Last week IBM and Google announced a joint “academic cluster computing initiative” to provide data centers for the promotion of computer programming techniques for clusters of processors known as “clouds.” The centers will grant access and processing power to large numbers of students and programmers for writing software code involving massive amounts of data over the Internet, a practice known as “cloud computing.”

Cloud computing allows computers in remote data centers to run parallel, increasing their processing power. The cloud can run many software applications and can be accessed by many users, improving efficiency for common tasks and making it easier to complete difficult tasks that require extreme amounts of processing power. The program will allow companies and universities to share resources, preventing them from having to expand their own costly data centers. However, the concept does generate some daunting questions about security, reliability and ease of use.

The program, which is already under way at the University of Washington, will also be rolled out at Carnegie-Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland. IBM and Google will provide hardware, software and services.

Three different university curricula on topics related to cluster computing are offered by the University of Washington in conjunction with Google. Google is also offering a series of free video lectures on cluster computing. IBM will provide Hadoop, an open-source software platform for developing clusters, as well as a collaboration Web site for universities and students via the IBM Innovation Factory.

For more details check out extensive cloud computing articles at c|net News or the Wall Street Journal Online.

Seeking to capitalize on new and emerging marketing opportunities for ebooks, Lulu.com, a digital content platform on the Internet, recently introduced an ebook optimization service that allows users to format their works for viewing on Apple’s iPhone and the Sony Reader.

This service enables individual content publishers participating in the Lulu online
marketplace to format existing PDF files for viewing on an iPhone or Sony Reader. Previously available to large publishers exclusively, Lulu’s service now gives independent publishers the opportunity to target the rapidly growing market of ebook readers by providing downloadable content for handheld devices. The service is available for $25 per project, and the publisher can set the price and advertise the work as he/she sees fit.

Lulu’s ebook optimization service grants me a vision of the glorious future when I will be a able to conveniently subject students (for a nominal fee) to the invaluable insights of my previously unpublished dissertation.

Check out PRNewswire’s complete article.

Having recently decried the fact that Apple hasn’t yet made an iPhone-formatted version of its Web Apps Index, we began to realize the hubris of our position since we hadn’t done that either… But now, thanks to our web guru, we can tsk-tsk Apple with the best of ‘em.

Just this evening, we went live with the iWPhone plugin for WordPress from the good folks over at Content Robot, and we’re pretty happy with the results. The plugin installs easily in your plugin directory and automatically reformats your WordPress blog pages to fit on the iPhone’s and iPod Touch’s screens with no muss or fuss. Visitors don’t even have to enter a special mobile version of your site’s address — the plugin simply and automatically detects whether they’re using an iPhone or not and voilà serves them the reformatted page(s) if they are.

And while we might debate about whether or not it’s a good idea to format pages specifically for the iPhone platform (after all, isn’t the whole point of it, as Steve himself said, not to have the “the baby internet, or the mobile internet — people want the REAL internet on their phone”?), we also know first-hand that it’s nice to be able to read a page’s text and see everything without having to pinch and zoom first-thing after it loads. We’re also pleased with the accelerated load times we’ve experienced on our iPhones after installing this plugin and see this as a pretty painless way to serve our iPhone-toting readers.

Obviously, a WordPress plugin may be of limited use in many educational contexts — we imagine a BlackBoard plugin would really kick off the revolution — but iWPhone is a handy start for those of you running class blogs or other independent sites, and we thought it would be polite to share…

Let us know if you’ve got any other nifty iPhone plugins or formatters that the iPhone-education community ought to know about and we’ll be glad to spread the word.

It seems like one of the most time-consuming things we do, ironically, involves finding time to do the stuff we need to do — and that gets made even worse every time we have to work with somebody else. Trying to arrange meeting times among the harried schedules of a group of our colleagues can sometimes be worse than that little bug we picked up from eating raw shellfish at the mini-mart in Merkel…

However, a colleague recently introduced us to a very handy little site that promises to make scheduling group meetings (as well as performing group-input surveys) a joyful pleasure. Doodle offers to streamline the scheduling process by providing participants with an easy-to-use, online web app for indicating when they’re available. One person can set up the basic parameters, and then everyone else can easily indicate which times work, and the software helps tag available times with a nifty color interface.

So the next time you’re trying to schedule your iPhone research team’s Halo 3 tournament regular weekly meeting, you might want to give Doodle a try. We certainly will….

While this isn’t exactly an education-related story about the iPhone, we know that a lot of our readers spend a fair amount of their time administering systems — servers, network storage, clusters, secret nefarious research labs… So we were excited to see the news about new startup Inco and its forthcoming system-administration application.

Started by Virginia Tech sysadmin Josh Eckstein following a weekend vacation “he couldn’t refuse” (which is way better than other incarnations of that line), Inco seeks to make all of your common administrative chores available straight from your iPhone, including the ability to access (and control access to) server files, use SSH to talk to and control server actions and monitor and kill processes. While Josh and his pals are “still polishing Inco up to be shiniest, easiest-to-use mobile administration tool on the block” (meaning it ain’t released yet), it ought to be available soon for a reported price of $39, which shouldn’t break anybody’s bank.

Our friends over at TUAW have a nice interview with Josh that’s worth checking out, and we’ll look forward to hearing about anybody’s experience with this (or other) remote administraton applications for our favorite little converged mobile media device…

It’s not outside the realm of possibility that we’ve spent waayyyy more time on the new Web Apps Index than is really healthy, but how much sleep does a person really need?

One of the great things about bringing together all of this iPhone- and iPod Touch-specific software is the inspirational function of a site like this — seeing how everyone has creatively responded to these new platforms and their parameters. The software that’s being designed right now will not only help us to be more productive, but will also help to establish some of the basic features and functions that users will grow to expect as this platform develops and solidifies.

We were blown away, for example, by the nifty interface on Ultralingua’s dictionary app (Ars Technica also mentions this briefly in their story about the introduction of the Web Apps Index). The brilliance of Ultralingua’s popup-list interface is not only handy in the context of their program (and we see interesting and ready-made educational applications for software like this), but also suggests possibilities for other applications: an attendance program that lets teachers click on a student’s picture to record various kinds of absences, a survey or “clicker” tool that lets students choose various options in a “multiple-choice” format, an interactive timeline application that lets people see the contexts — cultural, historical, political and economic — that surround a particular date or event. Or take Tap & Go’s ability to combine maps and comments to make an interactive writing experience for an archeological site or a museum, or use an interface like iActu’s as a front end for interacting with e-portfolios… You get the idea.

So while the Web Apps Index doesn’t currently have an “education” channel for iPhone software, we see the site itself as inherently educational — and we think that’s a very good thing, indeed.

The third annual Handheld Learning Conference in London is currently underway, and Mark van’t Hooft of Ubiquitous Thoughts has the scoop on the first day’s sessions. Van’t Hooft covers pre-conference sessions, the opening session and more, summarizing and reflecting on a number of speeches, including those given by Jim Knight, UK Minister of State for Schools and Learning, Stephen Crowne from BECTA, Tarek Shawki from UNESCO, and Francesc Pedro from OECD’s CERI.

Van’t Hooft provides the essential content of each session and offers his own very insightful impressions, giving us a chance to vicariously experience this signature event for “always-on” learning.

Wow, that was fast! Tonight, Apple released the official iPhone and iPod Touch Web Apps Index featuring all kinds of yummy Web 2.0 applications (more than 200!) for your favorite converged media device. Categories include: Calculate, Entertainment, Games, News, Productivity, Search Tools, Social Networking, Sports, Travel, Utilities and Weather. And yeah, that means they didn’t take the advice from our post yesterday and include an Education category, but hey, it’s okay… really… we’re fine with that. Why Steve?!! Oh, why?! We thought you cared! We don’t need some kind of official affirmation to know what a handy site we run. Plus, we figure that new categories will pop up as apps show up to populate them anyway, so our vision of the world is inevitable. And that’s a comfort. So let’s get fired up and get programming, education web gurus! We’ll show them!

Along with the app index, Apple has also posted a nifty feedback page for anyone who wants to comment on the apps they’ve downloaded, and for developers, they’ve put up a handy guide for submitting web apps (though you have to have an AppleConnect account to get in).

Though it’s unfortunate (and maybe a little surprising) that the Web App Index isn’t optimized for viewing on the iPhone (unlike MockDock and Leaflets), we see the release of the index as a really positive development, offering a ready-made audience and distribution channel for the best iPhone web software developed. And we’re glad to see this sort of application infrastructure coming from Apple since it means that our favorite devices will be even more accessible and will offer richer, more specialized software for students and faculty.

Now… On to downloading Bejeweled and Missile Command so I can, uh, research that academic paper I’m working on… Yeah, that’s the ticket!

Mac and Palm software company ecamm has recently released iPhoneDrive, an application that transforms your iPhone or iPod Touch into an external storage device. Now people can access the capacious sufficient tiny leftover space on their iPhone’s memory to store files that don’t currently work with the iPhone’s current software. So while it certainly makes sense to use audio and video files, for example, from within the iPhone’s own iTunes framework — perhaps using Apple’s handy video-out cables to show them to your class (see story), you might also want to bring those documents for editing or those backup files with you by treating your iPhone or Touch as a handy flash drive.

While the software doesn’t allow the iPhone to access the files it’s carrying as iPhoneDrive data, the application does offer some nifty advantages, and we could see it making teacher’s lives a little bit easier as they shlep their files from class to class. A free demo version is available here.

In a recent Times article, Winnie Hu explores the widespread educational application of iPods. While highly publicized higher education initiatives have made most of us well aware of the device’s potential for teaching and learning in the academy, the implementation of the iPod is becoming quite pervasive in a variety of primary and secondary educational contexts as well.

Hu reports that a number of schools in New Jersey have been handing out the portable digital player to help bilingual students with limited English ability sharpen their vocabulary and grammar. For example, next month the Union City district will give out 300 iPods at its schools as part of a $130,000 experiment in one of New Jersey’s poorest urban school systems.

In a relatively short amount of time, the iPod has firmly established itself as an invaluable tool for teaching and learning in and outside the classroom. How long it will take the iPhone, which holds even greater educational potentiality, to follow suit?