Mark/Space recently announced the upcoming release of The Missing Sync for iPhone, the latest addition to the company’s Missing Sync family of synchronization products for Mac OS X. The application will provide data migration of contacts, tasks, events and photos from Palm OS, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry smartphones, as well as the ability to archive, browse and search iPhone Call Log, SMS text messages and Notes.

Brian Hall, Mark/Space president and CEO, asserts that “Prospective iPhone customers want to know that they can take their existing smartphone data with them, and Missing Sync for iPhone is designed to meet that need. Existing and prospective iPhone customers alike will benefit from enhanced access to their Call Log, SMS text messages and Notes.”

The Missing Sync for iPhone is expected to ship in the fourth quarter of 2007. A single installer will include English, French and German language versions. Electronic downloads will be priced at $39.95 from the Mark/Space Online Store, and CDs will be available several weeks later for $49.95. “Crossgrade” discounts will be available for owners of Mark/Space’s Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Palm OS editions of The Missing Sync. The Missing Sync for iPhone will require Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.10 or later and an iPhone.

Check out Mark/Space’s website for a full description of the product.

In his article “There’s Something in the Air: Podcasting in Education,” featured in the Educause November/December 2005 Review, Gardner Campbell provides a brief history of podcasting; explains how to produce, distribute and subscribe to podcasts; and presents educators with a call to action concerning the implementation of podcasting in higher ed. Two years after its debut, Campbell’s article serves as a valuable reminder of the incredible educational and social potential of podcasting in the academy.

Campbell suggests that “rich media” tools like podcasting are the tools of students’ native expressiveness, and with the right guidance and assignments, they can use these tools to create powerful analytic and synthetic work. He asserts that we do students a disservice if we exclude these creative digital tools from their education.

By situating podcasting within the time-honored heritage of radio, Campbell suggests that the tool might be used to create a theater of the mind. “A gifted teacher could be said to create just such a theater of the mind, as well as the conditions whereby students may be enticed to create such a theater for themselves. At it best, podcasting can serve as training in rich interiority and in shared reflection.” He also suggests that, like radio, podcasting has the potential to spread its effects to people both near and far and to unite them into a community of shared learning. He writes, “Done well, podcasting can reveal to students, faculty, staff, communities—even the world—the essential humanity at the heart of higher education.”

If you are in need of a message that will incite or renew your enthusiasm for podcasting in higher education, Campbell’s article certainly won’t let you down.

Last week, Erica Sadun of tuaw.com announced the marriage of Bonjour, an application that offers configuration-free networking technology, and the iPhone. With Bonjour, your iPhone and iPod touch can talk to your Mac, to printers or to each other. They can also browse for available services or provide their own as a server.

For her initial project, Sadun put together a couple of applications: PicSend and PicListen. These apps allow you to subscribe to a camera on another person’s iPhone. Just tell that iPhone to snap a picture and within seconds that picture appears on your own screen. You can download copies of PicSend and PicListen from Sadun’s FTP site.

As Sadun suggests, sending pictures back and forth between iPhones isn’t a huge deal until you realize that you’re not limited to pictures. “With Bonjour, you can send files, data, sounds, videos, anything that transfers from one computer to another.” With this application, it is possible that the iPhone will soon be able to “discover” printers in its area and offer to print out pictures or webpages.

The possibilities of social computing with iPhones, iPod touches and Bonjour are certainly compelling for those of us interested in the utilization of these devices for teaching and learning. In a classroom full of Bonjour equipped iPhones, a teacher might snag the picture off of a student’s phone to project it for the entire class or might also “manage” the content students are viewing.

For more information and programming details check out the full tuaw.com article.

In yet another step toward increased software capabilities on the iPhone, Apple this past week opened the iPhone Dev Center, a comprehensive guide for programmers and developers to everything iPhone. And we mean everything.

While it’s not the full SDK that’s coming in February, the site describes itself as “your single source of information for designing, coding, and optimizing web applications for iPhone and iPod touch,” and it should be a great place to prepare for that Great February Day. The site features web development guides, tech talk videos, sample code, and a pretty darned comprehensive iPhone reference library.

Programmers who work from this resource should not only find an easier time of it all, but their work should also move smoothly from the current Web 2.0 incarnation into native versions when the time comes (should people want to make that leap). For educational users and developers, the Dev Center should make a great resource not only for their own efforts, but also for students in programming classes, interface design classes, and web classes.

So don’t just sit there… Get coding! We need some educational iPhone apps prontissimo!

At many of our universities (and hopefully here at iThinkEd, too) scholars, technologists, and administrators are reconceiving the academy. The educational and cognitive impact of the “information age” presaged for more than 40 years by pioneers such as Marshall McLuhan (we think especially of The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media) is finally becoming broadly recognizable — not just in our words, but also in our teaching. And the key, I think, has not been either pervasiveness or accessibility. It has been both.

The computer was initially a tool for doing old things in a new way — categorizing, organizing, searching. But recent developments are offering the opportunity to do completely new things — and to move from modes of organization to modes of discovery and integration. This is a recurring message in recent video work by Kansas State’s Michael Wesch, whose Digital Ethnography Group continues to turn out some of the most insightful work on media and convergence that we’ve seen (a recent example about classroom learning is presented below). Old conceptions of teaching and learning — and old assumptions about them — will have to be reconsidered as the pervasiveness of technology and associated infrastructures increases and as accessibility (including ease of use, ease of configuration, and ease of integration) fuels even more adoption and experimentation.

However, technology alone isn’t the answer. It’s what the technology can do to enhance communication, connection, and collaboration that’s essential. In other words, it’s not about delineation and control; it’s about community and convergence. Social learning theory tells us that humans learn best in community — when they feel connected to others. And community forms when people explore and collaborate together, connecting their experiences. Any technological solution aimed at increased learning must enhance community and convergence. If it doesn’t, it’s likely to be pedagogically irrelevant. (more…)

A couple of days ago, Sybase announced that it will soon be offering a tool that allows direct access through the iPhone’s native email client to Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino — services that have thus far been relegated to a Web-based interface. This will presumably not only provide a better overall experience for interacting with Exchange and Lotus email while online, but will also allow offline access to stored email.

ZDNet reports that the “Information Anywhere suite connects mobile clients to email systems using standards, but not IMAP, which many email administrators shun due to potential unfettered exposure of email traffic to the Internet. Those using the Sybase solution for making the iPhone a corporate email client will be able to use their mobile networks to securely synchronize and replicate their emails.”

The iAnywhere approach comes with full connectivity to the native iPhone email application rather than links via webmail in the Safari browser. The email is therefore also available for offline use. It will work with any iPhone and supports all Domino versions from R6 through the new version 8, as well as Exchange 2000 through Exchange 2007. The solution will, however, require the iAnywhere suite 5.5. The iPhone-iAnywhere solution is expected in 2008.

Check out more reports at ZDNet and iPhone Atlas.

Education 2.0 Wiki, a test space for a Wiki involving Education, eLearning and the various social developments of Web 2.0 tools and services, has compiled an invaluable iPod use & podcasting in higher education bibliography.

Source categories include: reference works; guides & bibliographies; presentations; scholarly articles; articles in the media; local examples; and useful, free tools for creating, editing and receiving podcasts.

If you’re looking to borrow from or contribute to a great iPod/podcasting resource, check it out.

And speaking of mLearning, we think Mobile Learning’s recent post describing the Top 10 Learning Ideas to Try with Mobile Devices is a handy starting point for considering creative ways to incorporate mobile learning in the academy. Unfortunately, none of the top 10 refers specifically to math-based learning, which may be the reason for the discrepancy between the article’s title, which boasts 10 top ideas, and the actual post, which offers only 9… (frankly, we think it would have been more generous for the title to have under-reported and for the article to have gone to 11, but alas.) For such valuable information and for such a fine discussion, this is a small quibble, indeed.What are Mobile Learning’s top categories?

1. Situated/Proximal learning, which uses mLearning in a particular space, location or context, such as a nursery or art gallery, rather than the classroom;
2. Social/Collaborative learning, which emphasizes communication, interaction, and collaboration between learners;
3. Just-In-Time learning, which delivers small chunks of information to students as required by a particular situation;
4. Lifelong/Informal learning, which allows students to carry information with them outside of traditional learning contexts and share their own information with others;
5. Contextualised/Adaptive learning, which provides customized learning materials based on changing characteristics, such as language learning software that teaches “bon matin” in the morning and “bon soir” at night;
6. Convenient/Portable learning, which plays on the ubiquity and accessibility of mobile devices to allow learning whenever and wherever;
7. Personalised/Individual learning, which allows learners to customize their own learning environments and materials;
8. Connected learning, which enables learners to forge connections with other learners and to bring together materials from diverse sources;
9. Ubiquitous learning, which takes advantage of the fact that people carry their converged media devices with them most of the time, transforming all moments into possible learning opportunities.

Devices like the iPhone offer not merely a new technology, but a new way of conceiving of teaching and learning, and those of us who are educational professionals need to be quite busy indeed thinking about and trying out the new methods and applications that will grow to characterize learning in the 21st century. Articles like this and like the recent ECAR study offer us a great starting point.But don’t take our word for it… Click on over to Mobile Learning’s site and check it out.

Dr. Saiid Ganjalizadeh, Assistant Director for Instructional Technology at The Catholic University of America discussed mobile learning (”mLearning“) as an emerging technology in “Imagining Tomorrow’s Future Today: The EDUCAUSE Evolving Technology Committee” today at EDUCAUSE 2007 in Seattle.

Dr. Ganjalizadeh noted that mLearning is nothing new, citing the growth of this medium in its electronic form from the Walkman in 1979 to the iPhone today. He specifically praised the anytime/anywhere aspect of devices such as the iPhone/iPod Touch, noting that these devices share many of the key features desirable in mLearning, including:
• Tangiblility
• Low cost
• Attractiveness to young learners
• Photo capabilities
• Instantaneity of communication
• Readiness for voting, point-to-point messaging, and assessment (via SMS) [and Bluetooth?; ed]
• Web based integration with Class Management Systems and Learning Management Systems.

Dr. Ganjalizadeh noted that content delivery in mLearning devices are both just-in-time and just-enough — concepts of content delivery that seek to provide enough material to be useful but not too much to interact with when in a classroom environment.

He concluded by observing that mLearning projects have received a lot of attention in Europe, with a few US universities having thoroughly adopted elements of mLearning technologies.

Like many others (including us!), Dr. Ganjalizadeh anticipates that mLearning will face a major and steady growth during the next few years. Frankly, we can’t wait to see how it all shakes out.

Last week, Central Michigan University hosted the 2007 Conference of the Michigan Blackboard Users Group (miBUG). The conference, entitled “Engineering E-Learning,” featured presentations focusing on the effective use of Blackboard’s suite of products as well as building block software and programs related to the production and maintenance of E-Learning, multimedia content, online education and classroom supplementation.

The conference agenda included sessions on social bookmarking as an effective tool for sharing, discovery and collaboration; the employment of social software applications such as blogs, wikis and podcasts for effective teaching and learning; and the construction of structured ontologies that allow networking and information retrieval to take place more efficiently in knowledge management systems (KMS).

Karen Gage, Blackboard’s VP of Product Strategy, provided the Keynote Address, which covered the evolution of Blackboard solutions for educational needs.