This past week, Marketcircle announced a new version of iPhoney, its iPhone-specific web-design app. Providing users with a pixel-accurate 320 x 480 canvas, iPhoney is designed to help designers develop and test their iPhone-specific Web 2.0 pages prior to release. We’ve used earlier versions of the app in developing some of our own Web 2.0 apps, and we’ve been really pleased with its features:

• Test iPhone-enabled Web 2.0 applications and compatible web sites.
• Open any website that works with Safari (use Safari 3 beta for the most accurate experience).
• Rotate to see websites in either portrait or landscape orientation.
• Show or hide the location bar for a full-screen iPhone experience.
• Simulate the iPhone user agent, to test browser redirection scripts.
• Zoom out to see how your current pages might look while zoomed out on iPhone.
• Turn off plug-ins (including Flash).
• Automatic updates with Sparkle, so you’ll always know if there’s a new version.
• Open source code so you can contribute to iPhoney’s rapid development.

The new version lets users view the source code for pages. iPhoney requires Mac OS X 10.4.7 or later.

Akoo International announced plans to develop a web site optimized for the iPhone’s Safari browser that will allow customers to use their iPhones to control in-store media displays. Presumably, store displays will announce their “m-Venue” URL and invite customers to trigger advertisements with their iPhones. According to Akoo, this “real-time consumer-to-brand interactivity” gives mobile users the ability to “search, select, and activate songs, music videos, memorable sports moments, pre-approved user generated content, and additional programming for shared public performance over standard audio/video systems.”

While that’s pretty slick for advertisers, such a technology might have interesting possibilities for higher education, too. Using location-based services, the iPhone could be used to trigger a particular presentation or a particular file download depending on where a student was standing in the classroom (or any other learning space), or it could help a student find the perfect resource material in the university library (”cold… warmer… warmer… HOT!”). This application’s tremendous potential to engage people with location-dependent content could easily be appropriated by academia to engage students at that all-so-critical teachable moment…

This fall, Abilene Christian University is starting a campus-wide exploration of the benefits of converged, mobile devices like the Apple iPhone in higher education. In a pilot study, faculty and educational technology developers will research ways devices like the iPhone can deepen learning in the 21st-century academy. In addition, ACU’s planning to explore how these converged, mobile devices can help foster community on campus and facilitate administrative tasks like billing and registration.

According to Kevin Roberts, ACU CIO, ACU faculty and technology staff have been studying strategic opportunities presented by handheld devices in higher education for a few years now. Changing technology has finally enabled companies like Apple to release PDAs and smart phones that bring together the whole digital package, allowing users to send text messages, check email, take pictures, listen to music and download information. “The creation of Apple’s iPhone – which offers many popular services in one device – has made what we see as the first really compelling solution,” said Roberts.

Through its Adams Center for Teaching and Learning, ACU is creating an elite case-study group to analyze ways to use the iPhone as a learning tool—both in and out of the classroom. “We’re really excited about the possibilities that the iPhone offers for reconceiving teaching and learning in the 21st century,” said Dr. William Rankin, associate professor of English at ACU and leader of the faculty research group. “We have a vision for ways that a true convergence device like the Apple iPhone can influence more student-centered models of learning and help teachers to configure classes in more creative ways. We hope to learn more as our pilot group begins using the iPhone every day in the academic setting.”

For more information about ACU’s efforts, you can contact ACU’s Public Relations Office.

Update: video from a local news station can be found here.

Hitting the news today is Apple’s patent application with the World Intellectual Property Organization for a user interface that can be reorganized by dragging elements on the screen to rearrange them. Originally submitted in December and published last week, the patent application doesn’t really offer a lot of news—in fact, you’ve probably already used this technology if you’ve reconfigured the icons that appear across the bottom of your iPhone’s iPod application. But this technology does offer some interesting possibilities in an educational setting. Imagine, for example, a “seating-chart” app that lets a teacher drag pictures of students into various configurations to record discussion or study groups or to assign students to particular projects… Or an app that lets students rank elements on a quiz or worksheet visually… After all, wouldn’t dragging make some of that stuff less of a drag?

Check out a good overview and some handy diagrams from the patent at AppleInsider and MacNN.

Apple was recently issued a patent for a software technique that proposes to enhance Apple’s Mac OS X operating system by enabling it to both read and write account information to and from external storage devices such as iPods and iPhones. Apple explains in the filing that “by coupling the external, portable data store to another multi-user computer, a user is able to login to any supporting multi-user computer and be presented with their user configuration and user directory.”

This means that as the iPhone hard drive grows (which it will inevitably do) students will be able to carry their home directories and personal Mac OS X settings in their pockets. They will be able to dip into any machine throughout the day and access their own data, their own setups, their own everything. It seems that this development has the potential to dramatically decrease pressure on university infrastructures by reducing the need for network storage.

What are some other potential higher education applications for this nascent feature?

Click Here for Original Article

We’re extremely interested in hearing how the iPhone has exceeded or fallen short of your expectations in respect to features that might be useful for higher education in the 21st century. Here is a synopsis of Jay Dominick’s (assistant vice president and CIO at Wake Forest University) initial musings concerning the iPhone.

Back in January, Dominick suggested that conversations concerning the implementation of the iPhone in the development of a fully mobile, networked curriculum and pedagogy would inevitably escalate as the upcoming academic year approached. At the time he was of course in the dark (along with the rest of us) concerning the device’s features and capabilities. However, he suggested that the market demand alone was enough to warrant serious discussion about the educational potential of the iPhone. In an interview with Campus Technology, he stated: “Right now I’m thinking that we are going to have to look seriously at this phone, because there is going to be so much buzz about it in the June-July-August timeframe—just when students and their parents are making back-to-school purchasing decisions. We’re going to have to understand what impact that’s going to have on our programs.”

Dominick went on to assert that Wake Forest’s interest in the iPhone would skyrocket, along with the general interest of the academy, if the device combined Apple’s notoriously user-friendly interface with software development potentiality. He stated: “We’ve had [converged] cell phone/PDA pilot programs, MobileU, here for a couple of years, and one of the big challenges we’ve seen is user interface issues. I think if Apple can address the interface issues surrounding smaller devices—like cell phones or PDAs—they will have a very, very interesting and applicable product for higher education.”

Six months and one giant revelation later, the iPhone seems to indeed be a “very, very interesting and applicable product for higher education.” It appears that Dominick’s premonition has, in many respects, become a reality. It will be interesting to hear what he has to say about the iPhone as he presents an
update on MobileU and converged devices this week at the Campus Technology 2007 conference in Washington, DC, July 30-August 2.

“Dialing Up the Future for iPhones on Campus”
1/24/2007
An interview with Jay Dominick, Wake Forest University
By Mary Grush
http://campustechnology.com/articles/45172_1/

Here are a couple of questions for education that the iPhone poses: How might the use of converged devices in and outside the classroom bolster interdisciplinary collaboration? How does digital collaboration through converged devices influence collegiality, educational opportunity, and student engagement?

According to Gartner, devices like the iPhone that bundle real-time and asynchronous features are especially effective in facilitating collaboration because they more accurately reflect a real work environment. Gartner suggests that in the business world, people typically meet “face to face or via messaging and conference tools to set goals, inform each other, establish a schedule and assign tasks; then, they work by themselves within a set of portals, forms and documents established for the collaboration.” This is obviously also a familiar pattern in higher education…

Devices that bundle synchronous and asynchronous features could become invaluable components for effective collaboration in the academy because they offer both immediate and persistent communication. For example, an IM communication might be translated into a persistent discussion thread so that class members could use it for reference or comment later on, or perhaps an audioconference could be transformed into a podcast so that others could share it and build on its ideas over time.

Though it’ll take a while to figure it all out, we’re wondering how having all of this stuff in one little package—media, voice, email, SMS, the web— will contribute to interdisciplinary collaboration between and among students and faculty. How will it transform the way teachers teach and how students learn? We’re eager to see…