“Duke spent more than one half million dollars this fall to supply each incoming freshman with an Apple iPod. The program is aimed at getting lectures, language materials, Duke maps and fight songs into the hands of each incoming freshman,” Alexander Rafael and Emily Anderson report for Newsweek.
“For Lisa Merschel, a professor in the Spanish department at Duke, the program has revolutionized her students’ experience with language. ‘Before, I would just play a CD in front of the whole class and there would be some students whose eyes would glaze over after the first couple of seconds and some who would get this intense look of fear on their faces,’ she explains. ‘With the iPods, each student can listen at their own pace and they have the control to pause or replay certain parts… I find that the slower students have more confidence.’ The technology has made her grading process more efficient as well. ‘It’s digital, easier, and faster.’ Merschel even believes that the iPod program has helped to break down traditional barriers between professors and students. ‘It’s extremely beneficial, especially for languages, and I have to say I’m getting a much closer relationship with my students,'” Rafael and Anderson report.
Still, not all students are convinced. ‘They’re really useful to listen to music on – while I go running or on the bus – but mostly I don’t need them for my classes and I haven’t heard of anyone needing them. I think the program has a lot of room for growth. If the professors get more involved and know more ways to use the iPod during their classes, it would be really beneficial,’ says Katie Brehm, a freshman at Duke,” Rafael and Anderson report.
Full article here.
And around 6.5% of these Freshmen will switch to Macs in the future.
It’s a good plan. Hook ’em before corporate business (and Dull) corrupt them.
Well if anyone needs to remind themselves how truly awlful the Windoze interface is, go ahead and download this opensource “OpenOffice” program for Mac OS X.
http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/index.php
Reports I hear they are redoing it so it matches Mac OS X, but at least you can use a free cross platform Office program.
No wonder Windoze users are a depressed bitter lot.
Oh yea, what’s up with all the depressing GRAY? I get down just looking at it.
🙁
I would say this is another reason to have a built-in microphone for a “student” version of the iPod, but all you need is the professors to get involved by recording their lectures and posting them to a server so students can download them to their computers and then their iPods.
Now if you could get iListen or Via Voice to take an mp3 or AAC file and have it create transcripts. If it is all digital, you should be able to take a one hour lecture and create the transcript in about 5 minutes.
The statement by the student illustrates a lack of imaginative thinking. I would record every lecture and have it for reference. She is probably right that the teachers need to think more on how they can integrate the ipod into their classes though.
If I was a teacher I would have every lecture available for download and assign students to listen to additional mini lectures for homework that they would be quizzed on. Rather than hand out worksheets I would have them as notes to be downloaded put in their ipod also. The iPod photo would be even more helpful though. You could have the students download slide shows and pictures to be used for review.
I am sure once you got into it there would be a lot of other possible applications that would come to mind.
The money spent on iPods would have been better spent of books, of which there are a shortage in UK classrooms.
Benn,
In the U.S., at the college/university level, students are required to purchase their/our own textbooks. Books are only provided for students in the K-12 grade (elementary & secondary) levels.
This story merely illustrates how a (major) US university is trying to utilize existing technology for the benefit of its students.
I have been involved with the Duke iPod project as a part of an academic consortium working directly with Apple (I am not on the Duke faculty, but I am in higher education at another University) … we have been discussing the applications for some time and they are really doing some amazing things … it will take some time for it to really catch on. They have worked with Apple to create an academic version of the music store — it is a great idea and one that should grow as a model ofr content distribution.
Someone here said something like, all faculty have to do is record lectures and students will listen … well, I’ve been experimenting with that this semester with mixed results. The real power of the iPod is in its ability to do so much more — it can be used for assessment (with the built in ratings system), for creating “choose your own ending” style interactive scenarios that students can work through, and of course audio programs. With RSS enclosures, faculty can drop content directly on students’ desktops as they see fit. Here’s an example:
http://www.higherweb.com/blog/2004/07/listen-up-ipod-can-change-grading.html
The big rub in the Duke (or any other) project is that faculty have to take the lead to get the materials to students. When we release new instructional technology initiatives at my University, we focus our adoption efforts on faculty — students get it very quickly. Its faculty who have to take time, develop places for it in their classrooms and develop a comfort level with it. The bottom line is that Duke has made incredible progress on several fronts — their ability to work with Apple to build a customized �store,� building a support unit within the University, and for providing a vision for this type of mobile technology. The full effects and adoption will take several years — if it is going be successful. Sorry for the long rant.
Thanks for the info Cole – very interesting stuff you are doing there, keep up the good work. Personally though, as I have said before, the priority should be for proper funding of text books at Universities before money is spent on luxury items like iPods, or at the very least make sure that the Campus library is well stocked, which in many cases it is not.
Benn, you keep on harping on textbooks at universities. In the USA, UNIVERSITIES DON’T SUPPLY THE TEXTBOOKS! They simply tell the students which books to buy.
And I’ve never seen a library at a USA university which was not well-stocked. We here in the “colonies”, not having nearly as long a literary tradition as the UK, have developed an appreciation for literature that only converts can understand.
However, we’re pretty good with technology, and its application to the classroom, too. And a half-million dollars (only �300K or so) isn’t much to spend on this – that’s probably only the tuition of 20 students or so.
For Benn�Your obviously not from the US. In America, colleges and universities DO NOT supply textbooks. Students must pay for them or come up with a useful alternative to have access to them. Only in the K-12 system are textbooks provided. Now, I’ve seen some universities with horrid libraries, but most of them are rather impressive, and with interlibrary loans if they don’t have the book you want, you can still get it fairly rapidly. Despite the requirement of a college degree to get a number of well paying jobs, universities are still considered a privilege in the US, meaning the students, students family or some benefactor pays for cost of attendance, books, materials, living expenses, etc.
I think what Duke is doing is pretty impressive. Even more so, since a dedicated course of action wasn’t developed. I’m certain it will take some time and creativity before teachers really understand ways to transform their traditional preparation into avenues that leverage the iPod. But I think this is true across the board, not just in education.
For example, I’ve been working on a community weblog, for a single neighborhood in Wisconsin. As part of the project goals, we hope to also offer, neighborhood tours�information on historical houses, parks, and other places of significance for download to the iPod, so people could do the tour individually. Walking by Simeon’s Folly, think its cool, click on your iPod, scroll to the Simeon’s Folly listing and hear an overview of when it was built, who built it, when it received landmark status, and other details.
There’s probably even more things that could be done, that we just haven’t even thought about yet, and I imagine that’s true for most of the professors and their classes. Look at Panda languages. I’m not seriously studying Japanese, but it’s great to be able to look up a word or phrase and hear how it should be said, rapidly. I do it just for fun, but it would be great to use the iPod in conjunction with an actual language class, or a literature class.
I already use my iPod to record meetings, and conferences, eschew notes
It surprises me how people are critical of Duke for spending a relatively small amount of money for a major university to “seed” what could develop into a new, more efficient, and more advantageous paradigm for academic content transfer. I went to Dartmouth in the 80’s and every student was required to reach a minimum competency in a foreign language. Most students took from 1 to 3 courses, depending on their entry level test scores. Of course, those with an interest took more, and many took a trimester abroad. I spent many, many hours (at least 75 hours) in the language lab, using functional, but still cumbersome AV equipment to go over the lessons (again and again). To me, having the iPod for those lessons would be greatly beneficial, and I guarantee it would have improved my language learning. Plus, it allows you access to the lessons 24/7! You could be hanging on the green, awaiting a friend, and do a little language work there! I also took a music theory course, and the iPod would have many advantages to that course’s cassette tapes and my tape player.
Scot, “people” aren’t critical of Duke–one brainless git with a spare letter in his name is critical of Duke, and unfortunately it doesn’t seem that he will ever understand that universities in the US don’t buy textbooks for the students, the students buy them, and as for Duke’s library the great git couldn’t even be bothered to do a couple of clicks and notice that Duke is roughly doubling the size of their library:
http://www.lib.duke.edu/perkproj/mainsite.html
Opinionated Jerk…
I looked up “git” and it’s a form of the word “get” or it means “gate” or “door.”
Maybe you could explain your usage of the word? I already gather it’s a slang for something.
twilightmoon
A quick search at urbandictionary.com returned this:
1. Git
1. A completely ignorant, childish person with no manners.
2. A person who feels justified in their callow behaviour.
3. A pubescent kid who thinks it’s totally cool to act like a moron on the internet, only because no one can actually reach through the screen and punch their lights out.
jack
3. A pubescent kid who thinks it’s totally cool to act like a moron on the internet, only because no one can actually reach through the screen and punch their lights out.
lol.. thanks Jack.. and I like #3 the best!
“I find that the slower students have more confidence”
nice!!!
If you want more books for the classroom and library, how about stopping the practice of publishers coming out with UNNECESSARY and unwanted updates for their textbooks every year so students have to buy NEW books! A teacher can not just decide to use last years books because they are no longer available.