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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!"
Free after your $30,000 tuition! Good for you! And if you're lucky enough to graduate after 4 years you're only down $120,000! But you got a "free" iPod!
Casual Games/Downloads
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Duke University has also raised tuition by $299.
The first time one of those Freshman herds wanders their way into Frat row looking for beer, it's going to get ugly.
I can see a bunch of pissed of Seniors beating the ever loving crap out of incoming freshman for their iPods. How do you tell them apart (unless they laser engrave them all).
Why did the Duke university had to shed out $300+ dollars for an iPod, while they could do the same thing (regarding text scheduling) with a Zire 31 that costs $140, and it can be expanded with SD cards if the students need to also listen to music.
I mean, this way the university could save a truck load of money and give out a handheld that is way more capable than the iPod in running real applications, plus having the ability to play mp3s!
I think that some people who take such decisions are just not practical.
It must really suck to be a sophomore at Duke!
A nice, big tuition increase. Yay!
Oh wait...
That's some good advertising. It seems like a ploy to lure more kids to their college, rather than a sincere techonological initiative. It's disgusting how colleges in the US are becoming more and more expensive, and entering a competitive advertisement scenario similar to the corporate arena. Hey, with the amount of money they charge for tuition, it's a business well worth it.
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
Jeez, I wonder what the cost of that deal was. Even at wholesale quantity pricing, that's a boatload of money. Let's see, 1650 iPods, let's assume a hugely generous discount so the wholesale cost is $200 each, that's $330k. Yow.
Of course the students end up paying for it anyway, in the "computer fees" that are usually tacked on to tuition.
Next up, Harvard to distribute gameboy advance
"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...
ha.. remember that musical montage scene in the movie "Real Genius" where the kid goes to physics lectures, each time he goes to class, there are fewer people and more tape recorders, until finally one day he goes in and there is nobody in the classroom, there's just a tape recorder delivering the lecture to a room full of tape recorders.
I first heard this story in 1974 when I visited MIT, they publish an annual guide for freshmen and someone gave me one, that story was in it, supposedly it was true.
But anyway, I can just see this happening with the iPods. They should have given away the Belkin voice recorder gadgets with the iPods.
I see the tuition hike posts being modded as funny, but there's actual seriousness to that. The university I go to decided to give "free" laptops to the engineers, but in return hike up their tuition another 2,000 dollars in addition to the annual hike the whole university got. Free...more like "forced"
Oh come on, give me a break... Sure they can be used for something else, in the same way that you can save any file you want on the iPod, but how many students are really going to use it that way?
WOW! Audio files that aren't music on my iPod. w00t!
...all the freshmen gets sued by the RIAA for pirating music...
(It's logical - they own a digital playbackdevice and has access to 'da interweb'; off course they steal music, and at least 10 gig each)
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
. . . Especially the ones working all summer to barely pay their tuition as it is. I mean... who needs food when you have an iPod? Good call Duke! At least schools with mandatory laptop programs can claim they are for school... I don't really know what Duke was thinking. Probably just wanted to gain the image of the most "hip" university or something like that... but it just comes off to me as stupid.
A man walks into a bar. The bartender says, "What is this, some kind of joke?"
..Orders placed on the new "iPod" music player from Apple Computers Inc, on it's "Applestore" online store will be delayed, sources confirmed. Rumours are that a high-priority customer ordered more than 1600 units of the new iPod, causing significant delays to end consumers. Angry Apple customers have once again, turned to sites like "Crazy Apple Rumours" for immediate relief.
While this may seem weird at first, it's really not all that different from Universities that require (or give) students have laptops to a certain specification. Knowing that every student has an iPod lets you do cool things like distribute language lessons for them, be able to standardly trade music for a music class (no more problems with students or teachers that don't have a CD burner or a tape player or a computer to play the music on). Now whether it really makes sense considering the cost of the iPods is another matter, but who knows, Apple is certainly giving them a massive discount because they're both buying in bulk and giving Apple more positive press (just like the G5 cluster did).
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.
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.
...and what happens when the students attach the iPods to their own computers, and get all of the 'educational' audio erased?
Apple has always been strongly involved in education, even when losing ground to PCs in the market, Apple's market share in the educational arena has remained sizeable.
This new move, however, is worrisome. It is clear that is scheme to "distribute" Ipods among Duke freshmen is nothing but a naked marketing move on Apple's part: sellng the already high-margin Ipods at a so-called "discount" to Duke under the thin pretext of using them as an educational device, then pushing Itunes, and relying on the soon-to-be-well-paid Duke graduates to keep buying Apple products in the future.
It is a shame that a fine institution Duke has gone in for such a blatant moneymaking gimmick. This is little different from allowing companies like Coca-Cola to produce "educational" material for our public schools. I would hope the Duke adminsistration would have taken a page from and choose integrity over money, but such is not to be. For shame.
And you thought the BMW was going to be the biggest iPod accessory ever! Now all the students have a whole university to plug into them!
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.
Yup, until Johnny Freshman doesn't have room for the latest Avril song.
Hmm. Delete Linkin Park song, or some professor yacking about french. Hmmmm.
Please help metamoderate.
Many professors have still refused to adopt the internet as a way of getting information to students and Al Gore invented that over 10 years ago. Other than the CS classes and a few tech-savy professors elsewhere this won't even be attempted.
For those that do, It will take a long time for them to gather audio lectures and exactly how helpful are they without the visual aids behind them? The same is true for audio books. Technical audio books are not exactly the easiest way to learn a subject. The best use for audio books would be for literature, but as stated above, humanities professors are the ones least inclined to adopt this type of idea. Even then trying to learn the theme or symbolism from an audio book is quite hard. You can't flip back and forth as easily as you can with the written form.
My guess is that there will be a big craze and initial educational push as professors *try* to make the idea work, but after a month it will only be used by students to trade prOn and music before class starts or during lunch. Not that that's a bad thing. I am all for easier to access prOn, but for the majority the educational benefit is little.
Apple to Napster:
"Haha, fuck you."
Distractions? This ain't no high school. If the introduction of a free toy reveals that the entire student body is afflicted with ADD, I think it's time to switch schools. Either that or time for the school to enter into a simliar agreement with the makers of Ritalin.
You are saying you would rather PAY $29.95 for a DVD player than get a FREE iPod? Weird.
You can't work enough over the summer to pay for tuition at Duke. You've either got a loan, a grant, or a rich family.
Well, if you CAN make $30k over a summer, you're kinda wasting your time in college....
$299 iPod/$30,000 tuition = an insignificant fraction.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
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!
Actually, I find that the educational potential of portable audio players like the iPod is enormous. The problem at the moment is the scarcity of audio course materials.
I would love to have these universities that are beginning to put courseware online start providing downloadable audio lecture files. (OGG or MP3 to make them as vendor-neutral as possible.)
If they value "broad, liberal education" so much and have such a hard time finding room for all the people who want to enroll, let them provide their history classes, foreign languages, music appreciation, philosophy, poli sci, etc., as downloadable audio courses that anyone can download and, to the extent possible, let those who want credit take a machine gradable test or series of tests so that attention from a live instructor is not needed.
A lot of classes couldn't be done this way (calculus, circuit analysis, etc.), but many could, and this is one way a university could enable engineering students (for ex.) to get more liberal arts and humanities without the need to double tuition and make the university ever tougher to get in to. And once they did the work to create these audio courses, they could let anyone (not just students) download them for just the marginal cost of additional bandwidth. They could then minimize even that cost by putting the material in the public domain and explicitly allowing P2P sharing.
(For that matter, I'd like to see organizations like the BBC, NPR, NHK, etc. start providing their archives in downloadable OGG or MP3 instead of just streaming RealAudio. NHK has terrific language courses available on the radio every day in Japan, but you have to live in Japan to hear them. As far as I know, you can't download them and that seems absurdly wasteful since they put so much work into creating them.)
Then, universities could require students to have portable audio players capable of playing MP3s & OGGs or provide them with one that can and serve more and better courses to more students with fewer faculty and staff and help reduce the outrageous rate of inflation in costs of higher ed.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
"Duke sucks!"
You cant fight in here, its a war room!
Utah Sate University Students get the same! Here in Utah, even the legislature got into the act. They made it mandatory for all students entering the state primarily to go to school pay out-of-state tuition for 2 years instead of one. Yay! They claimed that students didn't contribute anything to the state (taxes or otherwise), so they didn't deserve in-state tuition after just one year. This just goes to show that students should vote. Then they might be able to put a little fear into the politicians.
Don't count your messages before they ACK.
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I'm not stealing an iPod until Apple supports OGG!
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Besides, they don't really need to test your abilities to do arithmetic and the like. Why not just write the test so that there is no real need to use a calculator? Arithmetic is so mindless and it doesn't really relate to modern day job skills.
Of course air conditioning the Freshmen dorms in hot fetid North Carolina wouldn't be a bad idea either.
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.
There have been some references so far to how much Duke will cost you yearly ($27,000), and I just thought I'd point out for anyone who doesn't happen to know that Duke's financial aid works on 100% financial need. Basically they calculate how much your family is capable of paying, and they go find the grants to help pay the rest. For example, I received a $20,000+ financial aid package, although I think it was more around $23,000.
Just something good to know for anyone who's still considering colleges and is worried about cost. A number of other colleges operate on the same system (i.e. MIT, CMU, Yale, etc), so keep your eyes open.
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.
I would love to have these universities that are beginning to put courseware online start providing downloadable audio lecture files. (OGG or MP3 to make them as vendor-neutral as possible.)
The University of Minnesota is already starting to do that with their Digital Audio Initiative. Want to learn Pashtun or Punjabi? You can. You can also study Shakespeare, British literature, science fiction, or learn how to write a short story.
More courses can be found here. They're adding courses, but slowly. It's worth bookmarking.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
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.
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.
For great justice.
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.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...