Colleges give out iPods, cellphones, and more for educational reasons, of course
List: Showing which colleges are giving free cellphones, iPods, and other devices to students, faculty, and staff members
Colloquy: Read the transcript of an online discussion about whether colleges’ purchases of gadgets like iPod music players and tablet PC’s for their students reflect genuine educational priorities or simply institutional needs for publicity.By SCOTT CARLSON
If you want to find freshmen this fall amid the crowds of students walking around the campus of Duke University, you need only look for the little white wires -- maybe dangling carelessly out of a backpack, or running from a pocket up to a pair of plugs in a student’s ears.
Last month, to the envy of music-loving students everywhere, each of Duke’s 1,600 freshmen got a brand-new iPod, a popular digital-music player with signature white ear-bud headphones, along with a microphone attachment. The devices, Duke told the students, are for educational purposes, of course.
“I was pretty surprised at first, because I didn’t see what we could do with it,” says Jesse Sandburg, a freshman who is sitting in a lounge chair in the student union, a white wire hanging from his book bag. He shows off his iPod’s silver back, which is engraved with the university seal and the words “Duke University Class of 2008.”
For years now, some colleges have given out laptops to all incoming students in an effort to incorporate technology into learning, or to promote a cutting-edge image. Now that laptops are ubiquitous, colleges are looking for the next must-have gadget and passing it out to students -- often passing on the cost too, in tuition or fees.
The gadgets include tablet PC’s, iPods, cellphones, personal digital assistants, and other devices. Many administrators, noting the popularity of cellphones among students, are giving out hand-held devices, hopeful that their mobility will complement a laptop. In most every case, colleges that pass out new electronic devices stand to get some kind of marketing boost. But colleges always say that their interest in their chosen gadget is primarily educational.
“It’s a little bit of a marketing stunt,” says Mr. Sandburg, the Duke student. But that’s fine with him: “Duke is trying to show that we’re not one-dimensional, that there are other kinds of technology we can use.”
Laptops: So Last Year
Winona State University, in Minnesota, has given laptops to incoming students for six years, but this year the university decided to take a chance with something different: tablet PC’s. They are similar to laptops, but the user can write on the screen. Officials say students will use that feature in a number of new ways, like for writing down complex equations or diagrams in mathematics or science classes.
“We looked at this as, How do you move to the next level of laptops?” says Joe Whetstone, vice president for information technology.
The tablet PC’s will help Winona compete against colleges in its region, and maintain the university’s tech-savvy image, he says, but “our first priority is to help improve the learning environment here.”
He says that Winona State passed out a couple of dozen tablet PC’s in a test run last fall and that the response was “totally positive.”
This year the university leased tablet PC’s from Gateway for every student on the campus, at a cost to the students of $1,000 a year, which includes software, maintenance, and an upgrade after a couple of years. The students will get to keep the PC’s when they graduate. Mayville State University, in North Dakota, set up a similar deal with Gateway.
At the University of Maryland at College Park this fall, M.B.A. students are getting free BlackBerrys -- small devices that are essentially cellphones on steroids, with Internet and walkie-talkie features. Cherie A. Scricca, associate dean for master’s programs and career management, says that the BlackBerrys will be used to “create an atmosphere where the students are connected with staff and each other on a 24-7 basis, as they would be in the real world.”
The BlackBerrys will not be formally used in courses. Rather, the business-school administrators want to see how students interact with each other, how they use communication tools during high-pressure team projects, and whether they use the BlackBerrys to break rules -- in good and bad ways.
“To show you just how much we are not establishing ground rules,” Ms. Scricca says, “we have just placed in their hands all of the tools they could possibly want to cheat, and we are not telling them that they can’t have them or that they have to turn them off.”
How do faculty members feel about that? “We don’t know,” she says. “We are learning about that as we speak.”
Getting Attention
Duke’s iPod program is the highest-profile of the new-gadget giveaways, garnering articles and commentary in major newspapers and online technology columns all over the country. Some of the coverage has been sarcastic, questioning the educational merit of the iPod. One headline: “Duke University Buys Thousands of Rich Kids iPods.”
Duke’s professors learned of the iPod program in July, shortly before the rest of the world did. When a reporter visited Duke’s campus in late August, during the first week of fall classes, university administrators had just sent out a call for proposals to use the iPods in classes, and only a handful of professors were assigning tasks that made use of the devices.
It is far too early to tell whether the iPods will be an educational hit, but Peter Lange, Duke’s provost, has high hopes. He has heard from professors who plan to record their lectures, then make those lectures available to students online, for downloading to their iPods, near the end of the semester. He expects that the foreign-language departments will make heavy use of the iPods to help students hear samples of dialects and to get used to hearing spoken languages. And Mr. Lange says he hopes professors and students find uses he never could think of.
For years, he says, Duke was seen as behind in technology. “Four years ago, we talked very self-consciously about gearing up our commitment to technology in education,” he explains, so the university invested in wireless Internet access and started talking about requiring laptops. The $500,000 iPod program was not a publicity stunt, he says, but an attempt to do something bold to get attention, especially from professors.
“The diffusion of technology among faculty, if left to its own devices, happens at a slow pace,” he says. “One of the ways to crank it up is to do something out of the ordinary that says to everybody, I ought to pay attention.”
To what extent that message is getting across to professors is difficult to tell.
Sitting in her office in the history department, Elizabeth A. Fenn seems apathetic about the iPods and for now has no plans to record her lectures for her freshman students.
“I’m sure there are other things they would rather listen to,” she says.
Sean Metzger, a lecturer in English and theater who just arrived at Duke, says he has not yet had time to look into the iPod project, but he thinks he might distribute hip-hop songs in one of his classes about pop culture.
The iPods help Duke cultivate a with-it image, he says. “Top-tier schools are being judged by how techie they are,” he says.
For students, he guesses, “it makes people feel better about their tuition expenditures when they have something in their hand.”
When asked about the iPod program, most upperclassmen grumble a bit about not getting one, then say that it seems like an elaborate marketing ploy. Mark Sutherland, a junior, says it makes Duke “stick out” from the pack in an effective way. He still remembers tour guides’ talking about the laptop program at Wake Forest University when he visited that college four years ago. The offer of free gear “sways you some,” he says.
Some freshmen began finding educational uses for their iPods within the first week. Jay Levin will ask his friends to record class lectures when he goes home this month for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Then he’ll download the audio files and find out what he missed. He also uses the iPod as a storage device to transfer files to university computers.
The iPod is a neat gadget, he says, but it has downsides. It is technically university property until the end of the academic year, and if Mr. Levin loses or breaks it, he will have to shell out about $300 to replace it. Theft worries him. Before he arrived at Duke, he heard that upperclassmen would try to beat him up and steal his iPod, so he etched his name and driver’s-license number on the device’s shiny steel back.
He thinks that Duke could have spent the technology money elsewhere, like subsidizing the purchase of laptops, which he considers “a more useful tool.” Although he thinks that students will find some in-class uses for their iPods, “the majority of kids will be listening to music on them.”
This early in the semester, at least, that seems to be the case. If you walk across the campus, stop students with white wires in their ears, and ask them what they are listening to, you hear answers like ska, Madonna, the Refreshments, or Dave Matthews. Some freshmen on the quad tell all by absent-mindedly playing an air guitar or pattering a beat on invisible drums.
Never Out of Touch
Little devices with explicitly social uses are not necessarily shunned at other colleges. At the State University of New York College of Agriculture and Technology at Morrisville, students in the dormitories are all getting cellphones instead of having phone lines in their rooms. The university cut a deal with Nextel to provide service in this relatively rural area. Officials say that chances are, students who bring their own cellphones to the campus will not be able to get a strong signal, or might not get a signal at all.
Jean Boland, Morrisville’s vice president for technology, says the cellphone giveaway is part of an effort to prepare graduates for a mobile work force.
But the cellphones also help students connect to one another or stay in touch with home. When Ms. Boland arrived at college as a freshman, if her roommate wasn’t around at dinnertime, she was “faced with going to the dining hall and sitting with 1,000 other students, perhaps by myself, and that overwhelming feeling of aloneness -- or skipping dinner altogether.” Now a student can just call his or her roommate and arrange to meet at dinner.
The cellphones are a reassuring gadget for parents, too. “Parents like to be able to reach their sons and daughters, and with a cellphone they can,” Ms. Boland says.
Morrisville had already been passing out laptops for several years. A few years ago, the institution added wireless Internet access to the campus.
“Morrisville does have a technological image, so I think it just adds to that image,” Ms. Boland says. With increasingly tech-savvy students arriving every year, “we need to stay in front of that group and know what their needs are,” she says.
“If we don’t, we’ll be sitting here and people will pass us by.”
A Cheap Alternative
Institutions that cannot afford iPods, laptops, or cellphones have looked for ways to compete in technology giveaways.
This year Samford University, a small Christian college in Alabama, will give out key drives, little data-storage cards on a keychain that plug into a computer’s USB port. At $20 apiece, complete with the university logo printed on them, the key drives were the cheapest way for the university to offer its students a technological tool.
“There is a coolness factor to something like this,” says Alan Hargrave, the university’s chief information officer. “With today’s tech-savvy students, there is a part of that that we have to play to. We acknowledge that we are going to embrace that rather than let technology pass us by.”
He says the university had pondered buying laptops for students, but administrators were uncomfortable with bumping up tuition to pay for the computers.
Warren Arbogast, a consultant who advises colleges on technology investments, says administrators are right in thinking that hand-held devices will soon be a ubiquitous tool. He recalls sitting in a recent meeting, watching a student take notes on his cellphone, and thinking that typing tests of the future will be conducted on those tiny keypads.
But when it comes to giving away technology en masse to incoming students, he says colleges should think hard about what they are trying to accomplish.
“If it is buzz and excitement, obviously that has worked because we’re talking about it,” he says. But if it’s something with academic relevance, colleges are better off establishing basic services, then introducing devices on a small scale and evaluating their performance.
“As for the giveaways we’re seeing, I am an open-minded guy,” he says, adding that he used all sorts of gimmicks to get his students’ attention when he taught at the University of Virginia. “But will an undergrad download language-lab tapes before Eminem? I don’t know. I sure wouldn’t.”
Still, buzz and excitement are powerful sensations among competitive institutions.
Nancy R. Crouch, assistant chief information officer at Wake Forest, got shrill e-mail messages from recent graduates and other alumni after Duke made its iPod announcement.
Some alums said, “I can’t believe you let them beat you on this,” she says. Then they wrote, “So when are you going to tell us what you’re doing?”
In fact, for a few years now, Wake Forest administrators have lent hand-held gadgets to students in limited quantities and in select departments, studying how various devices might be useful in courses.
Jay Dominick, the university’s chief information officer, says that students’ familiarity with cellphones is driving an interest in hand-held devices.
“The laptop is mobile, but it is not mobile like a cellphone is,” he says. “The laptop to a certain extent becomes a server for a variety of mobile devices. I don’t think that the mobile device replaces the laptop. I don’t think that it comes close. But I think that it can significantly enhance the laptop.”
But he says the university wants to be careful in adopting new technology. He says officials have found that students need more training with hand-held devices than they do with, say, laptops. He also wants to make sure that there are legitimate academic uses established at the university before purchasing the devices by the truckload.
“The first thing that we do when we roll these out is make an announcement,” he says. “Faculty or alumni call and say, What are you going to do with these things? Isn’t it just a toy or a gimmick that you are giving? Why are they needed? I think we’re getting pretty close to having those answers.”
Wake Forest’s favorite gadget at the moment is a Pocket PC with wireless access to the Internet. A group of education students used them to write papers and stay connected to home during a backpacking trip in Europe.
Students in the university’s Army Reserve Officers Training Corps will be the latest group to get Pocket PC’s. John Pham-Ta, a senior who is a biology major and a ROTC officer, used pocket PC’s in a chemistry class and thought that the devices’ communication capabilities would allow officers to tell students about last-minute changes in uniform or formation. He went to Anne Bishop, the university’s director of research and development, and told her about his idea. Ms. Bishop wrote up an instant-messaging program for the hand-held devices, then began distributing a set of Pocket PC’s to ROTC students.
On a sunny afternoon in a Wake Forest lecture room, about a dozen freshmen in jungle-green fatigues are sitting rigidly in plastic chairs, as Ms. Bishop holds up a hand-held computer that uses Windows and lets users enter data with a stylus, and explains what it can do.
Mr. Pham-Ta sits in the back of the room showing off his own pocket PC, which he got more than a week ago. He has already used it outside of his ROTC duties -- to register for classes, for example. And he keeps notes about supplies for ROTC on the device.
He’s so excited that he even went out and bought a fancy pen with a stylus tip. He pulls the pen out of a chest pocket on his camouflage uniform and shows it off.
“This is like Christmas,” he says.
WHO’S GETTING WHICH GEAR
State University of New York College of Agriculture and Technology at MorrisvilleGadget: Motorola i205 cellphone ($100)*Who gets it: The 1,800 students who live in the university’s residence halls
University of Maryland at College ParkGadget: BlackBerry 7510 personal digital assistant ($550)Who gets it: The 320 full-time students in the M.B.A. program and many faculty and staff members
Duke UniversityGadget: iPod music player ($299)Who gets it: The university’s 1,650 freshmen
Samford UniversityGadget: USB key-chain storage device ($20)Who gets it: The university’s 680 freshmen
Winona State UniversityGadget: Gateway M275 tablet PC ($1,800)Who gets it: All 4,000 undergraduates, as well as many faculty and staff members
Mayville State UniversityGadget: Gateway M275 tablet PC ($1,800)Who gets it: The university’s 800 undergraduates
* All prices are retail. Colleges buying in bulk get discounted rates.
http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 51, Issue 4, Page A29
