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| Wednesday, April 06, 2005 |
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Duke University to Broaden Use of iPods in Courses
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Duke University will again give Apple Computer Inc.'s (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) iPod digital music players to students for use in its courses this fall, broadening their use from just freshmen to all class levels.
After a preliminary review of the year-long program, Duke said it will use the iPods in a more targeted manner. Duke, in Durham, North Carolina, last fall gave some 1,600 iPods to incoming first-year students, prompting other colleges to follow suit.
While the university won't again distribute iPods to all incoming freshmen this year, it will give iPods to any student whose class uses them, said Lynne O'Brien, who coordinated the project for Duke. The students own the iPods, which are paid for out of a special technology grant.
"One of the pleasant surprises was that the faculty had a lot more ideas about using them than we had initially thought," O'Brien said. "Our approach last year was to put it out there and see what people might be interested in doing."
The iPods served as a springboard for broadening the use of technology at large in higher education. The project gained momentum through the year, with more than 600 first-year students enrolled in at least one course that used iPods.
Many of those courses were for music or a foreign language and students used the gizmos to record or receive audio files. They later began to use them for taking notes, conducting interviews, audio blogging or even for podcasting, a growing trend.
In podcasting, audio content, such as radio shows, is available for download. Users can then listen to the show at their leisure.
Duke Professor Daniel Foster said he taught a class on old-time radio in which students used the iPods to download shows from an internal Website rather than having to go to the library to listen to them.
"The students could get the radio shows on their iPods and that would not only be more convenient for them, it would also make them more portable," Foster said. "They could bring the radio shows to class and use them as they would a text."
Greg Jozwiak, Apple's head of hardware product marketing, said Apple was excited about what Duke has done so far.
"We've found in a short period of time what you can do with integrating the iPod into the education process," Jozwiak said. |
| posted by Perimbean @ 10:30 AM |
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