via Teaching and Learning with Technology:

“A program that I mostly use for note taking is called called iAnnotate. It requires the lecture slides to be in a .pdf format, and then you download them into DropBox and upload them straight into the program on the iPad,” Rutledge said. “You go on it, click on the file name, just take your notes on there. It automatically saves it, no hassle, and very easy to do.”

The student calls it easy, but this sounds exactly like something Apple would want to tackle and make perfectly seamless.

Student’s classes were requiring so much printing, it costs a single student 15 dollars a week. That would 450 dollars after two semesters. The iPad doesn’t seem too expensive compared to that.

If the iPad is going to make new inroads in education, let alone transform it, I think it will be by way of specialized apps that take advantage of the many great capabilities of the iPad, not through an augmented-textbook model that reanimates the corpse of Microsoft Encarta.

via Apple for the Teacher – Kieran Healy.

Is an electronic book a contradiction in terms? Is it trying to shoehorn the media of the old, the book, into the electronic age? Seems like that to me. Apple’s iTunes U is more interesting to me – it constructs a learning experience by aggreagting specific resources and tool from across the web. Nothing new there, but it is a more modern approach. Of course the downside is that not all the resources one might want to use are in electronic format. That is where iBooks and iBooks Author come in. It is trying to close the gap. It is also possible to think that if iPads, iBooks, and iBooks author gain a certain level of adoption, a new form will emerge. Think of how the rise of the iPod led to podcasting.

Have you seen the the new iTunes U? It is now an app. Apple released three things at their education-focused event a few days ago: A new version of iBooks with support for interactive electronic textbooks, a tool to author interactive electronic textbooks, and a new version of iTunes U. While the announcements about the books and book authoring are getting tons of attention, I think the new version of iTunes U is just as important, maybe more so.

Here is what a course now looks like in iTunes U (which is now an app for iOS):

A course consists of the following areas:

• Info: In essence, this is the syllabus. It contains sections like “overview”, “about instructor”, “outline”. It looks like you may be able to add as many sections to this as you want. I have seen things like “requirements”, “required apps”, “assignments”.

• Posts: This is the course content – video, audio, weblinks, links to apps, chapters of interactive electronic extbooks, assignments with due dates. When an instructor makes a new “post”, students can opt in to get a push notification.

• Notes: free form notes and notes and annotations taken in ebooks all aggregated in one place.

• Materials: .I think this is the same resources from the “posts” section, but in a flat list, sorted by type, so you can be sure to download all the videos, apps, books, etc so you have them available when you need them.

This is really a barebones LMS. I don’t know what to make of that. Yes, It doesn’t have all the features of full-fledged LMS. There is no grade book, quizzes, discussion fora. But this is Apple’s first take. They are well known for releasing a minimalistic product that hits the most important features, then building upon that in further iterations. A 2009 survey of faculty and teaching assistants at Penn State found that “the items that were extremely important to the majority of individuals were: course mail (74.9%), syllabus (57.3%), drop boxes (56.2%) and grade books (54.7%).” iTunes U hits the first two features. I won’t be surprised if the next iteration of iTunes U has a way for students to turn in assignments. In fact the old iTunes U had a way to create a dropbox for students to add media to a course podcast. Don’t know if there is any way to do that in this new iTunes U.

Think of the first iPhone. It had no apps, multitasking, copy-and-paste. Not only was there no app store, but no one was even thinking that the iPhone needed an app store. Apps, yes, but the app store was not a popularized concept. Now the app store defines the iPhone and iPad experiences. Imagine where iTunes U could go in the coming years.

And even if Apple doesn’t move into feature X – iTunes U is all about aggregating stuff from the web, apps, and books. Social features perhaps could be provided by a third party app or web site. I wonder about this doubly so since apple has such a poor track record with social features.

I am very curious to see how iTunes U evolves in the coming several years. Think what will you will of Apple or proprietary solutions, but when a company this big and with such a track record of transforming industries starts pushing into the education space, you can’t ignore it.