Slashdot Mirror
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!"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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).
It must really suck to be a sophomore at Duke!
Next up, Harvard to distribute gameboy advance
. . . 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?"
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Now that that's out of your system, let me assure you that while many were attracted to the iPod's pop-culture cult status as a part of this project, the academic and educational uses were the primary discussion. The "ooh, pretty!" factor, as you call it, was taken into consideration so the students would actually want to use the device given to them. Imagine Duke giving every student a Palm Zire...which most students would promptly toss in their desk after a month of occasional use if their classes didn't require it--most still won't, btw. But an iPod...the students will love those and use them!
I don't know who your friend is--I have some ideas--but if the "wow" factor is his explanation, he fell asleep at a few of the briefings, methinks. Take my word for it.
As for NACHOS....I didn't like it any more than you did, but many factors prevent 110 and 210 from switching to other options...I'd rather not rock the boat in the CS Dept right now.
Face it folks - the iPod (or any large audio player) has massive potential on campus. I've been trying to get my campus to pursue something like this for a while:
Special version of iTunes, that links into the university's library. Using your ID and password, it returns all of the lectures you are a part of and allows you to download them. Taking a humanities class concerning Candide? Download it. History class talking about FDR's fireside chats? Download them. Tired of floppies that are still cluttering up your PC labs (until this very day - arrrrrrggghhhh!)? Let the kids save to the iPod.
The iPod just becomes the central repository for things that, until now, were spread out across the dorm room. If the kid loses it, the kid loses it - same could be said about anything else (books, tapes, DVDs, etc.).
The only application that I don't think will work: audiobooks. It's really difficult to study from an audiobook. Even more difficult to use an audiobook in an open-book test, too...
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.