Dan Karleen’s comment on the preceding blog entry is both intriguing and troubling. Mostly troubling. It appears that Apple is providing a private iTunes store to the University of Michigan dental school. Dan, who also has a dog in this fight, explains the basic setup in his blog entry: dental school lectures are recorded and made available for download by means of a “special iTunes Music Store interface from Apple Computer” (quoting from the Michigan press release). Access is therefore limited to users who can authenticate within the University of Michigan network. Plans for future collaboration between Apple and Michigan include even more types of downloadable content.

The arrangement is likely to expand beyond the School of Dentistry. The initial story in The Ann Arbor News reports that “James Hilton, associate provost for academic information technology, said this week two other U-M colleges have expressed interest in podcasting lectures.” I read that story yesterday with delight. Today, in the context of the press release Dan led me to, that delight has evaporated.

What do these developments mean?

1. More walled gardens, and a retrograde attitude toward intellectual property in higher education.

2. Apple is apparently getting into the course management / textbook business.

3. This distribution scheme apparently bypasses public RSS feeds. To get this content, students must use iTunes. Apple’s business plan is thus not to build the best directory, but to lock people into a proprietary system. This is not surprising, but it is disappointing, and antithetical to the spirit in which the podcasting movement began. I smell a hostile takeover–and the very openness of the community makes it peculiarly vulnerable.

4. Apple has simultaneously established a sweetheart deal with U-M for hardware purchases. From the press release:

The University of Michigan School of Dentistry’s partnership with Apple Computer extends beyond the classroom.

Apple is offering students, faculty, staff, and alumni discounted prices on its desktop and laptop computers, iPods, and other products. To take advantage of the discounted prices on Apple products, individuals will have to visit the School’s Web site, www.dent.umich.edu. At this site, they will click a special link that will take them to Apple’s Web site where they can then place an order using a valid credit card.

Apple will gift two percent of the proceeds of the sales to the U-M School of Dentistry Learning Technologies Fund that will be used to develop educational technology at the School.

Aside from the teeth-grinding use of “gift” as a verb, this part of the release makes the larger plan clear: Apple seeks to be a sole-source software, hardware, and content provider for the dentistry school (at least). Apple gets a captive market. The school gets a nice little “gift” in return for leasing part of its core mission to Apple by allowing Apple to control access to content.

Worst of all, from a soul’s point of view, is that the entire press release describes the process in terms near and dear to all of us who work in academic IT: bottom-up, user-driven innovation, 24/7 access to content anywhere, collaborative project management and development, and a hook into a major new communications phenomenon, in this case podcasting. The whole enterprise reads like a textbook example of doing things right.

So what’s the problem?

Something to do with being closed and commerce-driven instead of open and community-driven. Something to do with profits instead of principles. And to be fair, something to do with public schools desperate for revenue in an age in which cutting appropriations for higher education is Job One in many states.

The new “Courses and Lectures” category in the iTunes podcast directory (blogged on here by Amy Bellinger) looks a bit sinister in this light.

More to chew on (apologies–just trying to keep my spirits up):

This “dentistry to go” podcast features a chat “on Apple computers in dentistry,” specifically an OS X dental management application. This podcast, of course, is freely available.