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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.
If I can get a 30gb iPod for free it might be worth the effort for about a week. :)
I'm not seeing it.... unless they mean installing Linux.
Random is the New Order.
= "I wonder what is the most creative way to slit my wrists"
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Vonal Declosion
What would also be really neat is if iPods could record. I could definitely see how having a 10-20Gb minirecorder could be really useful for classes. I've always wanted to be able to record lectures and play them back later with a high degree of ease. Laptops OTOH are not too well suited for this and you need a lot of space for a full course load.
Over all, this is a really cool idea.
Join Tor today!
University professors say the gadgets have helped the students think more critically about their Gothic Imagination course.
That's a lot of Bauhaus and Sisters of Mercy songs.
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.
All I get is an education. I don't want that crap. I want my free iPOD. Damn you WCC
Got Extra Money?
"I not only use it for class assignments but for personal use as well." I wonder what kind of personal use this dude was talking about? Surely not the 17,000 over the next 3 years kind?
What, me Tweet?
When or if or how Apple is going to release some kind of documentation for us to play with the guts. its obviously updateable and from a xserve cluster article I saw that they have already been re-programmed as headless lcuster administration tools. That and "dual processors" and "cd burning capabilities" why shouldnt we the owners be let in at some point. On an official Apple message board it was recently relayed to the community that ipod software 2.0 will NOT be availible for the first gen ipods...well I dont see anything that pushes the capabilities...why not let us have a look?
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
Sure there are other things you can do with the i-Pod, but when schools are getting bothered by the RIAA all the time, this doesn't seem to make much sense. Well... unless they really like having the RIAA after them? I don't know.
Most colleges claim that lectures are copyright by whomever is giving the lecture. That is, if your professor gives a lecture, the professor owns the lecture and you are not allowed to duplicate it without permission. Most also have policies mandating permission to record be given for people who have physical disabilities (such as deafness) that would prevent them from learning the material by hearing it a single time.
I'm interested to hear what Slashdottians think about this. It does cause obvious problems with using Ipods as study aids!
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.
It works for audio, text, contacts and calendar. I see the use for this course but it seems a bit of a stretch to make this practice widely available. Libraries could use ipods for checking out audio content which could save on duplication costs but campus networks could also share the files. Which would save a bunch on hardware, over the ipod option at least.
Seems like a better marketing plan then educational tool.
MP3s, OS X/Office X, Linux...
The coolest voice ever.
Sounds like the iPod would actually be useful as part of the coursework, but is that benefit really outweighing the cost?
Apple donated the first batch, but they aren't going to keep doing that. Someone has to pay for them at some point.
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
... and call it a laptop?
Where do you study, the University of DURRRRRR?
Attention Class, For Todays Field Trip we will be visiting CompUSA and seeing who can steal the most software.
I think it is actually possible to use a gizmo such as an iPod for tax write-off purposes. I think if you review it for an Established Publication(tm), you can then write it off. But don't take my word for it; I've only heard of it being done. (A tax accountant would be much better to ask about how to make it a valid write-off.) I'm really not sure how it could become an education write-off.
-- haaz.
That's just like my crack dealer buying me a new pipe.
Wait until the RIAA hears about this. Talk about a revenue stream!
...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.
Let's see... Congress has a huge new debt cieling that it's about to approve, and the dollar has fallen to new lows, and invester confidence is in the toilet tank, and somebody thinks that they'll be able to deduct something from their taxes?
Definitely time to go back to school.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Ugh, feature creep. No offense, but most of the appeal of the iPod is that it is small, lightweight, has decent battery life, and does one thing really well.
By the time all that was added, you wouldn't have an iPod anymore, you would have a sub-notebook.
"There is always an easy solution to every human problem -neat, plausible, and wrong." - H. L. Mencken
If your point is that a lot of technological innovations don't seem to improve education much and turn out to be a much-hyped waste of money, then fair enough. If your point is that this is an example of liberal-arts institutions wasting money, then I'd point out that the iPods were donated by the private sector and no liberal arts institutions were harmed by the creation of this experiment. -nudicle
"their Gothic Imagination course"
I didn't know iPods came in black.
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
...Apple donated about 50 iPods as part of an experimental project...
There goes profitability for the next 2 quarters.
That's called an iBook.
You're right, good idea though.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
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
And I would like to see what kind of Goth iPod mod someone could come up with.. black face-plate with red back-light?
1 - Give free iPods to college students.
2 - Wait a few months and sue them for all the "illegal" music they have stored there.
3 - Profit! (receive tens of thousands of dollars in settlements)
Don't be so sure that you can't record on the new Gen 2 iPod as a LINEIN setting has been discovered in Diagnostic Mode.
The government is very explicit with educational expenses you can itemize. Books are not included and neither are mandatory fees...just tuition -- UNLESS it's directly related to your CURRENT career. So if i take linguistics (future career) classes, i can only write off the tuition for that classes' credits, and with calc classes (current career) I can write off pretty much everything. However, you might be able to write it off as a development tool; i am. The general rule is items used 80% (i think) of the time for work can be written off. My iPod has my current codebase and tasklist on it 100% of the time. So you know, there's $500.
Of course, the problem is getting the auditor to believe that.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Disclaimer: I do not like to promote academic dishonesty, I just like to point out the obvious!
Coderz 4 Life
"Sony has donated 500 Playstation 2's, Force Feedback Steering Wheels and Gran Turismo 3 games to students of a California high school so that they may practice their Driver Education class.
'I think this Playstation is great!' said one sophmore, 'I'm doing so much better in my Driver Ed class, but I think it's hurt the rest of my studies because I spend all my time playing.'
School officials hope to use the game systems for other classes as well. 'Soon we plan on purchasing 500 copies of Grand Theft Auto 3 as part as our Criminal Law class to demonstrate that crime doesn't pay.' said superintendent Seymour Butts."
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Seems somewhat primitive at this point, but has possibilities!
At Berklee College of Music... having an iPod can be included in Finacial aid i think. It's pretty well recommended and common to have one...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
The new iPods can record, but the feature is hidden away in the diagnostic menu...
Linkage:
Diagnostic mode with mention of line-in recording
Mono recording short clips with diagnostic mode and earbuds
Maybe something Apple has planned for the next software update?
I live about 40 miles from GC&SU. I know the head of IT there (though he probably doesn't have much to do with this, he is the chair of the statewide IT committee and is very on top of things) and I have to read about this on the BBC's site?
:)
GC&SU is a nice campus - kinda out in nowhere, the campus (mostly old buildings) makes up a lot of the town. They have wireless all over the campus and purposly spills over into surrounding student hot-spots. I think they even have a point-to-point wireless link to the downtown to provide access to students while there.
Nice cafeteria too