, is hoping apple will come up with the social networking hooks that already exist elsewhere. Why?

And while D’Arcy is suggesting I am saying ITunesU is evil—I’m not, rather just superfluous and annoying in our case—I think th reason people are using it is more out of a sense of open education as a product, not a process. And the fact that ITunesU becomes a showcase, rather than a laboratory is an example example of that.

@D’Arcy,
Those aren;t web-based URLs, they are re-directs to iTunesU, a client-side application you must have to access the closed web of Apple. It is not an open, web-based resource that I can turn around and embed in a post or page. I think that is my definition of a URL more broadly, so perhaps I should rephrase that to something you can link to without being sucked into the apple “I” universe.

Also, how do these things fare in searchability on something other than ITunes? I imagine pretty poorly, and on top of that ITunesU is framed as free media storage, but it’s not. They don;t give you any space, and if you want to host the media you need to buy servers to the tune of 10,000 and have someone manage them (oh yeah, they have to be apple servers, btw) and that just seems like more of the same notions of free—free as in puppies, to quote Luke Waltzer.

As to those RSS feeds, where are they? Nowhere apparent, deeply hidden in the ITunes code, so no mortal web user can find them.

And lastly, I don’t necessarily think ITunes is evil—though I tend that way on certain days—I simply think it is a knee-jerk reaction amongst many schools to focus on the products of teaching and learning rather than opening up the process. Most ITunesU spaces I have seen, like the one at George Mason University, are closed, authentication spaces that reinforce the siloed logic. And the transactional nature of the space, whether or not one pays, is framed outside of a community, and like with OERs, it is most times the context around a resource that is far more valuable than the thing itself.

If there is another way to access content without being forced to use iTunes I would really love to hear about it. But in the research I’ve done, there is no other way to access the content.