I missed this when it was originally posted in December, but I want to highlight how totally cool it is (yes, cool!) that Casey Bisson made the nightly news because his WPopac software won the Mellon Award. Belated congrats, Casey, and keep pushing us forward.

The iPod Widens Its Audience in School

"When they aren't dancing, those familiar iPod silhouettes are probably hunkered down in the classroom, where the devices have become a common learning tool....

Students at the University of Washington can download lectures. At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, school President Mary Sue Coleman invites students to 'think of the university as your intellectual iPod.'...

IPREPpress offers a range of downloadable documents, including travel guides, a 40,000-word version of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, the Encyclopedia Britannica and biographies.

The bios are designed like graphic novels or comic books, with text hyperlinked to full-color images on subjects, from sports figures to scientists.

The cost is something even the financially strapped student can manage: Some dictionaries and encyclopedias cost less than $4, and graphic biographies sell for between $10 and $15.

Pearson Education, a business and educational publisher, and Audible, which makes spoken audio entertainment, recently launched VangoNotes study guides....

'Giving an iPod to everyone seemed to be overkill, to put it mildly,' said Stephen Miller, a senior who was at Duke during the iPod giveaway.

'It was an early Christmas present for a class of freshmen,' he said. 'It almost became laughable with teachers bending over backwards to find a way to put iPods into a course. I feel like it was a promotional gimmick.'...

Christopher Ayers, a Latin teacher at Wilbraham & Monson Academy, a private school in Wilbraham, Mass., favors content from EF Educational Tours for learning foreign languages, citing a trip to Greece last year....

'When we got to Greece, many of the ones with the podcasts were much more confident in speaking it,' Ayers said." [MSNBC]

Although there is no mention here about libraries providing content for iPods, the last bit in particular represents the essence of Library 2.0 - using technology where it makes sense and enhances the user experience. Something to think about as you evaluate content and services for mobile devices (which, by the way, will become more and more important during the next decade).