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SPECIAL DOUBLE FEATURE! Academic MP3s >> Is It iTime Yet?

2/28/2006

By Mikael Blaisdell

Getting iReady

iDreaming. GC&SU has taken an incremental approach to incorporating the iPod technology into teaching and learning. So, GC&SU is supporting a growing but contained number of iPod initiatives. The first step toward deciding which initiatives to pursue was to assemble a group from all areas of the campus—admissions, residence halls, library, and academic areas. Gormly recalls, “There were about 75 ‘iDreamers’ in the group. We demonstrated the iSuite and all of the associated software that was available in and around the iPod. We showed the group the possibilities of the tools and asked: What would you do?”

“If you just give people technology, some of them will use it, but a lot of the tools will sit on their desks while they feel guilty about it, because they don’t yet have a good reason for using them,” Gormly emphasizes. “You’ve got to have some values that are driving the use of technology, and our values are: How d'es this improve the teaching and learning? How d'es this help us create those graduates that we envision in our mission?”

Commit, and support. The outcome of the iDreamers’ work was a list of possible applications for the iPod on campus. The proposals were evaluated, and a list of targets was developed. “We picked a few to go with that we thought we could support and support well,” recalls Gormly. “If you have too many balls in the air, eventually some of them will fall, and then people won’t trust you to complete things in a quality way.”

Wolfgang also sees the issue of appropriate support as vital. “You can promote a technology like the iPod and encourage faculty so much that they tip off the far end and say ‘this is too much.’ Or, you can not do enough, and risk the project dying because you don’t have 52 designers building tools for them. But if you can keep it in balance, finding the middle ground, then you can be successful.”

“We want to encourage experimentation aimed at improving student learning but also recognize the importance of evaluating results,” says Leland. “This strategy allows us to make the best use of scarce institutional resources, and ensures that funding for instructional innovation using new technologies supports the outcomes we seek to achieve.” GC&SU and other schools have made significant investments in introducing and supporting the use of the iPod on campus, and are poised to make more over the next few years.

iPod Project: Nelnet-Backed Research

At GC&SU, Hayden and Linda Irwin DeVitis, Dean of Administration for the School of Education, wanted to research the perceptions about college held by middle school students and their families. Paul Jones, GC&SU’s VP for Institutional Research and Enrollment Management, and Assistant VP Suzanne Pittman came up with the idea of offering a scholarship to freshmen that included working in the community as mentors, helping middle school students in the area of college readiness. The scholarship students would have the opportunity to attend a leadership conference, and to work with technology as well.

“Technology is so attractive to these millennial students today,” says Pittman. “And our iPod programs on campus had been so popular that we began looking for a way to use that technology in the middle school research project.” Both the iPod’s functionality and its popularity offered advantages to the program. Using the recorder head accessory, the college mentors could use the iPod to record not only their interviews with the middle school students, but also the accounts of their own personal paths toward college. The capacity for storing notes and podcasts would be useful not only in equipping the mentors with appropriate and timely information to give to their young mentees, but also in sharing information among the project team’s members, as well. Plus, the popularity of the iPod was not restricted to the college students; middle school students also were attracted to the device.

Pittman and Jones approached the educational finance organization Nelnet (National Educational Loan Network; www.nelnet.net), which agreed to sponsor the project with an initial grant of $25,000. The funding was used for a scholarship to pay 25 college students a small stipend, and to purchase the iPods that would be used in their work.

DeVitis and Hayden created an academic course for the Fall 2005 semester around the service project, designed to prepare the students to research what actually makes a difference in the middle school students’ attitudes toward college. “We’ve been meeting every other week,” reports Tiffany Bishop, one of the scholarship recipients and student mentors. “We’re learning mentoring techniques, and how to use the iPods. At one of our meetings, we discussed how to approach certain topics. We had [practice scenarios] and learned how to respond to things like bad report cards.” The group members were taught to use the iPod’s recording accessories, to upload the resulting files, and to create podcasts so that they could be shared with the faculty and other students.

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