Here’s a couple of kind of fun and interesting links:
From Inside Higher Ed comes this article, “Duke Analyzes iPod Project.” And, for the whole sha-bang, there’s this, the “Duke iPod First Year Experience.” Personally, I think the whole iPod give-away thing is kind of a gimmick, and kind of a strange one for a place like Duke, if you ask me. “Sure, tuition is a gazillion dollars here at Duke, but hey, you get a free iPod!”
As reported in the Inside Higher Ed piece, there are some things that aren’t too surprising: for example, the greatest use of the iPod was in foreign language and music classes, and there were many “inherent limitations” for using the iPod in teaching, such as tools for mixing audio with images.
But I was surprised about the problem of some of the sound quality of iPod recordings not being good enough to use. I have one of these $50 recording devices for my iPod and it seems to work fine to me. Anyway, as I’ve mentioned before, I for one am interested in doing some podcasting sorts of things for an online class I’m teaching in the Fall; maybe they didn’t have much need for that at Duke.
I also think that iPods are useful (and might be useful for our students at EMU) simply as a portable hard drive. I haven’t tried to hook it up to a PC yet, but all I have to do to use it on a Mac is to plug it into an USB port. Very handy, if you ask me.
Of course, also easy to lose and/or steal, but that’s another story.