For several reasons, I have been resisting the temptation to post about Duke’s now-famous decision to give an iPod to every first-year student. To begin with, it’s been covered to death, so I didn’t think that just posting the link was doing a particular service to anyone. Second, others have already written about at least some of the affordances of the iPod that make it a potentially good fit. And third, since I just bought a new one myself, my iPod envy is under control.
But it occurs to me that there is a possible implication that hasn’t been fully explored yet, having to do with the affordances not just of the iPod but of the iTunes Music Store (ITMS). If you think about it, the iPod/iTunes/ITMS system that Apple created is simply an efficient means for distributing any digital content with any well-defined DRM restrictions. ITMS even has its own system for categorizing information (though anybody who has seriously tried to search ITMS by genre knows that their taxonomy has some significant limitations). You could use it to deliver journal articles or learning objects just as easily as songs (as Duke clearly intends to do). You could distribute some content for free and other content for fee (as Duke also clearly intends to do). You could probably even create a channel that passes Creative Commons licensing information and, in some cases, even inforces it. For example, some of the DRM options on PDFs and even Word 2003 documents (e.g., allow copying but not editing, allow or don’t allow cut-and-paste) mirror some CC licensing options. If you hook it into something like Merlot or MLX you could develop a relatively efficient learning object distribution channel, where teachers could post playlists that function something like an enhanced version of Instructional Architect (enhanced because it affords downloading of learning objects for offline use and potentially enforces DRM).
I’m not ready to suggest that this is the way to go; it may be that a P2P model like LionShare is a better option in the long-run. But it’s worth thinking about.
