Abilene Christian University has a program to give all students an iPhone. They've also got a video that shows how the iPhone might be used on campus (the video is conceptual, not factual). I found some of the ideas to be pretty interesting, but wonder how much IT support would be needed to pull them off. For example, in one sequence the students type things into an application running on the iPhone and a tag cloud is built on the projected screen in real time. Slick.

The current standard in teaching IT support is Blackboard and anyone who watches this video and then thinks about what Blackboard can do will be sorely disappointed that our capabilities are so thoroughly limited by this dinosaur from the 90's. Schools pay a lot of money for Blackboard and its one of the worst Web applications you can imagine. If I worked there, I'd be embarrassed to admit it.

All this just goes to show that there's still plenty of blue ocean in the educational and instructional software market if someone were willing to crack that nut.