iTunesU and SHED

A couple of other things of interest discussed at the RUGIT meeting - one was iTunesU, and how many universities were signing up to it. Several already have, and the evidence is that putting some of your prestigious lectures up can be a powerful marketing tool. We're certainly looking at it, and will have to get iTunes working properly on our managed service this summer in order to launch it later this year. As well as public content you can put internal content up available on to you institution. Probably best for most of our stuff until we can be sure that our lecturers have cleared copyright on all of their slides.... Have a look at the Open University and UCL on iTunesU if you want to see how it can be used.

The other interesting development relates to the shared service discussions and a proposal to get some funding to look at the possibility of a shared data centre service , particularly for high end computing, but it could be extended to cover other enterprise wide services. Such a shared data centre is unlikely to be just in one location, but could be in a couple of major centres. Just an idea the the moment but I'll keep you posted. At the moment the project is going by the acronym of SHED - which I think stands for shared higher education data service - but I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong!