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Students Get iPods as Study Aids
WIAKywbfatw writes "Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia has given iPod digital music players to its students to help them with their coursework, as reported by BBC News. Apple donated about 50 iPods as part of an experimental project to illustrate creative uses for the machine, and University professors say the gadgets have helped the students think more critically about their Gothic Imagination course." I wonder if I can write off my new iPod as an education expense.
Could an MP3 player be considered a study aid if perhaps it were to be filled with Audio Books?
A previous story about the Kalishnikov ammo magazine MP3 player led me to http://www.audiobooksforfree.com, a website that has a bunch of books in MP3 format.
But I would guess they are getting the phased out 5GB models. A little oversotck magically turned into good PR and some word of mouth sales.
I'm not sure I really see much of a point here. The iPod is a cool gadget and all (I own one in fact), but even after reading the article I don't see the benefit.
The article mentioned that not all people have broadband at home so they can't necessarily download the files easily. Isn't this what campus computer labs are for? Students could just listen to the audio there. You could use usb keys for a fraction of the price and just download the audio files to them. CDRWs would be cheaper still and you could write the audio tracks directly to them.
It would seem to me, that at $500 a piece you could give the students desktops or even laptops. Sure, they aren't as portable or cool as an iPod, but they'll play music along with having many other capabilities.
While not distributed by the school, each Mac has a firewire cable coming out the back that ends attached to the front of the machine. This way students can use their iPods (or other firewire drives) to move large video or graphic files from machine to machine. I wouldn't reccomend actually working off of the iPod for reasons of heat, and simply the fact that they aren't really made for that kind of abuse. However, for moving large files, they are great.
Oh, yeah, and they hold about 10,000 songs too. That's pretty cool.
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
...it won't happen. They're very tight about what information they release. And even then, it's often done under NDAs. Ferinstance, I recall from my LinuxPPC days the great lengths an honest developer would have to go to get documentation on a chip used in Mac hardware. And just because OS X has BSD at its core doesn't mean Apple's any more open with anything else. Proprietary thinking is still very much in the house, despite their partial embrace of open source software and open standards.
That said, there's no reason the iPod couldn't be hacked, as seems to be happening. (It's not encrypted in any way (that I know of), and therefore not under the guard of the DMCA.) But it would be quite good for Apple to open up just a little bit more.
-- haaz.
How much money do you suppose the students wasted on the free iPods that they were given (and that were donated by Apple)?
The students? None. Apple's the one wasting the money here.
If they had given the iPods to an Embedded Systems class at MIT, and challenged them to find "creative uses" for them, I'm sure we'd see a lot of newsworthy (at least Slashdot-worthy) things. But I doubt this class will find "uses" that we'd give a hoot about.
bp
That's like saying that you don't see the use of someone getting a Honda unless you can change the software that controls the car's computer.
If you want to market an MP3 player that uses Linux or some other free OS, more power to you. But to say what you're saying is just blind zealotry. Personally, I don't see a lot of use for an iPod in education (and I say that as a happy iPod owner), but it has nothing to do with religious reasons such as whether it's running an open source OS.
David
I always use about 1GB out of my 5GB iPod to do backups of my home folder. It is much faster than transferring the files to a network server that is in the tape backups schedule. THAT is business usage and can be written-off.
Pedro
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The Insomniac Coder