This situation is getting mighty worrisome. The thoughts below are fresh, fluid, and perhaps an over-reaction. Or perhaps not. I’m not the only one who’s worried.
Apple has announced a free service called “iTunes U” that allows schools to restrict content generated at the institution to authenticated members of that institution by setting up a school-specific iTunes store. (Chronicle story here.) The authentication system can be tied to the institution’s own identity management systems. Now we can all have what Stanford and the University of Michigan’s Dental School already have: the ability to strengthen the walls of our gardens by locking down content, and the ability to limit our students to one platform with which to access that content (the only mobile devices iTunes works with are iPods). The emphasis now is on audio content, but iPod now supports video, and Apple’s plans are clearly about more than just recorded lectures–which is not to say that recorded lectures are any small thing.
An interesting excerpt from Apple’s announcement:
It’s the most powerful way to manage a broad range of audio or video content and make it available quickly and easily to students, faculty, and staff. And it is the only application that supports the overwhelmingly popular iPod. iTunes U also offers you the simplicity and mobility you expect from Apple because it is based on the same easy-to-use technology of iTunes Music Store.
Yes, it is. In fact, iTunes U is the iTunes Music Store. It’s just the part you can use for free while you’re in the store, so long as you’ve paid your tuition and you own an iPod. To be fair, you can also listen to content within iTunes at your desktop, but the real augmentation comes with the mobile device, and that’s got to be an iPod. (Note that the Music Store menu item is selected in the Stanford iTunes U screenshot above.)
And if you go to the iTunes U web page, take a close look at the sidebars on the right. There are enough branding, revenue-generating, and courseware-integrating hooks here to land Leviathan without a splash. I look at them and part of me thinks, “I get an outsourced content management/courseware system for free? I don’t have to worry about tech support, server maintenance, interoperability, or any of those back-end troubles? And I can make money and earn cool points with music- and video-hungry students while leaving the driving to Apple? Where do I sign?”
The other part of me looks at those come-ons, and the mention of Blackboard and WebCT (and even Sakai, alas, through no fault of its own), and recoils. I think of the serpent and the fruit it offers. I look at the bite that’s an integral part of the Apple logo. I remember that he who sups with the devil must have a long spoon. Are our spoons long enough for dinner with iTunes U?
Obviously it is not enough for Apple to win market share based on mere excellence. Their larger strategy, perversely admirable in its cleverness, is to leverage popular culture from within the institution (all those iPods we have–and “we” means me, too, for it is truly an excellent product) to lure institutions into a) helping them generate a monopoly and b) giving in to their own worst impulses with regard to locking away the knowledge and expertise they generate. As one observer noted (I’ve lost the reference), Steve Jobs understands that the key to changing the world is popular culture, not computers. Trouble is, this iTunes U strategy isn’t changing the world at all. This strategy simply shifts advantage within the status quo.
We will see more of this, I’m sure. Some campuses will become Yahoo-centric, others Google-centric. We’ll find AOL getting into the campus portal business, and they’ll protect us from spam and malware for free. The idea will be to generate brand loyalty, to lock content (our work, our students’ work) into proprietary systems so we can’t shop around or assemble a best-of-breed solution, to turn higher education into a machine to foster life-long consumption of this or that product. Nothing new there, of course. I suppose I had just hoped for more from Apple. Their marketing certainly encourages us to hope for more. Perhaps hope is the most addictive drug of all, especially if you can push it while people are in your store.
In this light, Disney’s purchase of Pixar, which lands Jobs a seat on the board as majority stockholder, brings an uneasy image into my mind: the ravens on the playground equipment in Hitchcock’s The Birds. I laugh at my own melodrama. But there’s a catch in my throat as the chuckle dies away.
I distrust instapundits and I don’t want to be one. But I wonder: Think different? When I wish upon a star, my dreams come true?
I’m guessing the next step will be libraries. NetLibrary is not iPod compatible. Due to space considerations, budget retraints, and customer demand, audiobooks and all forms of downloadable materials will become much more a part of what libraries provide the public.
Wonder where they’d get the content tho’. Libraries don’t generate content the way universities do….
I don’t like it either. Great concept, unfair delivery.
[...] There are lots of people (Gardner, Brian, Tama, some /. trolls) posting interesting and thoughtful responses to the iTunes University service. It seems like the (online) consensus is something like “It sucks as a concept – forcing universities to lock content behind walled gardens, restricting access and requiring proprietary playback mechanisms.” [...]
[...] As I stated previously Dave Winer and Kevin Yank aren’t. Martha isn’t. Brian isn’t. Gardner isn’t and still isn’t. D’Arcy says not so fast. [...]
The perceived “paradigm’ shifts within the status quo is what really pisses me off … for all of Apple’s superority (and it is vast over Microsoft) they are certainly training their excellence to fit a mission of securing “foreign markets” at any cost.
The idea of a university branding itself to a proprietary corporate content management system marks a trend in higher education, more generally, that is highly suspect. University’s must engage an open source platform given their mission to the community of ideas. this comunity may be in grave danger when (to echo Alice here) public media libraries become a tool driven, pay-for-play enterprise.
All this, in my mind, leads to a further widening of a digital-divide that has always mirrored the racial/class divide we are so good at allowing pop culture to represent and explain away for us ( all too often to our detriment). How does this fit into Job’s vision – I wonder?
[...] Last week there was a healthy discussion about the pros and cons of iTunes U (here and here for a start) and after a bit of a think over the weekend, I’ve got some further thoughts. D’Arcy Norman in “iTunes U. Critiques – it’s not as simple as that” makes a number of positive points about Apple’s service. Probably the most important part of D’Arcy’s post is the last paragraph: I just talked with someone at Apple who would know – and iTunes U supports any file format that iTunes can grok – you can publish .mp3 (or .wav, or .aiff, or Apple Lossless) audio, .mp4 video, even .pdf files (that’s how album art is handled) as well as the “default†formats of .aac etc… This means there is no lock-in to having an iPod as portable playback device (and even the .aac files can be converted by iTunes to .mp3 now). Having cross-platform playable formats such as mp3 is, in my opinion, a huge plus because it does allow other players and platforms to handle the files (sure, you need iTunes to access those files initially, but having flexibility with them thereafter and no DRM is hugely important). Gardner Campbell, however, remains unconvinced by the service and in a “Postscript on iTunes U” makes the extremely important point that while there won’t be a technical lock-in to the service, financial realities may create a practical lock-in anyway: Will institutions, especially starved-for-cash public schools, be willing to fund home-grown open alternatives when they can make money on a home-branded, outsourced, turn-key operation like Apple’s? I doubt it. Apple doesn’t need de jure exclusive rights. We’ll essentially give them away, de facto. Much better PR that way, and the company gets to express its astonishment at any dissent, for after all no one forced us to put all our content in iTunes U. I think after consideration, I’m falling half-way between the two perspectives. I do think iTunes U has potential to be a very useful service, especially for publicly accessible university podcasts because the potential traffic charges could be huge, especially for well respected professors giving public lectures and the like. I also think that iTunes U could be a useful host for course content. However, it should not be the only host. If using iTunes U stops many universities exploring alternative services and developing their own, then Apple is pulling a Blackboard/WebCT. However, having recently learned from those lessons (and almost-done-mergers), I suspect many universities will using both iTunes U and in-house solutions for other formats/options. Along those lines, Burks Oakley pointed me to an important post by Michael Meiser whichs extends a post from Jon Udell both of whom focus on the difficulties of linking to and referencing material via the iTunes interface. As Jon Udell points out: It was an ironically circular exercise. I started at itunes.stanford.edu, which is just a web placeholder for the JavaScript code that launches iTunes and points it at the special Stanford area of the iTunes Music Store. Then I subscribed to some of the Stanford feeds in iTunes. Capturing the URLs of those feeds was way harder than it should be, because iTunes displays them but won’t let you copy them. Those feed URLs are, of course, extremely nasty-looking, e.g.: https://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/ITCSBrowse.woa/wa/ Subscribe/Feed_StanfordPublic-1770144-1770152–1770196_visitor $40indigo.apple.com_1137336780-95c4e56efabeb87e7982db034895cbd2eb6312de You’d have to nuts to write something like that down. Well, I guess I am, because I did. My reasons were partly selfish. I want to be able to get directly to the audio URLs contained in those feeds so I can automate conversion to MP3. Why? I like to listen to long lectures while running, and my iPod isn’t the preferred device in that situation. My Creative MUVO is lighter, and when I drop it or get it wet I don’t have to worry so much. More broadly, I want these freely available lectures to be able to spark the sort of web discourse that I’m sure Stanford intends them to. URLs are the currency of that discourse. If I want to refer you to Robert Dunbar’s global warming talk I should be able to link you directly to it. Discussion about the talk should be discoverable on the web by way of that URL. Here’s what shouldn’t have to happen, but currently does: I heard an interesting talk about global warming by Stanford’s Robert Dunbar. I wonder what you think about it? To listen, make sure you have iTunes installed, and then go to itunes.stanford.edu in a browser. From there, click the link to open iTunes. Then click on Faculty Lectures. Then scan the list for “Is Global Warming Real” or “Robert Dunbar”. So anyway, after laboriously capturing those feed URLs and posting them to del.icio.us, I turned around and subscribed to them in … wait for it … iTunes. It’s a decent podcatcher, after all, and I’m technology-agnostic. I’ll use anything for its strengths, while working around its weaknesses. The workaround, in this case, was simply to expose the feed URLs, and through them, the individual lecture URLs, to public discourse: linking, tagging, blogging, playlisting. That is the kind of intellectual activity that Stanford wants to encourage, isn’t it? iTunes U is thus somewhat at odds with the ease that a lot of social software provides when having conversations across posts, podcasts and other digital flotsam. Sure, that might be a good thing for some people (I know that locking podcasted lectures behind a university-specific interface will ease the concerns of many academics about the intellectual property), but it’s also important for any university podcast system to be linkable and accessible for content that they want to make publicly available (also an important part of good university PR). iTunes U doesn’t cover all our needs, but it can be part of the podcasting solutions. Just not the only part. And, as always, we should be working toward finding/thinking/creating the next step… [...]
[...] Fréttatilkynning Apple og þróunarvinna þeirra með Stanford háskólanum hefur vakið mikla athygli og er óhætt að segja að fjörlegar umræður hafi skapast á Netinu um útspil Apple. Og eins og gefur að skilja eru skoðanir manna skiptar. Fjölmargir hafa lÃst yfir mikilli ánægju með framtakið á meðan aðrir hafa haft uppi efasemdir um ágæti þess. Það sem einna helst vefst fyrir efasemdarmönnunum er sú staðreynd að Apple er auðvitað fyrst og fremst að koma eigin vörum og eigin stöðlum á framfæri innan skólakerfisins. Og þessi tækni og þessi skráarsnið og staðlar eru ekki nægjanlega opnir að mati margra sem óttast að þar með kunni skólar og nemendur að verða of háðir einum ákveðnum framleiðanda. Þvà þrátt fyrir að hvaða PC eða Makkanotandi sem er geti sótt iTunes U og hlustað á fyrirlestra eða annað efni à tölvunni þá gegnir iTunes U einungis iPod spilaranum þegar að þvà kemur að samþætta efni á tölvu og spilara. [...]
[...] Gardner Campbell [...]
i just want to win a free mp4 device
[…] Fréttatilkynning Apple og þróunarvinna þeirra með Stanford háskólanum hefur vakið mikla athygli og er óhætt að segja að fjörlegar umræður hafi skapast á Netinu um útspil Apple. Og eins og gefur að skilja eru skoðanir manna skiptar. Fjölmargir hafa lÃst yfir mikilli ánægju með framtakið á meðan aðrir hafa haft uppi efasemdir um ágæti þess. Það sem einna helst vefst fyrir efasemdarmönnunum er sú staðreynd að Apple er auðvitað fyrst og fremst að koma eigin vörum og eigin stöðlum á framfæri innan skólakerfisins. Og þessi tækni og þessi skráarsnið og staðlar eru ekki nægjanlega opnir að mati margra sem óttast að þar með kunni skólar og nemendur að verða of háðir einum ákveðnum framleiðanda. Þvà þrátt fyrir að hvaða PC eða Makkanotandi sem er geti sótt iTunes U og hlustað á fyrirlestra eða annað efni à tölvunni þá gegnir iTunes U einungis iPod spilaranum þegar að þvà kemur að samþætta efni á tölvu og spilara. […]
[...] I’ll echo Gardner’s sentiment from last year which brilliantly traces how Apple is really trying to create a situation of [...]