Apple's iPod touch and iPhone make the dominknow mobile e-learning experience sizzle

A week and a half ago the iPod touch was officially released in Canada, and this week we're rolling out the beta version of our touch and iPhone-optimized mobile portal for the dominKnow Learning Content Management System (LCMS).

The portal has been designed using the iPhone User Interface (iUI), a framework and sample code released by Joe Hewitt, a software engineer and major contributor to the iPhone development community.

Taking advantage of our iPod touch-optimized portal puts the dominKnow Learning Center in the palm of a learner's hand.

Learners can log in and access full courses, as well as Learning Objects as single-topic information and any documents or Web links added as resources to a course. Learners can also access their internal e-mail inbox, progress reports and more.

We knew as soon as we had the iPod touch in our hands that this device could open up tremendous new access to learning on the go - all because of Apple's focus on the user experience. There's been a fair bit of talk about these features for a while now, since the iPhone hit the U.S. last spring. Chief among these is the ability to zoom in and out when viewing a web page. This solves so many display issues typically associated with mobile web viewing.

Our office has been buzzing with excitement over this for the past two weeks, starting with our CTO, Luke Hickey, who kicked off the portal project as soon as he had his iPod touch in hand.

Since then, team members have been walking around the office, showing each other the latest additions and tweaks to the portal. I can't count the number of hallway huddles I've been in, as people gather around to see the portal in action - it creates that kind of interest.

I've had my iPod touch for a week and a half, and so far I've spent far more time using Safari than I have listening to music - the Web user experience is that good. And it's easy to see so many ways it can get even better moving forward.

The iPod touch really points to a whole new generation of devices that could put this technology to great effect. It seems inevitable, for instance, that one next step will be a full laptop device with touch control, and in fact tech blog sites like engadget have been buzzing about just such a device since last year. (I already find the iTouch so much quicker for Internet searches at home and when traveling, since the power-up process is so much faster than my laptop.)

For many people the iPhone is already that device, and Apple's announcement that it will release a Software Developer Kit (SDK) in February should make things really start to cook.