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10/29/2004
Viau supports those assertions, but, “before the iPod, I had serious problems finding a way to provide a variety of musical texts for my students to listen to at home and discuss online or in class,” he recalls. “Since my working definition of ‘gothic’ in music includes everything from medieval chant, Beethoven, and Nine Inch Nails to Tori Amos, over-the-counter CDs didn’t work; it was too much material to put on a single CD, or even a couple.” Enter the iPod, whose capacity and compact size made it possible for Viau to “simply hand my students 10 to 15 gigs of music to take home, listen and respond to, and then discuss in class.”
Student response “has been enthusiastically and uniformly positive,” says Viau. Adds student Rachel Hotchkiss, “The iPod helps me understand the way music is connected to everything—literature, history, architecture, our culture. It has exposed me to new kinds of music that I now listen to all the time.” Another student, Kevin Bustabad, agrees. “This class is totally different from any other I’ve ever taken. It has so many more elements to help us understand ideas about the course and think critically.” Says Viau: “Give me a hundred more iPods and I’ll transform interdisciplinary studies in the humanities at this school.”
“It just strikes me that listening to King's ‘I Have a Dream’ speech on an iPod offers less than 50 percent of the potential impact, compared to watching the speech with streaming media on a wirelessly-connected notebook,” Skill continues. “I wonder how many of the students who listened to the speech on their iPod can identify the location where King gave it? When I consider the relative value of a notebook computer with a wireless data connection, compared to an iPod, I have a hard time understanding why we would want to move to a narrow-use appliance when the notebook computer d'es everything an iPod d'es.” Skill d'es, however, acknowledge the iPod’s potential in areas such as language immersion, wherein students can continually hear and record the language as part of the learning process. This, in fact, is one area where Duke intends to employ its distributed iPods: One of the four classes is an intensive course in Spanish.
Still, “I remain skeptical because the uses are narrow and limited,” insists Skill. He adds, “Given the limited discussion of the educational benefits and lack of data showing measurable positive learning outcomes, I continue to question the strategy [of Duke’s program]. My sense is that a series of iPod pilots that test learning-centered strategies on groups of 30 to 40 students would be more appropriate for gaining useful insights as to the potential of the technology.”
This is precisely the way that administrators at Georgia College and State University chose to test the applicability of the iPod to pedagogical use: The school launched its own experiment back in 2002 and proved the iPod to be a valuable tool for instructional use.
“We started playing this tune two years ago,” says Jim Wolfgang, GC&SU’s CIO. “We took a different approach in addressing it from a proof of concept position before investing heavily, and we are very confident that what we are doing will be a part of higher education for the next generation.” The institution’s program was initiated by its vice chancellor for Information and Instructional Technology, Randall Thursby—himself an early iPod adopter.
Microsoft exec Stephen Elop on Monday announced two hosted solutions from Microsoft--Exchange Online and SharePoint Online--which are now available to organizations of all sizes in the United States. The software, paid for by annual subscriptions, is hosted on Microsoft's servers and supported by Microsoft's channel partners.
There are, in my experience, six strategies to consider with any use of technology that will guard against rote use of technology and facilitate critical analysis of teaching and learning effectiveness. In this article, I'll share with you the checklist I work with and encourage others to work with in learning about and using new technology.
How can an institution incorporate Web 2.0 learning opportunities for students, and evidence of learning from those opportunities, into existing campus technologies and processes? PlugJam is providing part of the answer.
As part of a strategy to meet students' expectations to experience interactive Web 2.0 applications in their learning environments, Delta College in Michigan launched an online Delta iTunes U site this fall.
The word "content," as used in education, is troublesome for many educators today who see education as a constructivist process, an interaction between knower and learner, and as a student-centered activity.
The Pennsylvania State University's World Campus and Kryterion have gone public with results of a pilot in which students completed proctored exams online using Webassessor Online Secured Testing. The technology is intended to deliver tests without the need for an in-room proctor present.
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