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April 7, 2005
Duke iPod Experiment Fails. Well. Sorta.
Via Engadget I read that Duke will not hand out "free"8 iPods to all first year students next year. Now people will have to register for a class that actually intends to USE recorded material. The story claims that sixteen classes fit that criterion for the spring semester. I take it that number excludes music and foreign language classes (course which, after all, have been using recorded materials for as long as those have been available).
"Some faculty are enthused about using iPods in courses, and others don't see any real purpose for them," O'Brien said in a statement. "But without the iPods experiment, we wouldn't be having such active discussions about what value new technologies have in teaching."Welcome to technology adoption on campus, though $500,000 seems like a kind of expensive ice-breaker exercise. We still don't have 100% penetration for email, after all.
So were they free? Well, the distribution of 1,600 iPods doesn't appear to have been grant supported, though it was an initiative in concert with Apple. Sooooo . . . the money came out of someone's budget. Duke's in the $40,000 per year bracket. Even if it was grant supported, the time and effort spent on getting THAT grant could have been spent on getting ANOTHER grant (this is something cranky faculty members often say in response to an administrator saying "but the [whatever] is grant-funded and we wouldn't have gotten money from them for a different kind of project!").
further: In answer to a comment below I started wondering about the fallout on campus -- then I wondered what the phone lines at the Duke admissions office might be like today: how many cranky members of the next Duke entering class will be calling the to shout "damn it! my parents told me that since I was applying to Duke early admission that they weren't going to buy me an iPod for Christmas because I'd get a free one in August anyway!"
Posted by CrankyProfessor at April 7, 2005 8:45 AM