Great Idea

This obviously won't be a scientific study, but it should be very interesting to see the final results.  We should never be afraid to hear directly from our students.

Future U

My boss just sent me a great article about the future of higher education.  It cites a book I'm currently reading called The Innovative University by Clayton Chistensen and Henry Eyring.  Both the article and the book are worth reading for anyone interested in how higher education will have to adapt to stay relevant.

iTunes U

Oops - I jumped the gun a little bit on my last post and there was more news from Apple this morning.  They also announced a new iTunes U app that will host full courses that you can take for free or (I assume) for a fee at some point in the future.  They have had this content for a while in iTunes but they are obviously making a big push in education now and so they are breaking this out into its own app.  I just downloaded it and it pretty much works the same way it did in iTunes.

It will be very interesting to see how this develops in relationship to the burgeoning Open Courseware initiatives.  It could be a battle between an open and closed environment that we are now seeing with iOS and Android.  There is a lot to keep track of in this space and it's a really exciting time to be working in education.  Stay tuned!

iBook Textbooks

Some very exciting news coming out of Apple this morning.  They have released an upgrade for the iBook app that is geared specifically for textbooks.  This was fairly expected but the real surprise was the free authoring environment they are also releasing that will make it very easy for instructors to write their own textbooks.  Of course it only runs on Macs, but Apple isn't exactly known for making it easy to use their stuff on Windows.

I believe this has enormous potential and could revolutionize the textbook industry, just like the iTunes did for the music industry.  Textbooks from all of the major publishers are available now for $14.99 and imagine what it will be like when instructors all over the country can start producing their own materials.  The best will get voted up and the worst will get voted down and the students will be the real winners.

A Fresh Start

I realize that my blog posting in 2011 was pretty much nonexistent which I also realize was a huge disappointment to both of the faithful readers of DigitalEdu. I'm going to see if I can do something about that and will be trying to update this site more often. I've refreshed the look a bit and am exploring some of the new features Blogger is offering to see if I can make this a more interesting site to visit.

Let me know if you have any ideas, and thanks for visiting!