Jennifer Demski of Campus Technology posted a great article today about the use of mobile technologies to not only enhance communications on campus, but to also provide access to increased administrative information. The article profiles the usage of mobile technology at three institutions: Tompkins Cortland Community College (TC3), Illinois State University and Dartmouth College.

Demski’s first profile discusses TC3’s work with SunGard Higher Education’s web applications to create myMobile, an initiative that allows faculty and staff to send e-mails over the school’s existing SMTP server, which are then received by standard cell phones as text messages. The exciting thing about this initiative is that it is designed to adapt the school’s existing web services for a mobile interface, enabling instant access to vital information over a cell phone or PDA. Students can check their grades, class schedules, and campus news, all with real-time updates. The mobile portal also allows faculty to view class lists, e-mail students, and check their schedules right on their phones.

The article goes on to profile Illinois State Univesity’s adoption of Agilon’s Mobile Access for Development Officers. ISU’s executive director of development information and donor services, Jill Jones, initiated this adoption because she wanted to make sure that her traveling development officers had the most up-to-date donor information when they stepped into a meeting with a potential benefactor. Consequently, development officers at Illinois State can use their smart phones to update prospect proposals on potential donors, examine demographic details of donors and alumni, review a donor’s giving history, and more, all in real time.

Finally Demski discusses Dartmouth College (NH) partnership with Agito Networks to install a campuswide mobile network that allows dual-mode phones to switch seamlessly between cellular signals, campus WiFi signals, and 3G/4G technology, depending on the location of the user. Via “fixed-to-mobile convergence,” Agito’s RoamAnywhere Mobility Router (in conjunction with a little piece of Agito software downloaded directly to the phone) monitors the location of an active cellular device and adjusts its signal accordingly, without any disruption to the call.

Be sure to check out Demski’s full article at Campus Technology.

Merriam-Webster recently joined forces with ParagonSoftware Group, a leading software developer and content provider for mobile devices and desktop PCs, to bring the eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary to iPhone users. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary for iPhone is now available at the App Store. The program is supported by iPhones with firmware 2.0, iPhone 3G and iPod touch with firmware 2.0.

The dictionary’s database contains 225,000 entries, including more than 10,000 new words and definitions, which can be accessed anywhere, any time, without Internet connection or additional charges. The new app features an easy-to-use, single-click application for instant access to all words and definitions. The SlovoEd engine compresses the database to a minimum of memory space while allowing users to quickly perform multiple lookups.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition for iPhone has a suggested retail price of $24.99 USD and may be ordered at http://www.merriam-webster.com/store/iphone/collegiate/.

Find more information at PRNewwire.

TUAW posted an interesting update today about Stanford University’s fall iPhone programming course. The course is obviously in full swing, with a reported 80 students signed up. Stanford has also started a project that is beginning to bear fruit in the form of iPhone and iPod touch apps—the Stanford iApps Project.

TUAW reports that five student-developed apps are now being tested as part of the Stanford iApps Project. Two of the apps are targeted at Stanford students and provide management of course registration and bills, while the other three apps are aimed at a much larger audience including the general public and alumni.

These other apps give access to a searchable Stanford University map (see screenshot), schedules and scores for the University’s sports teams, and listings in the StanfordWho online directory.

While future iApps may be the result of the iPhone development course, these apps were developed by TerriblyClever Design. a startup created by Kayvon Beykpour, a Stanford computer science undergrad. Once the Stanford apps are out of beta testing, they’ll be available in the App Store.

For more, check out the full article at TUAW.

We were awfully pleased to hear about Apple’s new Developer University Program for the iPhone and iPod touch. Targeted at university developers interested in creating native apps for Apple’s devices, the program is open to colleges and universities in the US only at this time.

To apply for membership (yep, you gotta apply),  you’ll need an Apple ID (either an existing iPhone developer ID, an ADC ID, or even your iTunes ID) and you’ll need to be able to link your request to a specific course. Applications developed under the program can be distributed either at Apple’s app store or on-site at the university via Apple’s “ad hoc” distribution model. Of course, the program also “allows students within the same development team to share their applications with each other through email, or by posting them to a private website for presentation and grading purposes,” which should make teachers’ and students’ lives a bit easier.

We’re looking forward to seeing a whole new crop of educational applications show up in the apps store, and we hope they’ll get beyond the unquestionably handy but fairly tame collection of memory and language apps that currently make up the majority of educational apps…. A cool interactive chemistry app that triggers the “vibrate” function for haptic feedback to denote an explosion if you mix the wrong chemicals? A grammar app that uses the accelerometer to let students shake to diagram a sentence? Man, oh man… The options are endless!

This week Thumbplay, an online platform of mobile entertainment content, expanded their services to allow users to download reference materials and study aids like CliffsNotes and American Heritage Dictionaries and titles from Scientific American Magazine and the Sierra Club from their cell phones.

The new titles span a wide variety of classes and disciplines including:

• Language and grammar aids: 100 Words Almost Everyone Confuses & Misuses, 100 Words Every High School Freshman Should Know, 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know, 100 Words To Make You Sound Smart
• Literature: CliffsNotes for classic works, including Beowulf,The Canterbury Tales, Great Expectations and Julius Caesar
• History: Great American History Fact Finder
• Science: Scientific American: Ask The Experts, Scientific, American: Geography, Scientific American: The Human Body, 100 Words Science Words Every College Graduate Should Know
• Mathematics: Scientific American: Mathematical Games

“With nearly 85 percent of the U.S. population using cell phones, we’re seeing an increasing demand for ever more engaging and useful content,” said Are Traasdahl, Thumbplay’s CEO and founder. “We’re thrilled to add these applications to our ever-expanding content library.”

As you likely already know, The New York Times recently published an article entitled “Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod,” which provides an overview of the debate sparked by Abilene Christian University and three other universities planning to distribute iPhones to some or all of their students this fall. The article gives voice to both the advocates and skeptics of the mobile learning strategy.

While plans to distribute the devices worry some professors, who suggest students are less likely to participate in classes if they are multitasking, many schools emphasize both the iPhone’s educational usefulness and the inevitability of the movement toward the use of mobile technology in education.

If you’re interested in the conversation (which is highly likely if you’re on this page), this article is worth checking out.

Today, TUAW posted an excellent list of research tools specifically for Mac users as part of their Back to School series, which provides tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers. Their extensive list of desktop tools that provide fast and intuitive means of navigating and collecting information begins with Pathway.

• Pathway creates “webs” of pages, allowing you to map your trail through the wiki’s articles. You start with a search, and the search result creates the center node of the map. Satellite links are created from the table of contents for the page, and following any of them creates a new node, linked to the originating page and with its own satellite links.

• The next tool introduced is Selenium, which combines a browser, a PDF manager (with annotation capabilities), an outliner, a Cocoa rich text editor, and bibliography manager.

• The final research tool presented by TUAW is DEVONagent. This tool is a “whiz” at scouring general and specialized online sources, providing intelligent summaries with multiple methods of viewing and navigation. You can see ranked keywords from the search results and a map, which shows how they relate.

Be sure to visit TUAW’s full article, which goes on to discuss tool for citing sources in a bibliography and in-text.

As it prepares to launch the first-ever academic deployment of iPhones and iPod touches in higher-education, Abilene Christian University has developed a new integrated resource for students and faculty unlike those we’ve seen previously. Like several other universities, ACU is rolling out a new mobile version of its student web portal that gives students easy access to news, campus and community events, maps of campus, and touch-access to teacher and departmental information. But ACU’s almost 1,000 incoming freshmen will find a lot more when they hit campus in a couple of weeks.

The new ACU mobile serves as the front-end for a whole new range of academic and social tools: mobile access to account information, live access to files, integration of Google apps for education, and access to socially-aware information about what’s cool to do around town.

Most impressive of all, though, is the suite of classroom applications for the iPhone’s and iPod touch’s academic context–applications from in-house and off-site developers that show the potential of this new mobile-learning platform. Students will have automated access to class sites; on-the-fly availability of podcasts, files and media for immediate classroom use (without hooking back up to a computer); and automatic access to class events and assignments, all pulled dynamically from online class calendars. And the new portal automatically preconfigures and organizes all of the information for each student based on standard student management software. Access to a suite of easy-to-configure polling and quizzing tools and easy-to-use apps for presenting and organizing class content round out the mix, giving teachers and students lots of options for in-class and out-of-class use.

To launch this mobile-learning initiative, ACU will be officially unveiling everything at a celebration this coming weekend. ACU will be bringing together executives from Apple, AT&T, Alcatel-Lucent, along with a number of other important developers –including eMantras, Turning Technologies, Dipity, and Webfirecracker.com as the first students get their devices and learn their way around how these devices will transform education. As a demonstration campus for the pervasive use of iPhones and iPod touches in higher ed, ACU is clearly aware of the importance of this launch and is working with representatives of these companies to get things started on the right foot. Given what’s already in place, what’s under development, and what ACU’s teams of faculty researchers are investigating, the next year should give higher ed a lot to watch.

Yesterday, our friends at Open Culture posted a fascinating and accessible video by Michael Wesch dealing with the intricacies of Web. 2.0. Michael Wesch, a professor of cultural anthropology, has become something of an internet phenomenon, having produced two wonderful videos that help demystify the world of Web 2.0.Wesch has a new video getting some play.

Below you can watch a talk he recently gave at The Library of Congress, where he uses video to dissect the new mediascape that we’re living in, and how it’s changing our relationships … for better or for worse.

Be sure to check out Wesch’s other videos, “The Machine is Us/ing Us” and “Information R/evolution.”

Today, T.H.E Journal posted a great article describing a recent educational technology initiative in Saugus Union School District in Santa Clarita, CA. The district is launching a new writing program for its fourth-grade students that couples writing and science using ultra-mobile devices and collaborative learning software, among other technologies. According to T.H.E Journal, the initiative is being funded through a $1.4 million EETT competitive grant the district recently won.

The initiative, dubbed “Student Writing Achievement Through Technology Enhanced Collaboration” (SWATTEC), focuses on writing achievement within the science curriculum. T.H.E Journal reports that EETT funding will provide access to Asus wireless ultra-mobile devices (UMDs) for all 1,700 fourth-grade students in the district, Web-based writing tools, and an online collaborative learning environment. It will also provide teachers with laptops, projectors, printers, interactive pads, mobile carts, and wireless hardware. Teachers are also receiving professional development for the initiative.

Although there is a 1:1 component built into the SWATTEC initiative, Jim Klein, director of Information Services & Technology for Saugus USD, told T.H.E Journal that the emphasis is not just on throwing technology at the students, but on using these tools as a means to an end.

Klein asserts, “While the project might look like a vanilla 1:1 project, 1:1 is not our primary goal. The center of the project is writing and collaboration using social media technologies; the devices are just tools that will get us there. Ultimately we want the technology part of it to be completely transparent–to be at once invisible and indispensable.”

For more be sure to read the full article from T.H.E. Journal.