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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. :)
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.
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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
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"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?
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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.
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
Attention Class, For Todays Field Trip we will be visiting CompUSA and seeing who can steal the most software.
...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.
"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.
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.
for people who have physical disabilities (such as deafness) that would prevent them from learning the material by hearing it a single time
This would also work for people who don't speak the language in which the course is taught. They could just play it back louder.
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I'm not certain if its the same university, but I was reading another article on creative uses in education, and they were doing some very cool things. One class set-it up so that the class lecture, curriculum, research, and notes as well as student projects were available for sync-ing. Students could plug there iPod into any number of iMacs in a pre-configured lab, to get all the new lectures. They could then listen/re-listen to lectures as needed. Additionly any new files designated by the instructor were also sync'd to the iPod, and students could place their projects in public folder, were others could download it and view it, listen to it, etc.
It combined using the iPod for as a MP3 player, as well as the hard drive to exchange and port files, media and documents.
Apparently being able to listen to the lecture and discussions more than once, not only improved retention of knowledge, but increased student participation in future discussions, etc.
It sounded as if it made the class much more exciting. Now of course, part of this excitement was probably just from the fact that the instructors had to rethink their entire syllabus, and revise it to actually be used with the iPod, which probably freed them from a lot of the boring standby material. But the fact that students for additional semesters were willing to purchases their own iPods, if they could just take the class, proves the value of the new format.