Mike Keppell is the new president of ASCILITE (that’s the Australasian Society for the use of Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education), an organisation with a long and honorable history of promoting improved uses of technology in higher education down under, and whose most recent conference we have done some coverage of in another forum.

Mike is pretty excited about lots of the devices and systems that were gathered together at Macworld, because they promise to make a massive impact on the way we go about our teaching and learning in universities. In particular, increasing mobility and interoperability mean that we will of necessity become much more learner-centric, especially as learners acquire enhanced capacities to collect content on the fly, and indeed to generate their own content.

In this podcast Mike speaks to an equally excited Allan Carrington, for whom, of course, the question of how we disseminate and implement the visionary ideas inspired by Macworld is never too far away.

We all know that the iPod spearheaded a revolution in the way we think of and utllise personal entertainment. And some of us right now have a sense that the iPhone is leading a radical change in the way we go about our personal and professional business. Well, Joe Morelock, from the Canby School District in Oregon, and Kathy Shirley, from the Escondido Union School District in California, reckon that the iPod Touch has a similar revolutionary potential in the educational sector.

At Macworld today Joe and Kathy ran a workshop on that topic, entitled Tap into Something More: Using iPod Touch in the Classroom. Well, it wasn’t actually about educational revolutions per se. It was more of an opportunity for participants to get some hands-on experience of just what this device might be able to do for education, in the right pedagogical hands, that is, as Joe and Kathy explain in this interview with Ian Green.

Joe and Kathy are both Apple Distinguished Educators, and you can access a whole range of iPod Touch material that they have assembled, including guides, examples, resources etc., at Kathy’s iPoddess (yes, that’s ‘iPoddess’ as in ‘goddess’) and iRead sites.