UA Apple Executive Briefing May 9, 2008

Our agenda looked like this:

8:15-8:45 Welcome and Introductions & Briefing Objectives Lisa Sandrini, Business Development Specialist and Glen Banks, our UA Account Executive. (personal note: in previous jobs at the U of Delaware and the UA Library I regularly dealt with vendor reps from huge companies like IBM to small software application producers. I find Glen the most responsive and genuine that I've ever met.)

8:45-9:45 Apple in Higher Education Kris Bazán, Sr. Group Manager, Higher Education Marketing. Ms. Bazán reviewed the factors that Apple has identified as driving its presence in higher education. These factors include the way content is delivered (think iTunes U), how devices impact higher education (think mobile computing/iPods), and the changes to the physical campus (think social networks and collaboration). Ways that Apple is addressing these factors include 1) moving to the Intel-based platform which positioned Apple to provide computers capable of supporting all kinds of applications; 2) iTunes U which, besides being an important educational resource, has given Apple access to campus provosts and presidents; 3) collaboration tools - wikis and blogs - delivered in Leopard; 4) student market which as grown significantly as the computer chosen by incoming freshmen. Apple's business strategy for addressing these factors, Ms. Bazán told us, is to offer higher ed institutions three professional development opportunities: 1) The Digital Campus Academy, 2) Campus Leadership Consulting, and 3) Faculty Development Seminars. See this PDF for a review of these three programs and related costs. During her presentation she showed a short video about the University of Wisconsin's digital learning environment, which enables faculty to easily create and distribute content, and for students to access that content from computers and mobile devices. For the UA, implementing Apple's Podcast Producer will, I think, be extremely important in realizing a learning environment that meets UA students learning styles.

10:00-11:00 Apple Corporate Overview, Joan Hoover, Director, Investor Relations. I I didn't take notes on this presentation but truthfully found it much more interesting than I'd anticipated. Ms. Hoover has been at Apple for 21 years and weather the ups and downs. Happily for her and the nearly 30,000 other Apple employees, Apple has been doing quite well over the past few years. We saw lots of graphs and quotes from IT financial industry showing significant growth each quarter for the past three years. One thing she said that stuck with me is that Apple targets a specific market and wants to be best at that market.

11:00-12:15 iTunes U & Mobile Learning Miguel Young, Sr. Manager, iTunes U & Mobile Learning. Miguel is the Apple contact I've dealt with for the most part with our iTunes U implementation. I think I recall him telling me that he came to Apple from the U. of Iowa in the late 1990s. He reviewed iTunes U and our UA iTunes U site with the UA group and it sure didn't hurt that he and Glen spoke highly of our site. Steve Francis also joined us for that session. Steve is a project manager for iTunes U and he gets to develop iTunes U's main page. As he once said, "can you believe I get paid to do this!"

12:15-1:00 lunch break and trip to the Company Store. (this is nothing like the company store in Tennessee Ernie Ford's song) We're told that you can't buy Apple logo goods outside of the store, so it has a certain mystical aura about it. And yes, I bought myself an official Apple logo polo shirt and t-shirt that has I VISITED THE MOTHERSHIP on it.

1:00-2:15 Solutions for Content Creation & Collaboration Steve Sullivan, Consulting Engineer Manager, EBP. This session turned out to be the most informative for me because Mr. Sullivan gave us a good overview of Apple's Podcast Producer. (OSCR's Gregory Anderson is implementing podcast producer now and he's recently shared emails with ideas on how to develop it for campus.) The most important thing, in my mind for a successful implementation is that we can use podcast producer with PCs as well as Macs because it has web-based capture. Mr. Sullivan also spoke about wiki/blog features with the Leopard release, iLife and iWork. He demonstrated how easy it is to create audio and video podcasts using iLife applications such as GarageBand and using Keynote for voice over. I've been using Audacity Studio which creates a voice capture plug-in in Powerpoint to do this and am very interested in moving to doing this with Keynote. The main thing for anyone reading this and unfamiliar with these applications and making podcasts is that Apple has engineered its software to easily "share" a file to iTunes, making it podcast-ready. Podcast Producer has an additional capability in it that enables you to share it directly to iTunes U. Can't wait to see that in action!

2:30-3:15 Technology Update Jack Quattlebaum, Consulting Engineering, EBP. Mr. Quattlebaum had a cart full of computers, monitors, drives and devices that he pulled out as he talked about Apple's hardware innovations. What Apple wants us to take away in particular is that Apple is unique in the industry because it makes the hardware + the OS + the applications software.

3:15-3:30 Wrap Up & Next Steps Discussion Glen Banks. We were pressed for time as most of the group needed to get to the airport for flights home. My sense is that everyone in the UA group had a very successful briefing and came away a greater understanding of what we can do on campus to move students and faculty forward with a UA digital learning environment.

If you'd like to talk more about any of this, feel free to let me know. And feel free to add a comment to this entry.