You may have noticed that things have been a bit sparse around here lately…

Well, we can explain that. Most of us here at iThinkEd work at universities, and it’s been pretty hectic — followed by a few happy weeks off.

So in the meantime, while we recharge our batteries (and those of our iPhones), we’d like to wish all of you a happy holiday season. We’ll look forward to seeing you in the new year – with lots of nifty stories (our room, flight, and tickets are already booked for MacWorld!) and some nifty new features we’ll be rolling out in the coming months.

In the meantime, we’re hoping for peace — and a better life for those who are suffering.

Happy holidays from all of us at iThinkEd. 

MIR3 recently announced the availability of the first enterprise notification and command interface for the iPhone and iPod touch mobile communications platform. MIR3’s full-featured Web-based management applications run under Apple’s mobile Safari browser to enable IT administrators or corporate executives to initiate emergency notifications and remotely manage enterprise notification systems and response teams using Apple iPhone or iTouch mobile devices.

MIR3’s iPhone interface also functions as an automated mobile command dashboard that allows executives or administrators to instantly notify and initiate live voice conferences among the appropriate response-team members, and access MIR3’s real-time reporting features to track notifications and responses on their iPhone. Amir Moussavian, CEO of MIR3, suggests that “Mobile devices may be the only functional option for decision makers during an emergency, and we believe that the iPhone, with its game-changing communication capabilities, will be a preferred crisis management and emergency communications tool for many of them.”

MIR3’s interface might be a very compelling option for university administrators seeking to implement effective emergency notification systems on campus. For more information, check out the full marketwire article.

The other shoe finally dropped this afternoon: after months of rumor and secrecy, the good folks over at Google announced that they and a consortium of handset makers and tech companies (Apple is conspicuously absent) are releasing a new mobile handset OS called “Android.” The new mobile OS, which you’ve probably been hearing about as the “Gphone” for the past couple of months (unless you’ve been living under a stone), is Linux- and Java-based, and will feature an open SDK that’s set to be premiered on November 12… Hey, that’s next week!

One of the key features of the OS will be its agnostic treatment of core and 3rd-party apps: for Android, all apps are equal. What does that mean for the educational community? One clear implication is that the iPhone will see competition both in its deployment as an academic tool and in the development of learning- and university-based applications. And frankly, competition is almost never a bad idea when it comes to finding the best solutions.

Of course, the release of Android doesn’t quite tell the whole story… While the SDK will be available shortly, handsets based on the new OS aren’t planned for release until early 2008 — right around the time that Apple’s SDK is supposed to make its entrance. So your current choices are an SDK without a phone or a phone without an SDK. Hmmmm… We think, by the way, that the real loser here won’t be the iPhone, but Windows Mobile (which is looking increasingly like a, well, you know…) — though only time will tell.

Either way, it’s time to get serious about the ways that ubiquitous converged mobile media devices are going to transform our classrooms. And that’s something that looks to be not years off, but maybe just a few months. So friends, it’s time to put on those thinking caps and get busy! Yowzah!

According to the online version of WSU’s Guardian independent student newspaper, the school is in the final stages of opening up a dedicated facility for creating podcasts.

Housed in WSU’s Dunbar Library and available to students and faculty, the podcasting facility is designed to give access to the equipment and software necessary to produce podcasts for a variety of academic and social purposes according to Sue Polanka, head of references and instruction. According to the October 31 story, the facility is also designed to make podcast production easier and more familiar. “By having our own separate room dedicated just to podcasting, we are able to give the students a nice place to come and try out the new software,” says Polanka. ”We wanted to bring what’s up-to-date, fun and common for today’s students to the library here at Wright State.”

As podcasting plays an increasingly large role in education — especially following the ease of access introduced by Apple’s iTunes U — we expect to see more colleges and universities follow in WSU’s footsteps, developing centralized facilities to encourage production and adoption of this technology. Other schools are pursuing more distributed models, offering checkout or access to equipment like BlueMic’s Snowball microphone that can be easily transported (even into field settings) and connected to a laptop to produce podcasts.

Either way, as more faculty and students discover the benefits of podcasting, we expect universities increasingly to support the creation and distribution of this and other new media.

This year’s annual Campus Computing Project survey was released last week at the Educause conference in Seattle. The survey polled officials at 555 colleges and universities on their technology use via an online questionnaire. The report provides some interesting information concerning security issues, the expansion of wireless access in the classroom, the adoption of open-source applications (apparently more attractive in theory than in practice), and the prevention of illegal file downloading.

The survey reveals, of course, that 2007 has been a milestone year for converged mobile devices. PDAs are becoming more popular, and the iPhone has colleges wondering how to handle the potential increase in Internet traffic caused by dozens of handheld WiFi devices surfing the Web and downloading music during class. To date, campus IT officials have preferred not to deal with mobile phones and PDAs on campus networks. However, as Kenneth C. Green—the founding director of the Campus Computing Project— suggests: “That will have to change with the arrival of a new generation of network compatible phones and PDAs in the coming year.“

For more on the Campus Computing Project 2007 survey, check out the official summary or Inside Higher Ed’s full article.

Last week, Central Michigan University hosted the 2007 Conference of the Michigan Blackboard Users Group (miBUG). The conference, entitled “Engineering E-Learning,” featured presentations focusing on the effective use of Blackboard’s suite of products as well as building block software and programs related to the production and maintenance of E-Learning, multimedia content, online education and classroom supplementation.

The conference agenda included sessions on social bookmarking as an effective tool for sharing, discovery and collaboration; the employment of social software applications such as blogs, wikis and podcasts for effective teaching and learning; and the construction of structured ontologies that allow networking and information retrieval to take place more efficiently in knowledge management systems (KMS).

Karen Gage, Blackboard’s VP of Product Strategy, provided the Keynote Address, which covered the evolution of Blackboard solutions for educational needs.

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.

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.

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.

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.