Many students at Abilene Christian University now walk the campus tapping messages into their cellphones or listening to music rather than calling out hellos to passers-by.
The university’s unusual effort to give every freshman an iPhone or iPod Touch has been a huge success, officials say, and they recently decided to continue the project in the fall. But the devices are altering campus life at the 4,800-student college—and students say that not all of the shifts are positive.
“It has changed how people interact with one another on a day-to-day basis,” said Daniel Paul Watkins, a senior who is president of the student government. “Now walking around campus, nine out of 10 students either have their iPod headphones in or they’re texting or they’re talking on the phone,” he said. Sure, that’s happening at colleges across the country, but Mr. Watkins, who bought his iPhone, believes it is even more pronounced at a campus that has pushed the latest cellphones. “The West Texas charm of ‘Hey, howdy, everybody knows your name,’ has shifted inward—everyone’s enthralled by their device.”
Mr. Watkins also said that a few students were using the iPhones to cheat, furtively looking up test answers on the Internet (The Chronicle, October 10, 2008). .
“Since the iPhones were introduced, I honestly think that academic integrity has gone down,” said Mr. Watkins. “I’ve seen people cheat, and I’ve heard people talk about how easy it is to cheat.”
Administrators said that because Internet-ready phones are popular on many campuses, Abilene Christian is not alone in wrestling with such social impacts of the technology. And officials say they have not seen a rise in reports of cheating, and they defend the friendliness of the institution.
But because the college is aggressively encouraging students to make the smartphone a key communication tool, the campus serves as an interesting laboratory for examining the gadgets’ impacts—both positive and negative.
“One of the things we want to do over time is try to work on how do we develop the etiquette around these devices,” said Kevin Roberts, the university’s chief information officer. He said administrators were considering adding discussions about the social and ethical impacts of the phones in a mandatory course for freshmen next year.
And the university is developing technological tools that can prevent using iPhones to cheat. Specifically, developers are building software that will let a professor take control of the iPhone of every student in a classroom. That would allow the professor to send information or images to each student’s phone for educational purposes, but it could also be used to block use of the phones during a test, said Mr. Roberts. “It could be something like parental controls on your TV,” he added. Officials hope to have a prototype of the system ready by the fall.
Over all, Mr. Roberts said that he was “thrilled” with how smoothly the iPhone experiment has gone so far and how much students and professors are making use of the devices for educational purposes.
About 85 percent of freshmen at the university see the iPhones as “very valuable” to their education, according to preliminary results of a university survey. And the freshmen said that 20 percent of their courses made some use of the devices during the semester.
Officials plan to release the full results of the survey, and a report on their experiences so far, at a national conference at the campus next month that will explore the use of cellphones at colleges.
William Rankin, an associate professor of English at Abilene Christian who is coordinating academic uses of iPhones there, said programmers at the university had built software tools that let professors conduct instant quizzes using the devices. The professors can ask true-or-false or multiple-choice questions, and they can allow for free-form responses. The software can quickly sort and display the answers so that a professor can view responses privately or share them with the class by projecting them on a screen.
The university also designed a version of the university Web site for display on iPhones so that students can view course materials and even register for courses using their phones.
Entering freshmen were given the choice of receiving either a free iPhone or a free iPod Touch, which has all the same features as the iPhone except for cellphone service. Mr. Rankin said that about two-thirds of students chose the iPhone.
Mr. Watkins, the student-government president, said that despite his concerns about the iPhone program, he praised the college’s efforts to develop services for the devices. And he said the project has improved the university’s reputation. “In the long run,” he said, “it’s going to make my degree worth more.”
