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Duke University Giving iPods To 1650 Freshmen
baptiste writes "Duke University has entered into an agreement with Apple to distribute iPods to all of the incoming freshmen this year - that's 1650 iPods! This agreement is part of an initiative to "encourage creative uses of technology in education and campus life" The iPods will have audio and text on them including special university content such as "faculty-provided course content, including language lessons, music, recorded lectures and audio books." Faculty will be assisted in creating new content for these devices by Duke's Center for Instructional Technology And here you thought iPods were just for music!"
As someone whose friend was the student advisor to OIT (Duke's equivalent of the department that breaks computers on campus) on this monumental (and drool-worthy, click wheels...) project, I think that they made this decision based on several factors, including the "ooh, pretty!" factor.
Duke has reasonable coverage of computers everywhere, but their filesystem on campus is pretty esoteric (and a pain to navigate) if you want to transfer files back and forth. We're pretty much still stuck on Zips and transferring by email, etc etc. I think the latest stat was that 91% of kids on campus had one computer (at least). The thing is, though, you walk into a computer lab on campus and the bigger ones are almost always full of people, because it's a easy way to check email or do whatever without braving our really lame transportation system.
In the grand tradition of certain majors, too, we huddle in unix and windows labs at odd hours to program. Yes, we're still learning about OS using NACHOS. Duke's tried making us use CVS for stuff, but CVS is broken on our system and we have to resort to really weird measures in order to backup our files.
Sure, we could get a Zire, but how much would that cover with people carrying huge files back and forth? iPods are just hard drives anyways. I've seen some engineers (and computer science majors) hauling substantial fileage back and forth between dorm and class (and their Solaris lab, crappy as hell but comfy for all nighters).
At the same time, Duke's pretty much plastered with iPods already. A frosh class with ipods will just be the equivalent of previous frosh classes with their little Duke lanyards. A thousand or so more really won't make THAT much of a difference.
And let's face it, when you're talking 20000 for tuition, 4000 for an average crappy double, then 2500 or so for meals and way too much for books later, a few hundred for a white hard drive that your kid is going to phone home about in a few weeks and whine to get isn't going to hurt anymore than what you're already shelling out.
Besides, Duke's already raised the tuition for this year, even before the inclusion of the iPod. My firstborn is being auctioned on eBay as we speak.
I will be a senior at a "laptop school" on the east coast. At my school, each student is forced to rent an iBook to use during the four school years. Now since the entire school is based on Macs, many many students purchase iPods to go along with their Macs. In the last month of school, several dozen students found a program that would allow iPods to display text from files on the iPod. Six of these students were caught cheating on their final exams, and two were caught after having downloaded a 32 gig dictionary to their iPods and using them on the SAT. iPods are a great tool as long as everyone realizes that they are not radios, they are hard drives and can be used to remove data surreptitiously, or to covertly access data, or just general data storage.
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
Are you serious? Have you ever used AFS on campus? There is absolutely no need whatsoever to use a floppy/zip disk. If you don't have your own computer, every single Mac/Windows computer on campus has a shortcut on the desktop to your AFS home directory and if you login from a Unix box, your home directory _is_ your AFS directory.
As for CVS being broken, again, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
If that doesn't suit your needs, you can always setup an account on sourceforge.cs.duke.edu. All of this information was almost certainly provided to you in whatever class you took, by the way.
-Matt
Duke '05
And even if Apple decided to give the iPods for free, it would still cost them money. How much would cost Microsoft to give 1,650 licenses of Windows and/or Office?
Finally, the iPod is usuable under other plataforms than Apple's.