Sound the trumpets!! The walls around education’s gardens are falling down. Starting tomorrow, learning nodes and nuggets can be created a zillion ways and connected to by students in the open App Store.
Opening tomorrow, the Apple App Store is a pooling of “for sale” stuff with knickknacks and nodes of free innovation bubbling up from the golden swamp. (“Golden swamp” being the chaos that is the open Net.) The App Store is set up to connect the individual mobile phone owner with individual applications — purchased or free — with the mobile owner in making the choice and decision.
In the following excerpt from today’s New York Times story about the App Store, the point is made about which operating system might win for mobiles. An underlying principle bigger than any single operating system — and the incredibly wonderful thing that Apple has done — is that apps can openly interact with mobile users, content creators, and each other. Steve Jobs and Apple have made that openness real at the App Store, taking a large step into the global golden age of learning.
When Apple opens its online App Store for iPhone software on Thursday, Steven P. Jobs will be making an attempt to dominate the next generation of computing as it moves toward Internet-connected mobile devices.
The store, which will offer more than 500 software applications, including games, educational programs, mobile commerce and business productivity tools, may be a far more important development than the iPhone 3G, which goes on sale at the same time. An abundance of software could make the iPhone’s operating system dominant among an abundance of competing phones.
