Flametoad

Big trends

• Connected (“live”)
• Interactive/engaging
• Sharing/social

–but key is context. Good sites add context to the above elements. The better the social context, the higher the value. Personal outcomes should be more important than the individual web trends.

Conent in iTunes U has doubled in the last 30 days.

One middle school already has their own second life island. These are kids who will be coming to the university in another 10 years!

Challenges

• Privacy- personal use and guidelines
• Security- translate institutional policy
• Intellectual property- individual and campus policies
• Integration with campus systems- focus on people

External sites and services

• Complement or compete? – How are people best served?
• Integration with campus systems- widgets and api’s. 

Apple contributions

• The new OS, Leopard, will include a wiki server
• No markup language required
• Media rich
• Drag and drop editing
• Tagging and content searching
• Revision history
• Simple linking, cross referencing and page creation
• Access controls and moderation
• Customizable including css themes and javascript

Preston’s note: As someone who uses commercial hosting, it’s nice but no cigar. In shopping around for commercial hosting, NOBODY uses an apple server. It’s all apache or IIS.

iTunes U

Preston’s note: Texas A&M is already an iTunesU. New development: if you already have a podcast going, you can just “link it” to iTunes U so that it will be displayed there.

Podcast Producer

• Automated podcast capture, encoding, and delivery
• Remote audio and video recording
• Multi-format workflow
• Automated workflow—stitch together “standard” clips (intro, out-tro)

Summary

• Successful read/write web applications focus on personal outcomes, not web trends
• Educating/informing are key for facing the challenges
• Explore integrating external services (when appropriate)
• Help from apple (of course)
  • Wikis, blogs, and itunes you are starting points
  • Podcast producer can facilitate institutional workflow

Preston’s reading – Apple is working on creating mac-based applications (content creating, server) that make their hardware much more appealing. Customers want access to the software and thus have to invest in the hardware. Probably not a bad strategy, since Apple generally makes user-friendly software.