Here are some further developments in the story about the University of Michigan School of Dentistry iTunes podcast. An official at U-M confirmed that it’s a private online store for registered students only, and that there are others partnering with Apple to do the same thing.

This morning I received an email from Lynn Johnson, Associate Professor of Dentistry and Director of Dental Informatics and Information Technology at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, which confirms the nature of this offering as restricted to registered students.

We are part of a small pilot project with Apple Computers. The content you have read about is strictly for use by registered U-M dental and dental hygiene students. We are working towards making certain materials available to registered practitioners in continuing dental education courses.

When I asked Lynn whether there were others within U-M or outside the university who were participating in this with Apple, this was the response:

Yes. But that I cannot tell you until Apple releases that information. We are the only U-M unit doing it and the only professional school in the country.

Those interested in this story may want to check out Gardner Cambpell’s post that came as a follow-up to mine.

Will time reveal that we’ve entered an age of private, institution-mediated educational podcasts hosted by Apple? Perhaps, and it wouldn’t be surprising, but at the moment there seems to be a bit of mystery surrounding what I’m about to relate.

This piece about a University of Michigan Dental School podcast from The Ann Arbor News came via one of my alerts earlier this week. By now many of you have probably already seen it. Anyway, I was waiting to write about it until I’d had a chance to verify that in fact there is a podcast. I emailed the author and also left a voicemail asking for a URL, or to be pointed to the right place in iTunes–but no response so far in more than 36 hours. The story explains that the podcast is available through the iTunes online music store, but try as I did, I couldn’t find it there.

As it turns out, this article on the school’s website leads me to think that the podcast may be hidden in the iTunes store, accessible only to those having the special iTunes interface (possibly not the standard iTunes client?) to which this piece alludes. The piece reads:

Using a special iTunes Music Store interface from Apple Computer, students will use their Macs or PCs to download classroom lectures, transfer the information onto an iPod or an MP3 player, and then listen to the lectures in their apartments, walking around on campus, or even while jogging or working out. Access is for students with valid University of Michigan names and passwords. Future collaboration with Apple may result in new study aids, such as videos, photos, and other educational material, being added to the School of Dentistry’s iTunes Store.

This development raises some interesting questions. Is a podcast a podcast if it’s only available via the iTunes online store? Is there a way to add syndicated programming to the iTunes store without an RSS feed with enclosures? Is this special iTunes interface, which apparently enables the school to lock the podcast behind a login tied to the student’s university account, going to be made available more broadly? Will any aspect of the school’s apparently private store be made available to the general public?

I just sent an email to the contact listed with U-M’s piece; will keep you posted on what I hear.

P.S. Readers of this blog will note how strongly this model contrasts with some of the more open models of podcasting in education that are out there, such as Drexel’s.

Folsom Lake College, who recently launched an RSS news feed, is podcasting a lecture series by visiting Fulbright Scholar Dr. Husain Siddiqui on issues related to the Muslim world. They’re promoting the podcast on the college home page, and they’re also promoting their aforementioned news feed on the home page. In fact, it appears as though the news and events block on the home page is driven by the RSS news feed.

-Link via Scott Crow in the Public Information Office at Folsom

The University of Kentucky College of Medicine is publishing an RSS feed for news from the college.

Arkansas State Unviersity-Beebe now has an RSS feed.

Duke is hosting a podcast symposium September 27-28. The proceedings will be podcast and webcast.

You’re reading it here first. Allegheny College has launched an RSS feed for their dining hall menu. From Mike Richwalsky earlier this afternoon via IM:

I’m proud to announce that Allegheny has launched our new dining hall menu system to the campus today. I’m not sure, but it might be the first college with RSS dining menus.

Dining hall personnel maintain the feed themselves through a web-based app–no knowledge of RSS or XML is required.

From a recent post from the Kogod School of Business at American University:

This fall, the Kogod School of Business is changing the way it communicates with students. Important announcements and information from the Dean’s Office, from Graduate Programs, from the Graduate Business Association and graduate clubs, and from your professors will be communicated via RSS streams to your desktop, laptop and Blackberry. If you want to have the latest new on job opportunities, speakers, social events, club events, breaking business news, etc, you need to read the Kogod streams.

Not only is Kogod providing information via RSS feeds, they are also providing the software and hardware to consume the feeds. Free Blackberry 7100t’s are available to Graduate students at Kogod, and the devices come pre-loaded with the Kogod RSS reader.

Mentioned earlier on this blog, Classcaster is a blogging service with podcast facilities built in. Using a cell phone as a microphone, instructors can call in a lecture and it’s automatically posted to their blog and an enclosure is generated in the appropriate RSS feed. A white paper describing the application characterizes the sound quality as “good enough.” According to the white paper, the developers are planning to make the entire application available for free download for those who want to host it themselves. As of yet, there’s no word as to native support for tracking information about downloads, subscriptions, etc.

Reading a new blog called Educlib has drawn my attention a community of bloggers at University of Cape Town. The main page links to all the staff members hosting blogs with this service, and you can subscribe to either the individual blogs or an aggregated feed of the latest posts. This is similar to a blog community at Dickinson College, although Dickinson’s seems to be populated mainly by students. Offering an aggregated feed from a community of bloggers is not only convenient for subscribers who may be interested in the community in general, it also enables discovery of new blogs.