Technology in the Classroom

Last year Duke greeted Students with something interesting. They handed out an apple I-pod. Since then debate has absolutely raged about whether it was a frivolous popularity gimmick or an inspired new move to incorporate technology into the educational environment. I say it is more towards the inspired end of the spectrum because it embraces a very fundamental aspect of technology used for educational purposes. It MUST MUST MUST be universal. Since every student has one then teachers can expect them to be available to all of their students. Since every student has them you have the maximum possibility that they will figure out some new way to make them usefull tools for study.

Currently there is no end to the debate regarding computer use in the classroom at all levels of education. All I can say is that they will continue to be marginal tools at best till they are universal and their use is on par with that of paper. IE everyone has it and knows how to use it. Until then they are unevenly distributed tools and becasue they lack a universal nature teachers will continue to be at odds regarding how to properly harness them.

Now that said, I am not sure what the ultimate value of an Ipod in an educational setting is at this particular point in time but its power to be an effective tool is there as 20gb+ is an awful lot of information. Even with its limitations it has gotten enough use and the practice has spread to enough schools that they are slowly finding their niche. This article covers the positives and negatives and at the end raises an issue that makes my blood boil. It is a discussion of the right of students to share the material captured by their ipods... such as lectures and interviews. I simply find it appalling that there is even any question about the rights of a student to record and share the information they gain in class. Be that with their fellow classmates or the world at large. Technology has now brought a level of educational material dessimination to the realm of possibility that was utterly impractical not all that long ago. Consider it this way. After College one could have an IPOD filled with thousands of hours of lectures and full sets of the asociated texts and refference materials... and someone else could have them in the time it takes to copy the information. For 600 dollars worth of gear I could share the materials of my college education with a friend, my child or a complete stranger. This is simply STAGGERING. We should be dancing about singing hallelujia and striving to make the perfect envrionment for collecting all of this information into a manageable system for accessing it and pushing it out to anyone who wants it.

I wish I had my College classes and texts on Ipod or simply in any digital format... especially if I could index that information via something like Google's desktop search. Instead I have barely legible, incomplete notebooks, fading memories and some of the texts. I wish that when the time comes and my children are learning they could have access to all of that information, and more, easy access to that level of information in ANY field of intrest. This idea that it may be right to create limitations for sharing educational information needs to be stopped in its tracks.

Instead we seem more interested in protecting the prestiege factor of attending college and limiting the dessimination of the learning available only to those both finacially and physcially able to atend the classes at the various universities. With free sharing of this sort of information in place, top lectures by the best in the field could be used to supplement course material at ALL classes EVERYWHERE or used by a motivated individual to learn on their own.