Tama’s eLearning Blog

Last week there was a healthy discussion about the pros and cons of iTunes U (here and here for a start) and after a bit of a think over the weekend, I’ve got some further thoughts. D’Arcy Norman in “iTunes U. Critiques - it’s not as simple as that” makes a number of positive points about Apple’s service. Probably the most important part of D’Arcy’s post is the last paragraph:

I just talked with someone at Apple who would know - and iTunes U supports any file format that iTunes can grok - you can publish .mp3 (or .wav, or .aiff, or Apple Lossless) audio, .mp4 video, even .pdf files (that’s how album art is handled) as well as the “default” formats of .aac etc… This means there is no lock-in to having an iPod as portable playback device (and even the .aac files can be converted by iTunes to .mp3 now).

Having cross-platform playable formats such as mp3 is, in my opinion, a huge plus because it does allow other players and platforms to handle the files (sure, you need iTunes to access those files initially, but having flexibility with them thereafter and no DRM is hugely important). Gardner Campbell, however, remains unconvinced by the service and in a “Postscript on iTunes U” makes the extremely important point that while there won’t be a technical lock-in to the service, financial realities may create a practical lock-in anyway:

Will institutions, especially starved-for-cash public schools, be willing to fund home-grown open alternatives when they can make money on a home-branded, outsourced, turn-key operation like Apple’s? I doubt it. Apple doesn’t need de jure exclusive rights. We’ll essentially give them away, de facto. Much better PR that way, and the company gets to express its astonishment at any dissent, for after all no one forced us to put all our content in iTunes U.

I think after consideration, I’m falling half-way between the two perspectives. I do think iTunes U has potential to be a very useful service, especially for publicly accessible university podcasts because the potential traffic charges could be huge, especially for well respected professors giving public lectures and the like. I also think that iTunes U could be a useful host for course content. However, it should not be the only host. If using iTunes U stops many universities exploring alternative services and developing their own, then Apple is pulling a Blackboard/WebCT. However, having recently learned from those lessons (and almost-done-mergers), I suspect many universities will using both iTunes U and in-house solutions for other formats/options. Along those lines, Burks Oakley pointed me to an important post by Michael Meiser whichs extends a post from Jon Udell both of whom focus on the difficulties of linking to and referencing material via the iTunes interface. As Jon Udell points out:

It was an ironically circular exercise. I started at itunes.stanford.edu, which is just a web placeholder for the JavaScript code that launches iTunes and points it at the special Stanford area of the iTunes Music Store. Then I subscribed to some of the Stanford feeds in iTunes. Capturing the URLs of those feeds was way harder than it should be, because iTunes displays them but won’t let you copy them. Those feed URLs are, of course, extremely nasty-looking, e.g.:

https://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/ITCSBrowse.woa/wa/ Subscribe/Feed_StanfordPublic-1770144-1770152–1770196_visitor $40indigo.apple.com_1137336780-95c4e56efabeb87e7982db034895cbd2eb6312de

You’d have to nuts to write something like that down. Well, I guess I am, because I did. My reasons were partly selfish. I want to be able to get directly to the audio URLs contained in those feeds so I can automate conversion to MP3. Why? I like to listen to long lectures while running, and my iPod isn’t the preferred device in that situation. My Creative MUVO is lighter, and when I drop it or get it wet I don’t have to worry so much. More broadly, I want these freely available lectures to be able to spark the sort of web discourse that I’m sure Stanford intends them to. URLs are the currency of that discourse. If I want to refer you to Robert Dunbar’s global warming talk I should be able to link you directly to it. Discussion about the talk should be discoverable on the web by way of that URL. Here’s what shouldn’t have to happen, but currently does:

I heard an interesting talk about global warming by Stanford’s Robert Dunbar. I wonder what you think about it? To listen, make sure you have iTunes installed, and then go to itunes.stanford.edu in a browser. From there, click the link to open iTunes. Then click on Faculty Lectures. Then scan the list for “Is Global Warming Real” or “Robert Dunbar”.

So anyway, after laboriously capturing those feed URLs and posting them to del.icio.us, I turned around and subscribed to them in … wait for it … iTunes. It’s a decent podcatcher, after all, and I’m technology-agnostic. I’ll use anything for its strengths, while working around its weaknesses. The workaround, in this case, was simply to expose the feed URLs, and through them, the individual lecture URLs, to public discourse: linking, tagging, blogging, playlisting.

That is the kind of intellectual activity that Stanford wants to encourage, isn’t it?

iTunes U is thus somewhat at odds with the ease that a lot of social software provides when having conversations across posts, podcasts and other digital flotsam. Sure, that might be a good thing for some people (I know that locking podcasted lectures behind a university-specific interface will ease the concerns of many academics about the intellectual property), but it’s also important for any university podcast system to be linkable and accessible for content that they want to make publicly available (also an important part of good university PR). iTunes U doesn’t cover all our needs, but it can be part of the podcasting solutions. Just not the only part. And, as always, we should be working toward finding/thinking/creating the next step…

Update: Today’s The Age has an article “iTunes offers uni lectures via podcast” but it doesn’t offer much new information, although I think this quote covers the crux of the debate:

Schools and universities have historically been major contributors to Apple’s computer sales. With iTunes U, Apple “is leveraging the ubiquity that we’ve established on campuses with iPods and iTunes,” said Chris Bell, Apple’s director of product marketing for iTunes.

I suspect some universities might not want to feel all that leveraged.

Update 2: Burks Oakley has a great podcast on the ups and downs of iTunes U here.