Duke Digital Initiative into its fourth wireless year
Posted on January 30, 2009 by Hamish
Filed Under Uncategorized
As promised, I’d like to bring to your attention a few items regarding mobile learning (mLearning) and the way it’s being used in educational spheres. For the past few years, a trend has begun that has opened new possibilities for the ways in which students collaborate with the help of technologies they so fervently love to use.
Duke University was the one that set the one of the institution to set the trend in motion. (Update ) Other insitutions have followed suit, but I’d like to focus here on Duke. Its researchers were the ones who truly captivated the educational technology community with the radical experimentation they have undergone. They kick started in 2004 as the Duke iPod Project, distributing around one-thousand, six-hundred 20 GB Apple iPods to first-year students. The project was controversial, with mixed results. Student impressions were of skepticism but also welcoming of new technologies.
It has since developed into the Duke Digital Initiative, which is currently active at Duke, and explores the use of a variety of technologies that can help capture and record the educational experiences, and convert them to a portable format so that students may relive them. They provide students with the tools and means to use wireless mobile devices (WMDs) to gain greater access to course materials put out by instructors, and in various formats specific to different applications. The significance of the project was that even with a $500,000 investment backing it, no one really knew what would happen. Would students actually use their iPods for recording lectures and listening to course content on the go, or would they use it as a distraction in class?
What Duke researchers really wanted to know were a few essential things: How was the student body going to react when injected with these mobile devices, what would they use them for, and would it contribute to the educational experience. The answers to the first two questions were answered in the first year of study, in which students and staff were observed to see what they would do with these iPods. Staff posted digital audio material, and students downloaded it. It was hoped that students would become more engaged because their curricula were adapting to their interests.
Belkin soon got on board by offering free microphones that could be plugged into the iPods for recording purposes, and something highly valuable was thrown into the mix that if utilized during class sessions would be a great interactive study tool for students. By the second year they were refining their skills and applying what they had learned, so even greater potential could be taken from iPod use. These devices are highly popular to the student demographic, so embracing the technology proved a worthy decision. And regardless of what people might have said, feedback showed that while personal use was inevitable, there was still a significant array of academic uses for the iPods overall.
A number of other universities have followed suit, been using iPods in the same way, such as Georgia College & State University, York, and Drexel which distributed iPods to their faculty and staff to encourage the sharing of course content. Professors provided course materials like documents, podcasts, and other files to their students through a secure online server (as with Drexel), but students also use their iPods as recording devices for interviews.
In 2003, only a couple of years after the introduction of the iPod demonstrated the appeal for digital mobility, the U.K.’s Birmingham University with the help of Toshiba and a £150,000 investment from Microsoft, began a grand experiment. Birmingham wanted to see what would happen if they provided an entire faculty (of Engineering, as it turns out) and it’s students with mobile devices, such as PDAs, and allow them to be used anywhere on campus, in or out of class. Although this case study resulted in lower than expected approval rating from students by the end of the trial, it still foreshadowed greater examinations to come, as was the case with Duke a year later.
Instructor Diane Zorn lectures a philosophy course at York that is available in multiple digital formats, 100% of which is available for download through Zorn’s RSS feed: a PDF copy of the lecture is available for download, as well as a video podcast (‘v-cast’) through iTunes or other preferred podcast software. Much of this is iPod-compatible content, as “really what we’re offering students,” says Zorn, “is the ability to customize their learning environment to fit their lifestyle and their learning style”.
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6 Responses to “Duke Digital Initiative into its fourth wireless year”
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[...] Blog entry of the EDC blog:http://edc.carleton.ca/blog/index.php/2009/01/30/uk-guardian-birmingham-students-become-hi-tech-guin… [...]
Have they done many studies with the iPods to see how many students use the Uni iPods for personal music/etc.;, or if most students have two.
Also … it’s “Birmingham” – though the local accent does often make it “Bermingham”!
Hello Emma,
Thanks for your inquiry and for catching the typo. As for your question we are not really sure if they have gathered these types of stats, but are still looking into it and will post what we find. Please see initial response below.
Thanks for you interest, Ryan Kuhne
Response from blog author Hamish
“In 2005, Duke underwent its first real assessment of how it was going. It was clear (and perhaps expected) that students immediately used the iPod for personal use, and to what extent this donation meant some students were then carrying around a spare iPod is uncertain, but not unlikely. Still, they wanted to focus on the usage of their 20 GB models selected for the study, and they did find that students used them on an extracurricular basis, but also that students took advantage of the iPod’s features (with little needed incentive) because of its practical usefulness managing coursework, and in my opinion the beauty of the study is that the incentive came in the form of the device itself.”
All of the reports we have generated regarding the iPod program at Duke and the Duke Digital Initiative are available on the Duke Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) web site. I hope this is helpful.
http://cit.duke.edu/reports/reports_type.html
-Yvonne Belanger, CIT, Duke University
Thank you very much Yvonne!
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