Last year Duke University partnered with Apple Computers to form a unique alliance—give each of the 1,650 entering Freshman, at no charge, an Apple iPod to be used both in and outside the classroom. Dr. Larry Moneta, Vice President for Student Affairs at Duke, said the endeavor stimulated experimentation. “In this day and age there has to be room for playful experimentation,” he said. “The iPod project has done this for us. We were able to engage students with technology and get them to think of creative uses with the device.”
Almost all of the reported uses of the iPod have been academically related. Student Affairs Online wanted to know how Duke’s iPod undertaking was utilized for out-of-the-classroom activities. We spoke with Lisa Beth Bergene, Assistant Dean, First Year Campus, and one of the student affairs staff members on the Project Team.
Student Affairs Online (SAO): What was your involvement in the iPod experiment?
Lisa Bergene (LB): I was one of two Student Affairs members on the iPod Core Project Team. This was the group that was composed of the leaders of CIT (Center for Instructional Technology) and OIT (Office of Information Technology), myself, and Ryan Lombardi (Assistant Dean of Students, Orientation and Family Programs) who met weekly to update what projects we were working on, to share information, and to problem solve. I ran the Student Life component of the project and also co-advised the Student Creativity Team with Sean Aery from
CIT. This was a group of six first-year students who came together several times during the semester to talk about their experience with the iPod and ideas they had for projects.
SAO: It seemed the emphasis on the iPod experiment dealt with the academic realm. Can you elaborate on some of the non-academic uses students were using their iPods for?
LB: Students used the iPods in a variety of ways:
*Students downloaded a specially created calendar of the athletic events on campus. It dropped those events directly into the student’s iPod calendar. Students also could use the iPod as a psuedo-PDA if they created a calendar on their personal computer and transferred that information to their iPod. Some students reported tracking birthdays, exams, and other critical dates.
*Students used the "alarm" function of the clock to wake up in the morning.
*The rowing team borrowed iPods in order to allow the coxswains to record their calls to the rowers. The coxswains and coaches used Blackboard [one of the more popular course management software systems in use at colleges and universities] to share their recordings and offer feedback for both practice and race recordings. The rowers could also get the recordings and practice.
*The iPod has a contacts feature so we loaded emergency numbers onto the iPod that the students could utilize. Some students chose to use this as their address book.
*Students enabled the hard drive function of the iPod to back up their personal computers or to transport large files between computers.
*We posted recordings of an audio tour of East campus (first year campus) on the Duke Page on iTunes as well as recordings of speakers who came to campus and a welcome address by President Brodhead.
Ideas for the future might include:
-Post demo tracks from bands and musical groups performing on campus to use as an advertisement for events.
-More recordings of speakers on campus.
-Post recordings of student organization leaders to use as recruitment tools for their organization (including campus fraternities and sororities).
-Placing some form of kiosk in campus offices that would allow a student to go into the office and load a calendar of events, sample speakers, audio welcome from the director, etc about that office.
SAO: What did you see as the general reaction of the students?
LB: In general, many of them enjoyed being part of the experiment and getting to use the technology. Some students dove right in and put the iPod to use for both personal and academic use right away. In the beginning, I heard a lot about students recording their lectures and playing them back to enhance their class notes. Students used them at the gym and on the bus traveling back and forth to class. We also heard that the number of roommate conflicts that are typically caused by students not agreeing on music volume or music style were fewer because students used their iPods. In some cases, the iPods also opened up doors for students to talk to one another- on a bus trip to an NBA game in Charlotte, the staff reported that the bus aisle was a web of wires as students would share one earbud with another student so that they could hear
one another's music.
SAO: What were some of the challenges you and the creative team faced?
LB: There was no limit to the number of ideas that we generated. The challenge was that since we had to operate with this project as a pilot, it was difficult to convince students and departments to invest time and budget into making recordings that might only be viable for one year. It's quite similar to asking a member of the faculty to change their entire syllabus for one year to participate in this project when there is no certainty that it would continue in its current form in the future. I think both Duke and Apple were doing a lot of brainstorming about functions of the iPod beyond its playback functions. The Student Creativity Team generated a list of several pages of ideas--both academic and non-academic--for the iPod. The list also
included a "wish list" of things they hoped the iPod could do in order to make it more useful academically. One of the most common features was the ability to display images, which is what you now see in the newest version of the iPod.
There are also some limits with the technology- the iPod is not a PDA so there are only very limited ways to actually add information directly to the iPod.
The decision to issue iPods to just the first year students did have implications for the projects we chose. We did not want to create new ways of communicating with students that could not be utilized by the upperclassmen and the graduates or force them into the position of having to purchase the technology in order to be take part in University services.
SAO: Besides developing new and creative uses for the iPod, were there any other positive experiences with the program?
LB: One of the most successful parts of this project was what we as a University learned about our own infrastructure through this process and the relationships that developed between offices and staff. Normally, the CIT and Residence Life would not cross paths often, but CIT staff served as co-advisor to the Student Creativity Team, trained Residence Life staff on Blackboard,
and consulted for us on other student affairs projects. Residence Life has helped with CIT's formal assessment processes, assisted with information dissemination to students, and was able to gather input from students as needed. The same types of interactions happened between Student Affairs and OIT. It's also been interesting to have the opportunity to see what types of technology CIT and OIT are using to learn if they have practical use in our own office.
SAO: Hindsight is 20-20. If you could go back in time what are some aspects of the program you would have changed or better addressed?
LB: I don't think any of us realized how big this project was going to turn out to be. The staff at OIT and CIT, especially, put in many hours on tasks that no one could have anticipated such as having to clean and restore the loaner iPods at the end of each semester so that they could be used again in the spring. We also had to come up with a solution to working with students who
did not own a computer since the iPod is dependent upon the iTunes application for many of its functions.
I wish that we had had more time initially to consider some of the big philosophical questions such as intellectual property and copyright. For example, is it okay for a student to record a faculty member giving a lecture? Who owns the rights to that recording and is it permissible for a student to share that recording with a student outside of the class?
One of the things that we learned was that our students did not all walk through the doors understanding how to use this technology. About half of the students came to campus owning some form of digital music player, but a number of them would have benefited from one-to-one training of how to set up their iPod and make use of the special features.
SAO: What are your thoughts about the whole experiment?
LB: I think we were surprised to see how some student behavior changed as result of this technology. Other researchers have written about the body language of the iPod culture and we did see evidence of it at Duke. Students told us that wearing both earbuds sent the signal that the wearer would prefer not to be disturbed. Wearing one earbud meant that the individual was listening to music, but was willing to engage in conversation if approached. We found that the
current student culture of wanting to be around other people but not wanting the burden of having to interact directly was supported by the iPod. Intentionally or unintentionally, the iPod provided a socially acceptable way to be alone in a highly public environment such as the dining hall, library, or bus.
From sitting in on the academic project meetings, I was continuously amazed at the uses people found for the technology. At one of the Student Creativity Team meetings, Sean (CIT) described how to generate vocabulary flashcards using the iPod and the students sitting around the table immediately discussed several other uses for these audio flashcards. I believe that there are some
medical schools that are hoping to create visual flashcards for anatomy lessons with the new photo iPods.
For a one-year program, I think we accomplished a lot. Now that we know the project is continuing, more effort can be put into exploring longer term opportunities. For the Student Life projects in the future, we are focusing attention on the Duke Page on iTunes and adding more audio content for Duke community downloading.
A comprehensive report on the “Duke iPod First-Year Experience” is available at http://www.duke.edu/ipod