It’s possible that we spend a couple of minutes a week thinking about ways to use the iPhone and iPod Touch in higher education, and we were thus pretty excited recently when we learned about MyArtSpace. This software solution and service allows museums and other cultural sites to catalogue materials so that students can interact with them and gather information using mobile phones. Working in association with the SEA and other online organizations, MyArtSpace is featured in several UK museums.

While MyArtSpace provides easy-to-use solutions for member institutions, we’ve been thinking about the ways the iPhone (and to a lesser extent, the iPod Touch) might streamline off-campus and field research — without the need to set things up in advance. With its camera, text-input and access to the web (even when WiFi isn’t available), the iPhone allows students to record a wide variety of responses to the sites and items they’re discovering — and that makes for some provocative educational opportunities.

Imagine, for example, students in a sociology class recording images from a neighborhood they visit, pulling up demographic information from the web, and entering notes (and hopefully someday voice annotations), all of which can be mounted to a class website or used as the building blocks of a podcast or presentation. And if Apple gets its act together and makes access to iTunes U and podcasts possible through the WiFi Music Store, well, that’d be the cherry on top, letting teachers prepare advanced materials for use in the field and giving students a chance to tap into broad resources.