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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!"
Guess it's time to reapply as a freshman?
Also, considering that Gates and his wife have donated $55 million to Duke since 1998, I wonder how/if this will affect the university's relationship with Microsoft.
-Matt
Duke '05
"O'Brien cited as an example the elementary Spanish course taught by visiting assistant professor Lisa Merschel. Students in that course will use the iPods to listen to audio examples of textbook exercises, hear Spanish songs and record their own efforts to speak Spanish." When I was in high school we did these things with cassette tapes...for a lot cheaper...
It's pretty simple. You don't do a marketing campaign unless you can make back at least 10x your investment. The average Duke student's family probably makes well over $100,000/year. Many students' parents hold jobs where they interact with other wealthy people. Give 1650 iPods to privilidged students, watch them come home, dad or mom asks "let me see that neat toy they gave you that everyone's been talking about... hey, that's pretty neat. We should get Johnny (your little brother) one for christmas. The wife could probably use an iPod mini..." Johnny and Wife get iPods, their (rich) friends see them, want one, and buy one (or more). Not to mention the fact that this greatly increases the likelyhood that Joe freshman will buy a mac to work with his iPod, furthering sales.
Talk about the perfect targeted advertising.
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Here at Microsoft, we recently launched Office 2004 for OS X. The entirety of MacBU (that's Mac Business Unit) received iPods as ship presents. Kinda makes me feel like I'm working for the wrong group :)
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
How come when Microsoft gives away 'free' stuff to academic/government organisations the slashdot crowd slams them for unethical business practices, witchcraft and other unwholesome activities... but when Apple effectively locks in iPod and iTunes as the essential student/music listening tools for an entire university campus, the VERY SAME slashdot readers all post about how super kewl Apple is and how they wish they went to the University in question.
I have read this far down the comments list and not one comment has been critical of Apple, and only a few critical of the University. Is a little objectivity too much to ask? I know that it's not quite on the same level as MS using free software to try to wipe out competition across entire markets, but it is nonetheless a shameless commercial ploy to eliminate competition, albeit in a rather smaller market.
Read Pynchon.
Interested to know how they do this.
If you sync an iPod with an iTunes Library, and you try and use the iPod with another library, in most cases the iPod will be ereased, you can't just sync back the other way. So if they are pre-syncing some of the audiobooks, what happens when the student tries to sync with their computer?
I actually remember going to classes with my headphone on, my techno pumping, and being the only person awake in lecture halls seating 300. Every teacher I had was at first offended and annoyed, and then understood after seeing me for a couple of classes. Having a lively but non-distracting beat kept my focused, and my music was quiet enough to hear what was being taught and not disturb anyone around me. I even had a couple of teachers point it out in particularly sleep-inducing classes as something other people should try after they saw how I could keep writing the notes as other people snored.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, I can see how and why music in the classroom could be a bad thing. But it was the best thing to ever happen to my college education.
If you get nervous, just remember that there are a few billion other people who don't really give a damn.
Yet another excellent reason to go back to the good ol' days of no calculators on the SAT.
You'll pry my HP 48G out of my cold, dead hands, but I already passed the SAT with flying colors, using only a pencil and my brain.
I am a huge fan of computer-augmented math capabilities (I write a spreadsheet to do simple math), but the SAT need not test that. It should test basic mathematical abilities (such as might be found in a post-holocaust Earth).
But hey, it's just my opinion.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I for one would love to have college books distributed in Mp3 or other audio format so I could listen to them while driving, walking, or whatever.
Getting enough memory expansion on a Zire to hold a decent amount of audio would be painfully expensive. The default 16MB will hold between 15 minutes and a couple of hours of audio depending on the audio quality; it's nowhere near the bottomless pit the iPod gives you.
The iPod is not successful only because of its looks or interface. It is successful because it's very good at what it does. I read a review of a bunch of MP3 players recently. The ones that held a decent amount of audio were very bulky; the ones that were compact held a pitiful amount of audio.
The iPod is compact, holds more audio than I will ever need, has a decent (and rechargeable) batttery life and a straightforward interface. The fact that it's "cool" is a stigma I'll live with (as a person who goes out of their way to avoid "cool" things).
The fact that it can be convinced to do other stuff is an added bonus; I bought mine so I could stop burning AA batteries on the portable CD player I was formerly carting around. For PDA stuff I have a PDA.
My college, a small private women's college in Japan, gave (actually rolled the cost into student fees) 15G iPods to this year's incoming class of freshman. We pre-installed a series of listening materials (conversations, etc) and are involved in developing more advanced and comprehensive materials for future classes. We've been covered in MacFan magazine here but I don't think its been published in English.
It's been a good program so far and a large percentage of students are using the machines. Unfortunately many of our students are computer illiterate or have very low skills and thus aren't able to use the iPod on their own for personal study or amusement. But we're off in the right direction and the program will be getting better as it grows, undoubtedly.
We might go with iPod minis next year since they don't need the extra space. We are encouraging students to use them as hard disks as well as listening devices.
Etc, etc, ad nauseam, and so on and so forth.
Maybe this is true in grad school, or at some private universities, but at any public university, the professor will either be lecturing straight from the book or they would at least give the same lectures every semester. Professors have an interesting view of intellectual property, to say the least. They seem to think they should be able to use anyone's material, so long as they cite sources, but that nobody should be able to use their's. This same line of reasoning is used to prohibit companies that sell class notes on college campuses, and it falls flat on it's face.
There is a great deal of chatter about how Duke is so stupid as to fall for Apple's marketing and this thinly vailed disguise to get the students buying iTunes and so on.
/. every day so you tell me if you think I was in the 'in crowd') was the first in the US to distribute Palm PDAs to incoming Freshmen. The idea was that they would be able to keep organized, download class schedules, take quizes, etc. (read more). This was seen by some as just a way to get local media attention and promote the school.
Let me give a different perspective. The high school I went to (yeah it was private but I read
But it really did help the students. Sure you can beam stuff and play games and otherwise goof off with the device, but it also helped the students stay organized and keep their digital documents with them when they need them.
Now I'm not saying the iPod is going to help Duke students graduate in 3 years, and there are huge differences between the iPod and a PDA, but for digital arts students who need to work on a project outside the studio, or the Comp Sci student who wants a backup of the source for their thesis, there are applications outside the music realm.
Not to mention, this huge roaming profile rumor that one will be able to keep their user profile on an iPod, and when connected to a Mac, at home or on campus, log into their user account with their background and preferences, desktop files, user directory files, iCal calendar, address book contacts, Safari browser bookmarks, etc.
Now THAT would make huge sense on a campus setting.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Because no one will use a Zire and everyone will use an iPod? During the days when PDAs were "The Next Big Thing(TM)" I bought a Visor Prism. Nice device, and I liked it a lot, but after about 2 months, it became mostly useless. Sure it was nice having an organizer but I'm not particularly organized to begin with. So I tossed it in my drawer for a while. It's been 2 years since I took the think out, and I haven't missed it. By contrast, a little over a year ago, I bought a 10 gig iPod that has since been used for everything from an MP3 player, to a boot disk, to a repair disk, to a test bed and a backup unit. All of this on a single unit, that I never shelled out any money for an expansion for, and I use it almost every day. When I bought the iPod, it was twice as expensive as my PDA, and has gotten 4 times as much use.
You tell me which was the better investment.
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What about them?
Changing the test to allow calculators was a bad idea.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I suggested something similar at McGill for the language labs.
Instead of providing anything REMOTELY useful, they've decided to adopt an infuriatingly poorly designed difficult to use irritiating system called Can8. The super parts of Can8 use in the language lab:
-No printing from vocabulary lists so you have to scrawl down anything they put up, which is all but impossible in the alotted time.
-No access except during office hours, which makes studying impossible for anyone who holds a part time job during the day.
-No net access or ability to download any of the audio onto any sort of removable media.
When I said as much to the "technologist" along with some potential solutions she replied: yeah that's a bummer. Too bad.
In short, I'd like to opine that McGill spanks the monkey and will never be able to compete on a serious level because it's run by a bunch of backwards bureaucrats.
As a 2004 grad of Duke, I'm guessing this has a lot to do with Kazaa. There are untold gigabytes per day of illegal files zooming around the campus network. They don't want to put stops on internet use, but its clearly a problem both from a network infrastructure standpoint and an RIAA CYA standpoint. If they can push iTunes, it could ameliorate the problems caused by file sharing and soften the student outcry should they decide to block Kazaa traffic.
As for language tapes, there's already a library of cassettes no one bothers with anyway.
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One of my clients has a daughter at a private high school here in NYC that's doing the same thing. Language lessons as mp3s, file transfer and the like.
There's a lot of this kind of stuff going on. More power to the people coming up with it.
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