Learning 2.0: ITunes University

More on podcasting from an educational perspective. But personally, I find this to be a bit of a worrying trend. Firstly, why is Apple doing this? Ostensibly, they are trying to support education - they certainly have a track record with schools as a whole. But is there more to it than that? Maybe it's the cynic in me rising to the surface but I find this to be an attempt to corner a market with the long term view of profiting from educational content.

And after all, what is actually unique about iTunes. Not much really. Some cool esthetic designs, a really easy to use interface - all the kinda stuff that Apple does well. But expensive really, considering that the iPod is just a glorified MP3 player. Now, I'm all in favour of somebody providing a straightforward means of buying tunes legally. But I'm not so much in favour of them trying to foist this same paradigm on educational content flow. Oh sure, it is wide open just now...but will it remain so. And the fact remains that it does promote a non-open, non-standard data format over other perfectly acceptable open standards.

Jon Udell at InfoWeek has also written similarly on this topic. A thoughtful and very insightful author - you can find a reference to his piece earlier in the NOSMeLD blog.