Last week Apple expanded the free content available through iTunes U, which previously only offered lectures and videos from select universities. The new iTunes U “Beyond Campus” section will supply a host of materials ranging from recordings of Supreme Court arguments and public radio broadcasts on the civil rights movement to video interviews with sculptor Richard Serra.

Apple is launching “Beyond Campus” with six initial partners; including, public radio producer American Public Media; Smithsonian Global Sound; The Museum of Modern Art in New York; and KQED public radio and television in San Francisco.

Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes, suggests that a larger learning catalog for anyone — in college or not — helps to broaden the appeal of Apple’s iTunes and iPod franchises. He states, “We found that there’s a lot of educational content from other parties, and we thought it’d be a great opportunity to leverage iTunes U.”

Of course, those of us exploring the iPhone for use in academic settings are waiting a bit for the other shoe to drop: namely, now that we can get to the iTunes store over WiFi, when will we be able to access iTunes U? That would make all of this great content even more useful — and would match it with the very audiences it was designed to serve. So if anyone from Apple’s reading this, why don’t you forward that suggestion on up the line. Access to iTunes U’s educational content from an iPhone or a Touch would really broaden the appeal… And the utility.

For other articles on iTunes U “Beyond Campus” check out AP and MacNN.

Google is finally offering IMAP access for users of its free email service and, as an added bonus, has made IMAP available for your iPhone. On Tuesday Google offered instructions for enabling IMAP access on their accounts, allowing users to organize email into folders, save drafts, and access sent mail from multiple clients.

IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) enables users to sync their own email client up with a Linux hosting server, rather than simply downloading and deleting the messages as is standard procedure using the alternative POP3 option. This allows users to keep record of all previous emails, both ingoing and outgoing, regardless of the location at which they login to the server.

The great news is that Gmail’s new IMAP option works out of the box with the iPhone, on both regular and hosted accounts. Instead of the somewhat frustrating implementation offered before, where the iPhone would continually grab more and more old mail from the POP server as fast as you could delete it, the IMAP version reflects your Gmail labels as directories, and if you read something on your mobile, it is marked as unread on your main account.

To configure IMAP for your iPhone, just go to Gmail Help and follow the directions.

Today, our friends at tuaw.com report that the iphone-elite team at Google Code has released their “revirginizing tool,” which promises to rebuild your iPhone’s seczone lock table. The team suggests that after using this tool your 1.0.2 unlocked iPhone will return to its pre-unlocked state and be safe to upgrade to 1.1.1.

As with all restore/revirginizing methods, we (along with tuaw) recommend caution. You may want to wait a few days, listen to reports and scan the comment boards to see if ‘fallen’ devices are truly being restored to a prelapsarian state of iPhone innocence.

As we continue to explore and experiment with potential applications for the iPhone in higher education, we become increasingly excited about the manner in which the iPhone might function as an access tool and facilitation device for virtual learning communities that effectively aggregate our students, ourselves and our course content.

With this in mind, we recently stumbled across NoteSake, a free online community that enables students to take, organize, share class notes and collaborate in groups. With NoteSake a student can take notes during class and share them with a friend, or groups can work together on the same note, all through laptops (or iPhones?). NoteSake also allows students to organize notes by title, date, course and custom tag–making it easy to cross-reference notes.

It is not difficult to imagine how the iPhone might be employed with programs like NoteSake to create productive, virtual learning communities.

Why, it seems like only 3 days ago that our friend Steve officially announced the iPhone SDK, but how in the world is a person supposed to live for that long in anticipation (let alone until the actual release in February). I mean, come on, people!

It seems, however, that we’re not alone in our nail-biting anticipation. To that end, our friend Erica Sadun has worked to ease our collective pain by posting an exhaustive list of all of the iPhone’s various header structures for every data and file structure you can imagine (and we figure you folks can imagine a lot).

So if you’re jonesin’ to get your hands on the complete list of Objective-C class and file iPhone headers so you can have them all memorized by February’s SDK rollout, we won’t hold it against you. And you might want to check out some of the other groovy iPhone and programming-specific info Erica’s included on her main page, as well.

All we can say is bring on the caffeine and don’t talk to us for the next few hours… We’re busy!

Our colleague (and an iThinkEd contributer) James Langford has started a superb programming blog that we think you ought to know about. A really handy introduction to Web 2.0 programming for the iPhone — and especially to some of the behind-the-scenes programming infrastructure that gives iPhone programming all of its scrummy goodness — James’ Pointy Hair Boss Tech Guide is a handy resource for those interested in deploying iPhones within organizations — and especially higher ed institutions.

Though there are only a few posts right now, James is really creative and wonderfully generous, so we expect to see a lot of great new stuff over the coming months. So check back periodically, ’cause it’s bound to get more and more interesting…

Today, our friends at Ars Technica posted a great article, summarizing the two major surveys done regarding the iPhone’s effects: the original ChangeWave survey in August, and the more recent NPD survey. Both suggested that the iPhone is stealing customers from other carriers and manufacturers. And now that ChangeWave has released an updated iPhone survey, we have a pretty good idea of the manner in which the iPhone is transforming the industry.

As you might have suspected, the results look great for Apple and bad for a number of other companies. “Apple has gained a percentage point of manufacturer market share while Motorola has lost a point. Even better, Apple has the highest satisfaction rating (82 percent) of any manufacturer, a number that is 31 percentage points higher than the runner-up, RIM.”

16 percent of those planning to buy a mobile phone in the near future plan to shell out for an iPhone, which puts Apple in the highest “planned purchase” spot; the iPhone also seems to have influenced planned purchases of LG phones and Treos, both of which dropped a few points.

Although the NPD and ChangeWave surveys aren’t directly comparable, both paint a good picture of the iPhone’s effect on the market and reaffirm the notion that it will only be a matter of time before the iPhone becomes a pervasive presence on our campuses.

In a recent Information Week article, Mitch Wagner reflects on his experience using an iPhone as his primary computer and Internet device for almost three weeks. Wagner writes: “I learned far more about the pluses and minuses of the iPhone during those 21 days than I did during the rest of the 14 weeks that I’ve owned the device. I still like the iPhone a lot, and remain amazed and in awe at some of the things it can do.”

Wagner enthusiastically praises the iPhone’s web browser, suggesting that Apple has clearly worked hard to make sure its browser works well with the overwhelming majority of Web sites without modification of those sites. He also commends the device’s mail client, stating: “I used email to keep in touch with friends at home, and to make plans to meet up with friends and family while traveling, just as if I was still at my home office. That was a terrific experience. “ Wagner was also impressed with the iPhone’s text input device, using it to update his personal blog with about 2,600 words of trip reports.

Despite his general admiration for the device, Wagner does delineate a wish list of iPhone upgrades he is eager to see. He states that he missed having checklist and clipboard applications, as well as a way to create text documents and have them automatically synch to primary computers.

With the recent announcement of Apple’s intent to open the iPhone and iPod touch for 3rd-party development, Wagner’s upgrade wish list is sure to be met sooner rather than later.

Apple today announced its intent to open the iPhone and iPod Touch for 3rd-party development. We’re excited about the potential for targeted apps for education, excited by the role that colleges and universities will play in helping Apple shape the future, and excited to see Apple’s full commitment to this platform. There’s not much more that we can say that’s better than what Steve himself has said:

Third Party Applications on the iPhone

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-Touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once — provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones — this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.

Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,” we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.

We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.

Steve

P.S.: The SDK will also allow developers to create applications for iPod Touch.

A relatively recent (perhaps, slightly dated) eSchool News article explores the academy’s interest in the educational potentiality of the iPhone. As you may well know, many educators and institutions are intrigued by the device and are actively weighing its potential impact in schools. The iPhone’s revolutionary interface and its access to more than 300 applications coupled with a surge in the use of cell phones and iPods in classrooms has contributed to a significant amount exploration concerning the efficacy of iPhones in the classroom.

In a recent blog post, Helen Barrett, an Apple Distinguished Educator and recent retiree from the faculty of the College of Education at the University of Alaska at Anchorage, said she believes “online simulations, games, learning objects, widgets, blogs, and built-in-camera features … could [make] the iPhone the next one-to-one platform for learning.”

Jeff VanDrimmelen, an academic computing expert at the University of North Carolina and author of the EduTechie blog, says the iPhone’s multi-touch display, widgets, and easily browsable internet service could be the three features that make it compatible with education. “Imagine harnessing the power of a multi-touch display in a test, allowing students to more naturally interact and manipulate the test and then send it back to you over the air, anywhere,” he writes.

Indeed, Jeff. We’re imagining…