The small, fashionable and powerful iPod seems to have made a breakthrough on its way into university classrooms, as the Christian Science Monitor, a daily newspaper, reported yesterday. In the article When iPod goes collegiate Elisabeth Moore explores the chances and perspectives of the use of iPods in universities, such as Duke, Georgia College or Drexel University.

iPods became famous afer Apples aggressive promoting strategies some years ago. Being still expensive in price, they convince through technical stability and a brilliant design. On the other hand iPods still don't support .ogg files, audio files that are encoded with an open source codec.

So before iPods will ever be a widespread tool for learning in the public sector, some intellectual property questions will have to be resolved. This might not only be the question of the recording of the professors speeches, as discussed in the article, but also on the level of codec.

So despite all the advantages that the use of such a tool will bring for an enhanced learning experience, iPods can never make it into the classrooms sustainably unless the devices are supporting open source codes such as .ogg and the teachers teach under an open source license, such as creative commons.