It's getting to be the 'in' thing for Colleges and Universities. The University of Florida at Gainesville is now requiring incoming pharmacy students for the fall semester to have either an iPhone or an iPod touch.

The student Newspaper, the Alligator, quotes the College of Pharmacy Dean William Riffee saying:

"These are the instruments at the forefront that are developing applications for medical uses by the hundreds. We want our students to become adept at using these mobile devices early on because we see this as the future in pharmacy practice."

The Dean also owns an iPhone so he knows of what he speaks.

In May, the University of Missouri School of Journalism also required the popular Apple devices, saying they would be helpful for recording lectures and other academic uses.

This is obviously a good thing for Apple, and the University thinks it is a good thing for students. It's not so good, however, if you already own a Zune.

Thanks to Billy S. for the tip

Ars Technica is reporting that Apple has considered plans to sell the iPhone 3G directly on US college campuses. Some campuses do already sell Apple products in their on-campus stores; however, this varies by university.

If Apple marketed the phone directly to the students, this could definitely move Apple closer to the 18 million goal for 2008. Ars Technica also notes that a recent AppleInsider post speculates that a Best Buy deal could be in the works after the "old" iPhone's "grey-markets" put a hold on those plans. However, we know of one college that Apple probably won't be waiting in line to market their iPhone 3G to.

[via Ars Technica]

We haven't talked about iTunes U here in a while, but it's been on my mind lately, as I'm heading up my U's roll-out. It's a long, tortuous process--because of our internal bureaucracy, not Apple's--but, despite the fact I haven't been talking to our official reps (the extent of those conversations has been "we're still working out the details"), I have had the opportunity to sit down with some people from Apple and talk about the project. One of the topics of discussion was the direction of iTunes U 2.0 development. Apparently Apple has significantly increased the personnel dedicated to the project and has a number of enhancements planned. The person I was talking to couldn't tell me what, exactly, but he said that they were looking at community feature requests. Naturally, my next question was "well, what features have people requested?" The answers surprised me. Among the most requested features is on-site storage. This was a little bit of a shock, since one of the selling points for me was letting Apple handle the potentially multi-terabyte storage requirements and not worring about managing--not to mention funding--a SAN of that size myself. I can understand, though, that people want to keep control of their own information, and have on-site backups, etc. Closely following that was e-commerce capability. Again, a bit of a surprise. I wouldn't expect a free service to allow me to charge for access. on the other hand, I suspect that some professors would like to include materials that require royalty payment, so some vehicle for processing that will be required eventually, I suppose.

The #1 request, though, completely floored me: DRM. In fact, it is so in-demand that it has apparently been the deal-breaker for the majority of universities that had been approached about iTunes U and refused. That revelation literally left me speechless. It's one thing to realize that not everyone is as rabidly anti-DRM as I am, but DRM in the classroom flies in the face of not only my general IP position, but everything I like to believe about academic freedom. I've heard of cases, of course, where universities have claimed faculty-developed course materials as work-for-hire and property of the university, but that's never been the case at any university I've been associated with and I've generally understood that those were fringe cases. The idea that a significant number of universities would refuse to participate in iTunes U because of a lack of DRM is just...staggering.

Of course, that doesn't mean that FairPlay or any other DRM will find its way into iTunes U. But if Apple is dedicated to the project and the one of the biggest stumbling blocks seems to be DRM, well, you do the math.

And the worst part? If FairPlay does show up it won't be Apple's fault, or even the RIAA's. The universities will have done it to themselves.

Update: just wanted to clarify that second sentence a little. It's come to my attention that the original wording led a couple of people to jump to incorrect conclusions. You guys remember the bit about "assume," right?