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University Tries "One iPhone Per Student"
alphadogg writes to tell us that one freshman class has a little more than usual to be excited about. When students at Abilene Christian University showed up for their first days of class they were greeted with the choice of either a new iPhone 3g or an iPod Touch plus a package of custom web apps to use on them. "The hardware is part of the Texas university's pilot mobile learning project, which has been gestating for over a year. About 650 first-year students chose the iPhone, and about 300 the iPod Touch, which is a very similar device but without the 3G radio (both devices incorporate an 802.11g Wi-Fi adapter). ACU pays for the hardware, student (or their parents) select and pay for their monthly AT&T service plan."
Now do the students have to pay the extra surcharge that offsets the cost of the phones, or does the University pick up that tab as well?
...to ebay in 3...2...
AT&ROFLMAO
When we wanted to waste time and not study back in my day, all we had were fraternities and sororities. Kids today with their new-fangled distractions and time-wasters don't know how lucky they have it. They've got hundreds of reasons not to go to class right there at their fingertips. We had to *WORK* at it when we goofed off! We didn't even have pagers or MUD's back then!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Doesn't sound like this is going to do much for "mobile learning". Nice gimmick though....
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for.
...that keeps pushing up the cost of a college education.
iPhone plans are bloody expensive... the plans start at over double what even a very robust normal cell phone plan would cost. Unless you need one for work and your company can pick up the tab, I'm inclined to think that they are just a money sink.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
How much is Apple (or AT&T) paying said university to distribute these little profit-machines to these gullible students? Not that I wouldn't fall for it too, but honestly! I guess on the surface it's a win-win-win situation, but I can't help but think that someone is being taken advantage of.
When I first heard about this idea a few months ago, I knew that there would be some interesting consequences. Being that I graduated from ACU in December of '06, I know many of the people involved and have heard stories about what it takes to accomplish such a task.
ACU had to re-implement much of it's wireless structure in order to accommodate all of the new devices and ensure that students would have wireless coverage at every conceivable place on campus.
It will be interesting to see how it pans out and whether or not it works as well as the faculty and staff have envisioned.
Got a problem? Call a monkey!
The length some universities will go to justify their ridiculously high tuition fees...
At least then the students would have a general-purpose computer to do work on.
The Cathedral versus the Bazaar.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
The school is conducting a trial with a piece of hardware, maybe students will find interesting new ways to use it.
Sure the majority will use it to goof off, but it's possible a couple resourceful students come up with something useful and everybody gains. Is it the absolute best way to use resources, maybe not; but it's quite a neat capable platform and only time will tell what interesting things students can come up with.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
because every time the cost goes up, the politicians go all "rising costs of education!!!" and give them more money. My econ prof called it the "cookie monster" effect. Colleges go "Me want cookie!!!!" and spend $$$ on this, and super-fancy new buildings with HD video projectors in every classroom, and clubhouses for their sports teams, and what-not... om nom nom nom.... and, when they're done, there's another cookie there waiting for them! Rinse and repeat. Wonderful incentive structure there, no? Mmmmhmm....
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
It would be much more productive to give them a lightweight PC and free, Campus-wide WiFi so they can call people via VOIP.
No sig today...
Get a free happy meal toy with each and every degree.
One thing that is interesting is that there are a large number of Roman Catholics that do acknowledge that. But other than that, every branch attached to Protestantism seems to follow the concept that the bible speaks the truth, and scientific theory is as theoretical as the theory that there are tunnels in the north and south pole that connect in the center of the earth. I completely disregard anything related to religion in my life. And that includes the so called morals from religion. I guess I'm good enough that i don't need to follow any rule to get that tolerance is the key to many issues.
Usually it's the donors who give a large chunk of building costs that decide the new facilities should be super-fancy.
And they have to one-up each other too, so you could also blame the competition.
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
Can we get some realistic math for once? Attending a private school like ACU costs close to $110K for four years. A fancy $300 PDA doesn't even begin to account for that.
Also, colleges now rely heavily on the web and email for communicating with students. Bulletins, class schedules, online study materials, web-based paperwork... It's efficient and cheap. This works better if everybody has a standard device that works the same way with the campus WiFi network. Usually, colleges accomplish this by making all the students buy a standard laptop or tablet.
That route makes sense to me, but I can guess why the ACU people went the PDA route. People take their PDAs everywhere, so ACU can get information out to the entire student body quickly. That makes for a convenient fact to cite when parents want to know what the school is doing to prevent another Virginia Tech.
The title made me worry that we were only allowed to have a single iPhone per person. And I thought it was just some more unnecessary University restrictions.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
ACU pays for the hardware
No they don't. Whoever pays the students' fees pays for it, plus any admin charge the university adds for overseeing the moving around of the money.
I really don't see any issue. It's a private institution doing an experiment that just might work out for other institutions. Also for those who read the article it mentions that the apps are designed so that in the future one could go with a different phone. So once again audience, where's the problem?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
It's similar to issuing laptops in high schools. No costs for textbooks and easier to manage... This is actually a great idea
... is basically doing the same thing ( http://www.oc.edu/apple/ ). They are also offering the choice of a Dell, MacBook, or MacBook Pro. Many of the students here chose the iTouch (including me) simply because they didn't want to pay the expensive monthly fees for the iPhone. My service charge would be $90 per month. I just can't afford that price being a student having other debts to pay off (like college tuition). OC released an enterprise app for our iTouch/iPhone that lets us track things such as events going on, which laundry machines are open (through LaundryView), etc. I think it's pretty neat, but I'm not sure if it's worth the price tag.
The real headline should be something along the lines of freshmen class of Abilene Christian University all required to pay for brand new iPhones.
When I read the "New York Times Says Thin Clients Are Making a Comeback" headline, I thought of cellphone/pda apps. Considering books cost me around $300 a semester back in 1996-2000 and all the other ways that the university tried to leech a buck off my family, I'm not surprised that a college is doing something like this. This sounds and looks like a decent killer app for cell phones/PDAs.
I'm kinda sad though. I'd have thought that we'd have figured out how to get all this done, and my kids using this in elementary school right now. I'm really sad that colleges are just now getting there. I remember back in 1998 when my college just started their web app for signing up for classes. It was much, much better than their telephone system that they'd used before hand. We loved it.
My kids public school has a web app that'll show their 9 weeks grades and an event calendar. O.k. it's nice that they have anything, but still as a parent and tax payer, I'd want all their text books to be in pdf and able to be saved, viewed, printed, quoted from anywhere. I'd also want teachers grade books and PTA meetings online as well. There is a part of me that thinks class rooms need forums or a school running their own version of facebook, yet geared more along the lines of keeping track of all of a student's progress, projects, entire school history, homework, quizes, & test history for everything there, and doing it as a glorified year book. Especially to pound it into the student's head, that this is to make you and us look "good"! ;)
Like Nokia or Android or Eee PC stuff?
"Board of Regents owns Apple Stock!"
"C'mon baby, President of the University needs a new yacht!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
So much for telling the students to turn their cell phones off in class.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
ahh, a pickpocket's heaven. no matter who you grift, you'll atleast walk away with a $200 ipod!
If you have an iPhone/iPod Touch you can check out their mobile site at m.acu.edu. Of course you have to have an account to log into the myMobile section.
Of course its affordable, as it gets more expensive the government chips in more and raises the limit of the loans it will back.
That has been the problem with college level education and health care. As soon as the government stepped in and started paying for things at set rates without asking questions the competitive market failed. The price of admission became "cost + what the government was willing to chip in".
We have some of the best tax payer funded education in the world but too many don't realize who is really paying for it. I know in my wonderful state that reviews have shown a growing portion of the budgets are professor pay and retirement costs, funny the endowments are just rolling over the cash and not helping more students.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
ACU teaches that the earth is round, revolves around the sun, and that life evolved via natural selection. The astronomy course I took here didn't even mention the possibility of the earth being young; it was the Big Bang, 4.6 billion year old Earth, etc. "Alternatives" based in pseudo-science and an over-literal reading of Genesis were not even on the table. I've also never had a Bible professor even suggest that the Bible should be treated as a science book - every single one I've talked to on the subject regards the Creation account as metaphorical.
So every student on campus will have an easy to steal and easy to sell item in their possession at all times? Where can I submit an application? Seems to be a lucrative business opportunity. /paranoia
except for the 3G radio? What about the fact that ONE IS A PHONE!
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Everyone's saying this is a waste of money, but with tuition as much as it is, this is a drop in the bucket compared to what the students will be paying for their degrees. Do you think anybody will notice if their tuition went up 300 bucks over 4 years to cover the cost of these devices, that may have many benefits for their classes, such as easy class lookup and registration, online syllabus and course notes that are available with you all the time, and so on and so forth. When the teachers could rely on everybody having access to this stuff instead of just a few students, teachers can actually use the devices to improve their classes.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
ACU has a tradition of taking calculated risks when it comes to how they do business as an educational institution. This quality is what puts ACU on the map consistently as a leader in education. There are lots of other universities who have tried to pull off programs like this, and many have succeeded. ACU gets this large amount of publicity because it simply is an Apple product that has significant penetration into the student population. Having been involved with the rollout plan for when/how this project was to mature, it could have happened sooner. However, ACU made the decision to wait until there was enough software designed to make this more than just a toy/promotional tool. In fact, the semester before these were handed out several research groups were formed consisting of both students and faculty to determine how these devices could be used most efficiently and even begin to work on their own coding projects to achieve these goals.
These calculated risks are not just in how they were to be used in an educational setting, but also in the technology implementation. It was a significant challenge to provide that large a scale of wireless access. Having worked on it, I must admit that wireless deployment is an artform in how you balance capacity versus coverage with hundreds of environmental factors affecting your decisions. There are many great pieces of software to try and assist you making the optimal placement choices, but they frequently require large amounts of time for data entry for only a minor change in quality. When it boils down to is still the same procedure that has been used for years; deploy 90% of AP, turn it on and survey it, then use the remaining 10% to fill in the holes you missed. Sofar, most of the risky decisions that were made appear to have payed off and leave only a known portion to be expanded in the future.
I'm proud to have graduated from this university in May and have the privilege of working with the IS department for several years.
Consider this - Until the iPhone there was no practical device of the kind for browsing the web, with the full power of the web. As noted many times in this article, all previous generations of mobile browsers sux0r.
Kind of pointless to talk about supporting other platforms when there are, as yet, no other platforms to support (speaking of the mobile web, that is). They say, in the article, that they can always evaluate Android later.
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
It's not a phone, it's a platform for the latest killer app... ...GunmanTracker.
When any iPhone detects gunfire, it reports its position to a central server, which then creates a Google Maps mashup that shows the location of the gunman on all other students' iPhones.
If the iPhone is being carried BY the gunman, the phone is supposed to shock them like a taser would. Unfortunately in testing all the power that could be mustered from the battery would just tickle at best, and there apparently wasn't any way to replace the battery with something more powerful.
Even if they could replace the battery, it turned out that GunTracker was trivially defeated by the DontTaseMeBro app, although that was quickly pulled from the app store.
paintball
I think they were trying to offer a volume discount to the students, but they don't have a way to opt-out and save money!
The school wants them to all have the same device with the same capabilities. That's why they can't opt out.
And the best idea would be to ditch it the program altogether because I don't see these devices significantly improving the student's education.
Obviously you missed the point of this exercise. The school thinks the exact opposite, and believes that everyone having the same device will allow them to better utilize it (the school and the students). Duke has had a rather successful program using iPods for several years now.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.