As you may know, I’ve been an iPhone user since a couple of days after their big release last summer (no, I didn’t camp out for it; I strolled into an Apple Store a couple of days later and they had plenty in stock). Of course, one of the first things I began thinking about was how to put it into use in SIM and education in general. A particularly nice feature is that a savvy web programmer can develop sites and applications designed to work on the iPhone’s smaller screen and touch-friendly controls–this puts mobile application development within the reach of what we do at CRL.

Anyway, last week I worked on a small school project in which we explored the merit of iPhones in education. This is still a new topic, so there’s not really any published literature on it, but we found some like-minded souls in our search. Abiliene Christian University, a small, private school in Texas, is leading the way. They have an excellent blog called iThinkEd where their findings.

Yesterday, ACU announced they will begin handing iPhones out for free to incoming freshmen, beginning this fall. Students will be able to “receive homework alerts, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, get directions to their professors’ offices, and check their meal and account balances” via web-based applications developed by the school.

This is going to be a great model for what we want to do in terms of Stratepedia and the mobile web. Imagine feeding data into Dossier from the back of a classroom by quietly tap-tap-tapping an iPhone screen, or accessing on-demand video models anytime. We’re pretty excited to see what we can start rolling out.

If you’re interested in mobile uses of the Internet in general or the iPhone in particular, the ACU initiative will be a project to keep an eye on (tip: check out Amber’s RSS tutorial, then add iThinkEd’s feed to your feed reader).

Got any other iPhone questions or mobile web services you’d like to see Stratepedia provide? Leave a comment below!

Tags: iphone