Yesterday, Christopher Gibbs, a programmer at Abilene Christian University, posted a great follow-up to ACU’s big iPhone announcement on Monday. He asserts that being the first school in the nation to launch a converged mobile educational strategy of this magnitude has obviously put quite a bit of pressure on ACU developers to deliver the applications necessary to maximize the potential of the devices for effective teaching and learning. He goes on to remind us that there are a number of challenges when it comes to creating applications for the iPhone and suggests that the biggest is usability. He writes, “Some people say content is king, well I say usability is king. This is true with any program or website but especially true on the iPhone, where you have a very limited interface.”

Gibbs invites his readers to check out ACU’s concerted development efforts at acu.mobi (best viewed in Safari as it’s designed for the iPhone), but warns that it is still considered a development site and not production ready. There is a protected section (requires and ACU login id) which allows ACU’s developers to display data customized for the user viewing the site and a demo of what you might see if you were logged in.

Gibbs says that a lot of the content on acu.mobi is comprised of links to external apps (like Google Docs, Facebook, etc.) that are customized for the iPhone, but there are also a few that ACU has developed specifically for the university environment. For example, Gibbs has created an application that allows professors to take attendance in class from their iPhone. You can see it in the demo section of acu.mobi under My Classes (professor) -> Roster. It allows the professor to easily select which students are Present, Tardy, Absent, or Excused as well as automatically send an email to those students notifying them of their status.

To see more university-specific applications being developed by ACU for the iPhone and iTouch, be sure to check out acu.mobi.

Today, Abilene Christian University announced their plan to provide all incoming freshmen for the fall ‘08 semester with Apple iPhones or iTouches. This development makes ACU the first university in the nation to provide these converged mobile devices to its incoming class.

ACU’s executive vice president, Phil Schubert, asserts that these devices will be central to the university’s innovative strategy this fall. “We enjoy great relationships with many technological leaders such as Apple, AT&T and Amdocs,” Schubert said. “These relationships help us as we continue to be a university on the leading edge of technology, a central component of our 21st Century Vision.”

According to ACU’s chief information officer, Kevin Roberts, incoming freshmen will use their iPhones or iTouches to receive homework assignments and updates, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, navigate through campus, check account balances, and more. In fact, Roberts states that ACU has already developed a score of web applications to utilize the unique capacity of these tools for teaching, learning and community building

“We are not merely providing cutting-edge technology tools to our incoming students,” said Roberts. “We are also providing the web applications that ensure these tools will become critical to the students’ learning experience. Because 93 percent of ACU students bring their own computers with them to college, we are choosing to take them to the next level by providing converged mobile devices.” Dr. Dwayne VanRheenen, ACU provost, said, “This is exciting to me, not only because we’re giving students new tools, but because we are transforming the learning environment. The extensive research that’s been done on campus in the past 10 months has prepared us to launch with freshmen this fall, and research will be ongoing as we expand the program in the future.”

As we’ve reported in the past, you can check out ACU’s vision for mobile learning at www.acu.edu/connected. This site contains the film “Connected,” a projection of the iPhone’s daily usage on campus, along with a host of other mLearning efforts and resources.

Yesterday, PocketMac announced a new application that promises to ease the pain of making your Lotus Notes contacts and schedule mobile. With PocketMac GoBetween for Lotus Notes (nice and concise), the company has introduced an automated way to transfer information from your Notes to your phone.

According to ars technica, the process is fairly simple: GoBetween syncs contacts to your Address Book and schedule data with iCal. Then you can use iSync to sync iCal and Address Book with any paired phone or PDA, including the iPhone. While it’s a two-step process, it allows instant compatibility with anything that Apple, or a third party, supports via Sync Services. The process also works in reverse: if you add something on your portable device, it will get synced back to Lotus Notes.

The software works with Tiger or Leopard and Lotus Notes 7 or higher. A single license costs $24.95; of course, site licenses are also available.

The 2007-08 Digital Media and Learning Competition, administered by HASTAC and supported by the MacArthur Foundation, has just announced this year’s award-winning projects. From a field of over 1,000 applications, seven projects won Innovation awards, while ten projects received awards in the Knowledge-Networking category.

Innovation award winners include: Black Cloud, an Environmental Studies collaborative role-playing game; HyperCities, a web-based learning platform that connects geographical locations with stories of the people who live there; Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies (MILLEE), a project that promotes literacy through language-learning games on mobile phones; Mobile Musical Networks, explores new ways of making music with laptops and local-area-networks; Sustainable South Bronx Fab Lab, a laboratory that allows people to turn digital models into real world constructions; Virtual Conflict Resolution, a digital humanitarian assistance game that creates a learning environment for young people studying public policy and international relations; YouthActionNet Marketplace, a digital networking platform for young leaders to engage in social entrepreneurship and address critical social problems.

The Knowledge-Networking award winners are: Always with You, a social network that connects young African social entrepreneurs with young North American professionals. Critical Commons, a blogging, social networking and tagging platform designed to promote the “fair use” of copyrighted material; FollowTheMoney, an online interactive site that supports civics research of young people; Fractor, a web application that matches news stories with opportunities for social activism and community service; Let the Games Begin, a tutorial on the fundamentals of social issue games; Networking Grassroots Knowledge Globally, an “information commons” that will help share innovative practices for helping marginalized and vulnerable children; Ohmwork: Networking Homebrew Science, a social network and podcast site where students can share their do-it-yourself science projects; Self-Advocacy Online, an educational and networking website for teens and adults with intellectual and cognitive disabilities; Social Media Virtual Classroom, an online community for teachers and students to collaborate and contribute ideas about issues related to participatory media; The Virtual World Educators Network, an online hub to promote the use of virtual worlds as rich learning environments.

Of course, our descriptions of these fascinating projects are very brief here, so be sure to check out Digital Media and Learning’s complete announcement for detailed descriptions of each project.

The former iPhoneDrive Mac OS X utility has recently been renamed “MegaPhone” and now includes the ability to send text files, PDFs, and Word files to your iPhone/iPod touch’s Notes application for reading and editing directly on the device. Of course, this is a very significant development for those of us interested in implementing the device on college campuses as an educational and social tool.

In a recent post our friends at iPhone Atalas explain that the iPhoneDrive was initially created for storing files on the iPhone as if it were a removable drive, much like the iPod’s disk mode function. Subsequent releases added the ability to copy files that are stored as music, photos and video on the iPhone (synced from iTunes) back to a desktop Mac; play music stored on the iPhone or iPod touch; and access (and copy) call logs, SMS messages, and photos from the camera. Needless to say, adding the ability to send text files, PDFs and Word files to Notes for reading and editing on the go makes MegaPhone very useful in the context of higher education.

A 7-day trial version of the $20 application is available at Ecamm Network.

Abilene Christian University has sent out an official news release announcing recent mLearning research and development. Here is the release from Lynne Bruton, director of ACU’s public relations:

As part of its campus-wide evaluation and discussion, ACU recently premiered “Connected,” a short film that shows a compelling and futuristic vision of how mobile learning (mLearning) could transform higher education.

This visionary film follows a freshman through her first two days on a college campus where converged mobile devices, such as the iPhone, are leveraged to build student community, augment educational rigor and innovation and simplify day-to-day tasks, a dream ACU is already working to fulfill.

The film, written and produced entirely by ACU faculty, staff and students, and featuring ACU students and faculty as actors, imagines a number of novel and prospective uses for the new generation of highly mobile, converged computing devices that have recently become popular. Although many of the applications portrayed in the film are fictional, they are based on ideas being developed by ACU’s nine faculty and staff research teams on the use of converged media devices to enrich higher education. Many of the web applications have already been developed by ACU researchers, including the myACU Mobile portal and early forms of the classroom-management and assignment-distribution applications.

“The intent of ACU’s research into mLearning is focused on evaluating whether using converged media devices in the classroom is ultimately beneficial to students and faculty,” said Kevin Roberts, ACU’s Chief Information Officer. “Our goal is to support student learning and faculty teaching in ways that help students learn more effectively and become more successful. We think our movie, ‘Connected,’ is an important visualization of where we’re heading. Adding a student research team to the more than 50 faculty and staff already engaged in these explorations is the next step in this ongoing work.”

The ACU iPhone Executive Research Team has also recently announced a new website, www.acu.edu/connected, which features the film “Connected” and the vision ACU is developing for the future of higher education, as well as additional information about mLearning and the steps ACU is taking toward becoming a technological leader in higher education.

Our good friend and colleague James Langford recently posted a great article on his Pointy Hair Boss Tech Guide about Google Forms and their display on the iPhone. Here is the post in its entirety:

Google has just released what I think is one of their best product enhancements ever. Read about it on the Google docs blog post: Stop sharing spreadsheets, start collecting information

What makes this so cool is that they’ve given the person of average technical competence — i.e., the pointy hair boss– the ability to create a form with multiple types of inputs, gather the information, chart it, share it, and discuss it. And, the forms display pretty well on the iPhone.

Pretty well is okay, but you can easily make them fit right into the iPhone interface. If you’ve read previous posts about building iPhone web apps, you can apply the same techniques as we have before. Just add a bit of html at the start of the document and a bit at the end and stick the form in an iframe in the middle. We have written a little tool to get you started. Create your form, get the link for it, and enter it here: http://acu.mobi/ig

This will spit out the file in an iPhone-style interface. View source and save it as a document on your web and you’re set. In theory, you could point directly to the url on our server, but this is an experiment and I can’t guarantee it will be available, so please put all code on your own server.

By the way, you can do this same formatting trick with some Google gadgets and Google calendars since Google gives you a way to format the html output. Both are put in iframes. When you configure gadgets or calendars, just set the width to 320 pixels and a minimum of about 420 pixels length. Grab the url and stick it in this tool: http://acu.mobi/igadgets

Please use the same caution as above. Use the tool to grab the html wrapper and then host it on your own server.

Possible uses and caveats for Google Apps users

At this point, only public google.com accounts can publish a form for use by anyone. Forms published from inside Google Apps domains will require a login, so only users of that domain can fill out the form. And at the point, since we can’t use the extra formatting for the iPhone, users will have to tap or spread to enlarge the display. However, this is an easy-to-use online test, survey and clicker tool.

I suspect that Google will at some point give us the ability to share forms outside the domain, format for iPhone and display graphs of the collected input. In the meantime, I’m thankful for what we’ve got.

Today our friends at iPhone Matters posted a handy little article that provides some nice tips and great resources for reading eBooks on your iPhone or iPod touch. Because the existing iPhone apps present some significant inconveniences for reading eBooks and other PDF files, iPhone Matters has highlighted several online services that allow users to upload their eBooks for easier reading on the iPhone.

iPhone Matters especially recommends Readdle, which provides 50mb of online storage space in which to store your eBooks in a variety of formats; including Plucker, the standard mobile eBook reader format for Project Gutenberg, which houses over 20,000 free eBooks.

In addition, ReadWriteWeb has compiled a list of some of the top eBook readers; including, Free iPhone eBooks—which houses a limited selection of classics—and Scrollbox, which has a large public library and allows users to upload their own content.

The OEDb (Online Educational Database) recently posted an incredibly extensive list of the top 100 sites dedicated to educational uses of the iPod. OEDb lists what they perceive to be the best sites for transforming your iPod into a learning device, categorizing the sites into downloadable study guides, podcasts and audio books, tutorials, applications, classroom help, iPod learning support, tools and sites, iTunes U, and more. This is a “must-bookmark” resource for anyone looking to take advantage of the educational benefits that the iPod affords.

Today, our friends at Open Culture are featuring an interesting report concerning a motion recently passed by Harvard University, requiring its faculty members to publish their scholarly articles online. This motion will not only provide momentum to the open access movement, but will also alleviate quite a bit of pressure on Harvard’s library budget.

Robert Darnton, an eminent historian who now oversees Harvard’s libraries, has published an article entitled “The Case for Open Access” in which he underscores the manner in which digital publishing can relieve some important financial pressures on the academy. Citing Darnton, OC reports that “in order to purchase [costly scholarly] journals, libraries have had to reduce their acquisitions of monographs; the reduced demand among libraries for monographs has forced university presses to cut back on the publication of them; and the near impossibility of publishing their dissertations has jeopardized the careers of a whole generation of scholars in many fields.” OC asserts that digital publishing solves this spiraling problem in a straightforward way. The cost of publishing directly to the web is negligible. “There’s no pulp to buy, no publisher’s overhead to pay; no corporation […] looking to pad its profits and get thanked by Wall Street. The cost savings are everywhere.”

Of course the traditional publishers will be quick suggest that this development will undermine the peer-review system that ensures the overall integrity of research. However, OC asserts that there’s no reason digital publishing and peer review can’t coexist. In fact, digital publishing makes possible new Web 2.0 forms of peer review that haven’t existed until now.

For more information, be sure to check out Open Culture’s full article. And for more on the Open Educational Resources movement, check out the Hewlett Foundation’s new site devoted to the aggregation of OER resources.