Next fall, all new fresh­men attend­ing ACU (Abi­lene Chris­t­ian Uni­ver­si­ty) will receive an iPhone (or iPod Touch) when they get to cam­pus. And, from there, the Apple gad­get will fig­ure cen­tral­ly to stu­dents’ cam­pus expe­ri­ence. The iPhone is the lat­est and great­est “con­verged mobile media device,” which com­bines in one gad­get numer­ous func­tion­al­i­ties — inter­net and email access, phone, audio, video, and maps. And once you put a gen­er­a­tion of stu­dents reared on mobile devices on this com­mon plat­form, new ways of run­ning the uni­ver­si­ty in the 21st cen­tu­ry start to open up.

The changes begin with the way uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tion gets done. ACU envi­sions stu­dents using their devices to check their meal and account bal­ances, access course cal­en­dars, receive news and spe­cial bul­letins from the uni­ver­si­ty, and tap into the uni­ver­si­ty phone/employee direc­to­ry. Not far down the line, the uni­ver­si­ty antic­i­pates that the iPhone will ful­fill cer­tain reg­is­trar func­tions — mean­ing that stu­dents can use their iPhone to scope out, and even enroll in, var­i­ous class­es. Then, they’ll add some e‑commerce to the mix and let stu­dents use their mobile device to con­duct com­merce with the book­store and uni­ver­si­ty restau­rants. Are you start­ing to get the pic­ture? The iPhone becomes a “one stop shop for infor­ma­tion and ser­vices” that can be accessed on the fly.

But what hap­pens in the class­room? I had a chance to catch up with Bill Rankin, the Direc­tor of Mobile Learn­ing Research (and also Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor & Direc­tor of Eng­lish Grad­u­ate Stud­ies) who shared some of ACU’s think­ing about how the iPhone cre­ates new teach­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties. For starters, the device will allow stu­dents to access syl­labi, course doc­u­ments (cre­at­ed with Google Docs), home­work assign­ments and pod­casts that com­ple­ment the course. (Imag­ine stu­dents down­load­ing pod­cast­ed lec­tures from pre­vi­ous class­es, or lis­ten­ing to clips of Mozart in their music appre­ci­a­tion class, or review­ing bits of French dia­logue in the French 101 class.) From here, the ped­a­gog­i­cal uses of the iPhone start to deep­en. Accord­ing to Rankin, the Apple gad­get will give teach­ers the abil­i­ty to con­duct real-time sur­veys that gauge stu­dent per­cep­tions of the class (are they under­stand­ing the course? is it mov­ing too quick­ly?) and use the feed­back to make the class­es “more care­ful­ly tai­lored to the inter­ests and abil­i­ties.” It’s also an added perk that the iPhone will let stu­dents con­tribute to the class through their online per­sona, which, research shows, “embold­ens stu­dents [par­tic­u­lar­ly shy ones] who might not oth­er­wise share their ideas.” Then there’s this sce­nario (and oth­ers like it): With the iPhone, the “biol­o­gy class in the field will be able to pho­to­graph spec­i­mens, post their find­ings to oth­er class­es not cur­rent­ly in the field, com­mu­ni­cate with experts, and use the web to iden­ti­fy and research spec­i­mens. That’s trans­for­ma­tion­al, and we think it will offer dis­tinct advan­tages to our stu­dents.” Last­ly, the iPhone opens up the pos­si­bil­i­ty of cre­at­ing “hybrid” cours­es, which means cours­es con­duct­ed part­ly in the class­room and part­ly online. For more on the hybrid con­cept (and oth­er facets of the project), you can watch the video post­ed on YouTube that intro­duces ACU’s iPhone ini­tia­tive. We’ve post­ed Part 1 below, and you can access Part 2 here. To get more insight into ACU’s intel­li­gent think­ing about the poten­tial edu­ca­tion­al appli­ca­tions of the iPhone, you should spend some time on their “Con­nect­ed” web site.

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The iPod can super­charge your learn­ing. But it’s often a mat­ter of find­ing the right soft­ware and con­tent. Below, we’ve list­ed sev­er­al new pieces of soft­ware that will let you suck more edu­ca­tion­al media (DVDs, web videos, audio files, etc.) into your iPod. And we’ve also list­ed some impor­tant pieces of con­tent that will make your iPod a bet­ter learn­ing gad­get. So here it goes and be sure to vis­it our Pod­cast Library and our relat­ed piece 10 Signs of Intel­li­gent Life at YouTube:

1) Put Wikipedia on Your Ipod: Ency­clopo­dia is a free piece of soft­ware that brings Wikipedia to the iPod. Ency­clopo­dia can be installed on iPod gen­er­a­tions 1 through 4, as well as iPod Min­is. Def­i­nite­ly worth a try.

2) Watch DVDs on Your iPod: This free, open source soft­ware works on MacOS X, Lin­ux and Win­dows, and makes it sim­ple to load and watch DVDs on your video iPod. Here are some help­ful instruc­tions to get you start­ed.

3) Load YouTube Videos to Your iPod: Con­vert­Tube allows you to take any YouTube video and con­vert it to a for­mat that works on your iPod. It’s as sim­ple as enter­ing a url and click­ing “con­vert and down­load.” If you want to give the soft­ware a test run, try con­vert­ing these UC Berke­ley cours­es that were recent­ly launched on YouTube. Or these Nobel Prize speech­es.

4) Make Oth­er Video For­mats iPod-Ready: Life­hack­er recent­ly men­tioned three oth­er pieces of soft­ware that will make a vari­ety of oth­er video for­mats iPod-ready. For Win­dows, see Vide­o­ra; for Mac, see iSquint. Or more gen­er­al­ly see Zamzar. In a nut­shell, these items will turn a wide range of video for­mats into the one video for­mat (MPEG‑4) that your iPod likes.

5) Con­vert MP3 files into One Big iPod Audio­book File: Down­load­ing free audio­books can often require you to work with a series of sep­a­rate mp3 files, which can make things rather cum­ber­some. This soft­ware does you a favor and mash­es the files into one man­age­able file. And it has a fea­ture that will let your Ipod remem­ber where you stopped if you decide to take a break. (If this one appeals to you, be sure to see item # 10.)

6) Cre­ate eBooks for the iPod: This bit of soft­ware turns text files into ebooks that you can read on your iPod. After you load a text file, it will make the text read­able through iPod Notes (which you can find under “Extra Sett­tings”). Then, voila, a portable text. Thanks to Pachecus.com for point­ing this one out.

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Want the quick overview of what Apple has in the pipeline for ’08? Here it is:

The Ipod Radio Remote — Here’s a small gad­get worth check­ing out. Sim­ply attach it to your iPod and you can start lis­ten­ing to the radio (some­thing that always seemed miss­ing). I just got one, and it works real­ly well. So I fig­ured that I’d give it a quick plug. In case you’re inter­est­ed, Ama­zon sells it cheap­er than Apple, although you may want to read the reviews on the Apple site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

10 Ways to Make Your iPod a Bet­ter Learn­ing Gad­get

How many days, weeks or months before your iPod goes kaput? This web site will give you an esti­mate. Per­haps a handy tool for any­one who con­sumes all of the pod­casts that we throw your way.

Check out our col­lec­tion of Ideas & Cul­ture Pod­casts