A new school year is upon us here in the States and you know what that means: a new crop of articles about how iPhones/iPods are being given away to students. The most recent entry in this fine tradition comes from the New York Times.
The University of Maryland, Oklahoma Christian University, Abilene Christian and Freed-Hardeman are all planning on giving students iPhones or iPod touches. The institutions have in mind a number of different ways that the devices can be used to enhance the education experience—with a dash of location-aware applications for good measure. Sounds great, right? What student wouldn’t want to get a free gizmo? (Free, of course, being relative, sinceI imagine the cost of the device is covered by a technology fee of some sort.)
But it’s not the students aren’t the problem in this quadratic equation of technology. Faculty members argue that students are distracted enough by laptops in the classroom, why add yet another potential intrusion? The trick, in my opinion, is to make classes so engaging that students won’t feel the need to fiddle with their cell phones, but hey, I’m just a simple caveman blogger.
Despite professors’ worries that iPhones will turn students into insular technofiends only interested in what is happening on their screens, Duke University has seen positive results from its own iPod experiment. In 2004, it started handing out iPods to students for free, the idea being that students would use the iPods to record lectures, listen to podcasts from courses, and so forth (this was before the iPod touch, so these iPods didn’t have WiFi). It turns out that in addition to consuming content with their iPods, the students were inspired to make and share content on their iPods. Sounds like an educational experience to me.
I'm now going to wind up hearing every one of your posts in my head using Phil Hartman's voice.
Love the caveman lawyer reference.
Hmm I'm going to be a freshman at the university of maryland in 6 days and I haven't heard about this yet. Hopefully it's a surprise?