Mark Pentleton

The long-awaited day has arrived and in about nine hours’ time Steve Jobs will take to the stage in the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco and announce Apple’s “latest creation”. Speculation has been peaking over the past few days and weeks as to what form this creation will take, and I think that there are huge possibilities for this device, particularly in the world of education, both in its traditional in-school sense, and in a wider lifelong learning sense. However, I think that today’s event may well be more about the creation and delivery of content, and this is where the real news will be.

The rumours suggest that this device is likely to be some kind of keyboard-less tablet device, bridging the gap between the iPhone / iPod Touch and the MacBook. In my Mobile Devices presentation at BETT this year I looked at using the free content currently available through iTunes podcasts, iTunes U and on the app store on iPod Touches in the classroom. There are some amazing opportunities for engaging learners, young and old, using existing content, whether it’s fantastic language-learning podcasts ( ), learning about the history of Jazz from McGill University’s iTunes U content, or Making a Martian with your primary school learners, then thinking about how to describe it in English or indeed in any other language! Now, this same content on a larger device makes things even more interesting.

For example, I’ve just finished the latest enhanced podcast for Coffee Break French (episode 73, available later this morning) and when creating this content we have to think about the screen resolution, using really large fonts in Keynote when preparing the slides to accompany the audio. We also produce pdf lesson guides for learners to print out or to view on screen either while they listen or as an additional support before or after they listen to the lesson. The pdfs aren’t really practical to use on an iPod Touch or iPhone because of the screen size, but with a 10″ screen things could change somewhat!

It has been suggested more than once that the new device will be a “Kindle-killer”, that it will introduce a new class of ebook reader, and that it will be possible to read newspapers and magazines on the device much more intuitively – and enjoyably – than in the past. I think the key to all of this will be how this content is delivered to the device, and I would expect that it will involve podcasting. I’ve always thought that podcasting pdf documents has been one of the most underused possibilities of podcasting. It’s as easy to podcast a pdf document as it is to include audio and video in a podcast feed, and iTunes is quite capable of organising pdfs too (see Adam Burt’s work on Photocopier Podcasting for a brilliant way to distribute information in an institution). It is quite possible to include video and audio in a pdf document, but as far as I know the only way of doing this is with Acrobat, and I’ve just double-checked that you can’t export a pdf from Pages with an embedded video. So are we perhaps going to see a new version of iWork today which will allow us to create pdfs with embedded videos in Pages? Or perhaps Apple will come up with some proprietary format which combines text, images, audio, video (I’m not going to mention Flash…) and we’ll be able to create and consume the content on our new devices. I hope they don’t go this route – it’s always going to be more difficult to make a new format become standard, and makes things more difficult for content producers…

According to Wired this morning, it’s perhaps more likely to be HTML5-based, similar to the iTunes Extras content which was recently released. iTunes is already capable of presenting content which combines text, images, audio and video. So will iWeb get the much-needed makeover which would allow us to create fantastic HTML5-based content destined for this iTunes browser (and obviously also for other devices, not least standard web browsers)? Or will there be some new app added to iLife or iWork? It’ll have to be easy to use, and the creation tool I think is key. We don’t want to go back to a world where only the big publishers are capable of producing and distributing content!

Will we see a new element in the iTunes Store today? One where books, magazines and online content can be purchased? Where in-content purchasing will allow users to buy more content? Where consumers can subscribe to magazines and have them delivered automatically to the device as soon as they are ready? [Sounds very familiar...] And will there be a new App-Store-like element which allows independent content producers to deliver and sell their content? Even with a 70/30 revenue model like the App store, this presents a massive opportunity for companies like ours for a new revenue stream.

It seems that Apple has already been working with some of the major content producers: McGraw-Hill’s CEO Terry McGraw apparently let slip last night that they’ve been working with Apple for quite a while. I have to be honest and say that I’m not quite sure if it was actually a slip – perhaps it was the work of the Apple PR machine helping to push the fever further! Anyway, McGraw-Hill seem to have 95% of all their materials ready in a format which would be usable on a new device.

When iTunes U first appeared, I got the impression that some of the content was very much “videos of lectures”: you were transported into the lecture theatre with the professor standing at the front, delivering the same lecture he/she had delivered for 20 years to groups of students. While this is fine if you’re the student who missed the 9am lecture because you were out the night before, it’s not really maximising the potential of the platform. Now there’s much more content on iTunes U which is ‘made for the platform’, providing short-form video reviews of lessons, concentrating on the important points of learning. The institutions have seen the potential of the medium. I doubt that McGraw-Hill have recreated 95% of their content in a new format which combines text with images and multimedia, and I think that the real power of this device in the world of learning will come when content-creators see the potential of the device and the formats it can use. And when I say “content-creators” I’m not just talking about the big publishers or even independent content creators like Radio Lingua: I’m talking about the learners themselves. With an Apple iSlate (or iPad or Canvas or whatever it’s called!) in the classroom, a new creation tool which may combine handwriting, text entry, photos, artwork, audio recordings, music and video recordings together and packages them in a format viewable on other iSlates, iPod Touches and indeed on other devices, the possibilities are endless.

Like many geeks and non-geeks around the world, I’ll be following the event tonight (6pm UK time) on the various feeds. I hope Twitter survives what undoubtedly will be a massive load on its servers as it’s always one of the best ways to get and share in the information which appears.  I think while the tablet device will get the headlines tomorrow, the real story today is going to be about content, and hopefully about the creation of that content. Yes, it’ll be a fantastic experience consuming that content on a beautiful 10″ glass screen, but I think if Apple does for text-based content what they’ve already done for music, tv shows, films, and apps, this is the game-changer. And we’ll have a lot of thinking to do in the coming days, weeks and months! Bring it on, Steve!