As for missing you at TLT, my campus responsibilities have taken over my professional life. The good news is my campus has gotten its act together with technology support and integration. This has resulted in my needing to focus all my attention here and being scarce at SUNY wide things. I do miss things like STC, Wizard, TLT, for sure, but I am enjoying the marvelous opportunities to do interesting work on my campus.

Using iTunes U for social outreach to alumni and students is interesting; it hadn’t occurred to me. Let’s catch up about this via email; there’s a lot of interest at a number of SUNY campuses and I think we can do some interesting cross-campus collaboration here.

Nice series on iTunes U. We here at SUNY Oneonta just received word from Apple that we have been accepted into this program. We are looking at learning as we go and initially using it to reach out to Alumni, the general public and also give our students a place to post. For example, we have a large number of student musicans that could use this to post their music.

We don’t see this replacing our content managment or learning managmnet software at all (at this point). Rather just another option in the tools to provide content.

I’m curious as to what you think the prohibitive costs would be. The two factors I can think of are disk space (cheap, and getting cheaper all the time) and bandwidth (in the UK, at least, bandwidth is a fixed cost for HE institutions for more capacity than we come close to using). Are there ways in which these two could be cost-prohibitive that I’m not seeing, or are there other factors I’m overlooking?

The URL masking is something I still stand on as a small fixable issue. Try this. Find a URL for a podcast feed from anywhere else on the web. Copy it. In iTunes, use the Subscribe option where you can paste in the URL.

Now when you have this feed embedded in iTunes, try to find a place where you can locate that URL, and copy/paste it outside of iTunes. I have looked high and low- the only place it is displayed (under Get Info for a feed) *** it is not copy-able *** This is either a minor software glitch (I hope) or a heinous plot. So for that matter, using anyother podcatcher would necessitate doing something like writing out the URL by hand on a piece of paper, and then typing it back in to the not iTunes catcher.

This disfunction, IMHO, is in serious conflict with Apple’s own interface guidelines. I would like to hear an offical reason for this, since it has been weeks since Jon Udell posted this. This is the vague-ness which gives Apple a bad rap.

As for what happens after 2007, it’s not unreasonable to wonder, but it’s also not unreasonable for Apple to decide that they can’t guarantee free forever until they understand their long-term cost structures better for what amounts to a pilot program. The main point of my post is that Apple has no profit motive to charge, since it’s not really a viable business to do so and since they get more financial benefit by giving it away as part of their branding campaign.

I’m not sure about the URL masking; I’m pretty sure that it’s possible to use a non-iTunes client to podcatch from iTunes U but I don’t know the details. I’ll try to find out.

Regarding their degree of openness about their plans…well…they let me blog about it, so they’re not being too secretive. If you think about this as a non-revenue-generating operation with costs that are not fully known yet, it makes sense that they might go for a soft launch and not try to trumpet the details too widely until they have all the pieces in place. My sense is that they are feeling their way along with this somewhat. But really, I’m just guessing.

I don’t believe that is correct. From what I am seeing, Apple does store the podcasts and information on their servers.

The larger issue– that they explicitly indicate they won’t be an archive/repository is an interesting one. One of the benefits of iTunes U, as envisioned by some commentators, is that it relieves them of the infrastructure needed for storage and archiving. I wonder what Apple’s conditions will be for retention?

At any rate, it seems to me that any program using the service would be wise to mirror content (easy enough to do) and certainly retain it for long term access. iTunes U is– as these articles so clearly spell out– a marketing tool. Use it, maybe, but not use it SOLELY.

The questions I have are why do we have to guess what the plan, strategy is from Apple? There is some degree of opaqueness to them that maybe is a plan or not, but the side effect is conjuring up notions of conspiracy from those trying to “guess the apple”.

The vagueness of the “beyond 2000″ plans is worrisome. Is it really unreasonable to wonder what happens past then?

Why does iTunes mask the URLs of podcasts? You can see, them, but there is no way to copy/paste them elsewhere outside of iTunes, say to another iPodder type app or just to use in some other RSS enabled application. This is either a simple techical oversight or …. a means of evil lock in. It seems silly to hide a piece of data that at somepoint a user enters inside iTunes.

What was helpful here is the reminder that the source content does not lie in iTunes- the podcasts are thus referring to content we still need to store in our own sites, servers, etc– is that correct? iTunes is merely the handy referrer and link in the plaback chain of content?