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.”

Apple unveiled three new iPod touch models during its “Let’s Rock” event, all of which are available today. For $229 you can receive 8GB of storage, for $299 you’ll get 16GB, and $399 scores 32GB. That’s knocking $70 to $100 off the price of each.

The new touch body is very slightly thinner, and has a similar tapered back as the iPhone 3G. It will also include an exterior volume control and a built-in speaker for “casual listening.” There is no microphone built in, but the touch will work with new Apple headphones that include a microphone on the cord. This new feature could prove handy for teaching and learning. I can foresee students and teachers creating and sharing educational podcasts, playing and recording lecture notes, etc. from the palm of their hands.

For more details, check out iPhone Atlas’ coverage of the “Let’s Rock” event.

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.

A significant step toward full iPhone copy/paste functionality was taken today as independent developer Zac White recently unveiled his open-source solution: OpenClip, a standard for other iPhone application developers.

As iPhone Atlas reports, OpenClip is not a standalone app but rather a technology that developers can incorporate into their iPhone applications should they choose to participate. No applications yet support OpenClip, but it’s coming soon for the American Heritage Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus applications, Twitter client Twittelator, notepad application MagicPad, finance lexicon Wall Street Worlds, and a number of others.

iPhone Atlas goes on to report that iPhone users will be able to copy and paste from one OpenClip application to the next, but not to developer applications that aren’t participating or to Apple’s own iPhone apps, such as its e-mail client or the Safari browser.

Apple has, of course, acknowledged that copy-paste functionality will be officially coming to the iPhone, eventually, and OpenClip’s creator has recognized Apple’s plan.

“Instead of just waiting on the sidelines, we wanted to help iPhone users and Apple by being proactive and trying to help with a solution,” the site’s FAQ reads. “While just an interim fix until Apple adopts a systemwide version, OpenClip hopes to add to the iPhone user experience and provide a working case study for Apple, hopefully allowing (company engineers) to roll out their version more quickly.”

This past Friday, MiGhtyDocs released an app that makes viewing Google Docs on the iPhone a bit easier. The app enables you to keep your important documents with you at all times, even without an Internet connection.

All you have to do is open your document once on your iPhone, and MiGhtyDocs caches it for offline viewing. Unfortunately, the application doesn’t allow you to edit docs or view spreadsheets or presentations. As TUAW suggests, the app does one thing very well—plus, it’s free.

For more, check out TUAW’s post on MiGhtyDocs or download the app from the iTunes App Store.

Here’s another iPhone app that might be useful for teaching and learning: iPhone Atlas recently reported the release of Google’s new Translation service for iPhone users.  The Google Translate mobile service works almost exactly like the desktop version. Simply type in a word or phrase, select the language you wish to translate and hit ‘Translate’. It deciphers both single words and entire phrases from 24 different languages including Chinese, French and Japanese.

The app works using the iPhone’s Safari browser, which means that you need a data connection to use the service. But once you’ve searched for a word or phrase, it’s stored in the iPhone’s memory and can be accessed again without a data connection.

If you want to try it out for yourself go to http://google.com on your iPhone, click on ‘More’ in the menu and then on ‘Translate’.

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.

Today, TUAW reports that DataCase, a new iPhone app that looks to be quite handy for teaching and learning, recently hit the App Store.  Essentially, DataCase for iPhone turns you 16GB device into a wireless flash drive. Unlike FileMagnet, DataCase doesn’t require that an app be installed on the Mac, and it can also be used with a PC or Linux machine.

To use DataCase, install the app on your iPhone 2.0 device (or iPod touch, of course), tap the icon, make sure that Wi-Fi is enabled on your iPhone and then fire up your Mac, PC or Linux box. From your Mac you browse for the iPhone using Bonjour and by double-clicking the iPhone icon you have access to two default volumes on the iPhone—Drop Box and Shared Files.

TUAW asserts that Drop Box is exactly what it sounds like, a write-only location into which others on your network can drop files for you to view. Shared Files is a read-and-write volume, so you can either receive or distribute files. Create up to 16 volumes with individual permission settings. Coming from Windows or Linux, you can use an HTTP or FTP connection to transfer files. Once the files are on the iPhone, you can view them natively if they’re in MS Office, text, or PDF formats. 

For more, be sure to check out TUAW’s full article.

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.”