Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod.
Taking a step that professors may view as a bit counterproductive, some universities are doling out Apple iPhones and Internet-capable iPods to students.
Freed-Hardeman University in Tennessee is providing incoming students with a free Apple iPhone or iPod Touch.
Students at Freed-Hardeman activate their iPhones. Experts say uses for mobile technology in education are in their infancy.
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"Are we training thinkers in our colleges or are we training gadget users?"Paul, Kalamazoo, MI
The always-on Internet devices raise some novel possibilities, like tracking where students congregate. With far less controversy, colleges could send messages about canceled classes, delayed buses, campus crises or just the cafeteria menu.
While schools emphasize its usefulness — online research in class and instant polling of students, for example — a big part of the attraction is, undoubtedly, that the iPhone is cool and a hit with students. Basking in the aura of a cutting-edge product could just help a university foster a cutting-edge reputation.
Apple stands to win as well, hooking more young consumers with decades of technology purchases ahead of them. The lone losers, some fear, could be professors.
Students already have laptops and cellphones, of course, but the newest devices can take class distractions to a new level. They practically beg a user to ignore the long-suffering professor struggling to pass on accumulated wisdom from the front of the room — a prospect that teachers find galling and students view as, well, inevitable.
“When it gets a little boring, I might pull it out,” acknowledged Naomi J. Pugh, a first-year student at Freed-Hardeman University in Henderson, Tenn., referring to her new iPod Touch, which can connect to the Internet over a campus wireless network. She speculated that professors might try harder to make classes interesting if they were competing with the devices.
Experts see a movement toward the use of mobile technology in education, though they say it is in its infancy as professors try to concoct useful applications. Providing powerful hand-held devices is sure to fuel debates over the role of technology in higher education.
“We think this is the way the future is going to work,” said Kyle Dickson, co-director of research and the mobile learning initiative at Abilene Christian University in Texas, which has bought more than 600 iPhones and 300 iPods for students entering this fall.
Although plenty of students take their laptops to class, they don’t take them everywhere and would prefer something lighter. Abilene Christian settled on the devices after surveying students and finding that they did not like hauling around laptops, but that most always carried a cellular phone, Dr. Dickson said.
It is not clear how many colleges plan to give out iPhones and iPods this fall; officials at Apple were coy about the subject and said they would not leak any institution’s plans.
“We can’t announce other people’s news,” said Greg Joswiak, vice president of iPod and iPhone marketing at Apple. He also said that he could not discuss discounts to universities for bulk purchases.
At least four institutions — the University of Maryland, Oklahoma Christian University, Abilene Christian and Freed-Hardeman — have announced that they will give the devices to some or all of their students this fall.
Other universities are exploring their options. Stanford University has hired a student-run company to design applications like a campus map and directory for the iPhone. It is considering whether to issue iPhones but not sure it’s necessary, noting that more than 700 iPhones were registered on the university’s network last year.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, iPhones might already have been everywhere, if AT&T, the wireless carrier offering the iPhone in the United States, had a more reliable network, said Andrew J. Yu, mobile devices platform project manager at M.I.T.
“We would have probably gone ahead of this, maybe just getting a thousand iPhones and giving them out,” Mr. Yu said.
The University of Maryland, College Park is proceeding cautiously, giving the iPhone or iPod Touch to 150 students, said Jeffrey C. Huskamp, vice president and chief information officer at the university. “We don’t think we have all the answers,” Mr. Huskamp said. By observing how students use the gadgets, he said, “We’re trying to get answers from students.”
At each college, the students who choose to get an iPhone must pay for mobile phone service. Those service contracts include unlimited data use. Both the iPhones and the iPod Touch devices can connect to the Internet through campus wireless networks. With the iPhone, those networks may provide faster connections and longer battery life than AT&T’s data network. Many cellphones allow users to surf the Web, but only some newer ones have Wi-Fi capability.
University officials say they have no plans to track their students (and Apple said it would not be possible unless students give their permission). They say they are drawn to the prospect of learning applications outside the classroom, though such lesson plans have yet to surface.
“My colleagues and I are studying something called augmented reality,” said Christopher J. Dede, professor in learning technologies at Harvard University. “Alien Contact,” for example, is an exercise developed for middle-school students who use hand-held devices that can determine their location. As they walk around a playground or other area, text, video or audio pops up at various points to help them try to figure out why aliens were in the schoolyard.
“You can imagine similar kinds of interactive activities along historical lines,” like following the Freedom Trail in Boston, Professor Dede said. “It’s important that we do research so that we know how well something like this works.”
The rush to distribute the devices worries some professors, who say that students are less likely to participate in class if they are multitasking. “I’m not someone who’s anti-technology, but I’m always worried that technology becomes an end in and of itself, and it replaces teaching or it replaces analysis,” said Ellen G. Millender, associate professor of classics at Reed College in Portland, Ore. (She added that she hoped to buy an iPhone for herself once prices fall.)
Robert S. Summers, who has taught at Cornell Law School for about 40 years, announced this week — in a detailed, footnoted memorandum — that he would ban laptop computers from his class on contract law.
“I would ban that too if I knew the students were using it in class,” Professor Summers said of the iPhone, after the device and its capabilities were explained to him. “What we want to encourage in these students is active intellectual experience, in which they develop the wide range of complex reasoning abilities required of the good lawyers.”
The experience at Duke University may ease some concerns. A few years ago, Duke began giving iPods to students with the idea that they might use them to record lectures (these older models could not access the Internet).
“We had assumed that the biggest focus of these devices would be consuming the content,” said Tracy Futhey, vice president for information technology and chief information officer at Duke.
But that is not all that the students did. They began using the iPods to create their own “content,” making audio recordings of themselves and presenting them. The students turned what could have been a passive interaction into an active one, Ms. Futhey said.
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美國多所大學慷慨分送學生蘋果iPhone手機，以及可隨時隨地上網的iPod，宣稱這些裝置能增進校方和學生的互動，更是有用上課輔助工具。 包括馬里蘭大學、奧克拉荷馬基督教大學、艾柏林基督教大學，和菲力哈曼大學在內，至少已有四所學校宣布今秋將發送iPod或iPhone給部份或所有學生，其他學校則在考慮各種選項。 史丹佛大學已聘請一家由學生經營的公司開發iPhone應用軟體，如校園地圖和指南，該校正考慮是否需要發送iPhone，因為去年有逾700支 iPhone在學校的網路登記。麻省理工學院（MIT）行動裝置平台專案經理安德魯．余說，若iPhone的電信供應商AT&T公司能提供更穩定 的網路服務，iPhone早就隨處可見。 這些隨時上網的裝置將帶來許多可能性，例如，可使校方追蹤學生聚會的地點，或提供其他較不具爭議的功能，例如傳送一些訊息給學生，舉凡老師臨時取消上課、校車誤點、校園緊急事件，甚至是學生餐廳的菜單。 校方強調這些裝置的效益，包括在上課堂利用網路搜尋資料以及學生的即時民調等。最重要的是，若校園裡到處可見iPhone這種先進工具，校方也能博得走在科技尖端的美譽。 艾柏林基督教大學為今秋入學的新鮮人準備了600支iPhone和300具iPod，該校的研究及行動學習計畫主管狄克森認為，使用這些手持裝置輔助教學 將是未來趨勢。狄克森說，雖然很多學生攜帶筆電上課，但不會帶著到處跑，他們偏愛較輕巧的裝置。這所大學經訪調後發現，學生們不喜歡隨身帶著筆電，但身上 總是帶著手機，因而決定選購iPhone。 蘋果公司是最大贏家，積極和有數十年科技產品購買力的年輕消費者建立關係。但有些教授卻感到憂心忡忡，擔心已有手機和筆電的學生，若再加上iPhone或 iPod，恐將更無法專心上課。在康乃爾大學法學院任教40年的桑莫斯教授本周宣布，他的課堂上不能使用筆電，也禁用iPhone。 專家發現，行動科技應用於教育是潮流所趨，雖然現在才剛起步，但由校方提供功能強大的手持裝置，勢必會引發科技在高等教育扮演角色的爭論。 |
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