The Open University are documenting their involvement with iTunesU online at http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/itunesu/.

There’s a lot of excitement about the iphone finally getting cut and paste and the ability to do such mobile basics as picture messaging and contact sending/receiving, but it’s great to see iTunesU getting a much higher profile on the latest version of the operating system.

For the first time you can now access iTunesU directly through the phone, with Warwick University the first option on the homepage when I tried it. Expect to see usage rise over the next few months, although with such limited screen estate, it’s going to be more important than ever to build good relations with Apple and get those high profile feature spots.

A short interview from The Chronicle of Hired Education with Adam Smith of Google Book Search.

A great interview from a recent Net@Night with Jordan Goldman, CEO of Unigo. Unigo is “a new platform for college students to share reviews, photos, videos, documents”. There’s several other sites with similar goals and I’ve no idea how successful Unigo will be in long-term comparison with them, but the 20 minute interview is well worth listening to for the range of topics covered including:

• the increasing influence of student-generated online social networks on the profile of universities
• how to use full-time editorial staff to push the development of a successful social network
• the ability of university-age students to create and run successful startups

I’ve got an ipod and iphone, I work, cook, clean and walk listening to music and podcasts every day, I’ve recorded, edited and published podcasts, but I still hate to use itunes and struggle to do the most basic tasks with it. 

I wasn’t aware of iTunes U until I read about the University of Warwick’s new presence on it yesterday. There’s a good introductory video to iTunes U on the Apple website, it seems to be a section of iTunes dedicated to distributing (without hosting?) recorded lecture series (and any other audio material) from universities. These can be for either protected internal or public external use. 

Looking through yesterday it looked as though there was a lot of great content in a pretty hit and miss fashion. It’s going to take time to evaluate properly, at the moment I’ve got a pile of audio stacked up in a queue to download, but I’ll look at it more in-depth soon. I couldn’t find any critical analysis of it online other than this Washington Post article – Is iTunes U for you?