Aural exam
DUKE UNIVERSITY is conducting an experiment. This month the school will give free iPods to 1,650 entering freshman for a year and watch to see if these portable music players enhance higher education.
The $500,000 project sounds at first like a student scam: Everyone gets a free, tiny jukebox on the off chance that they might use it for academic insight as well as listening to Nsync.
But Duke's experiment is promising. It is part of a larger plan to increase the use of technology in education that has included experiments with laptop, wireless, and handheld computers.
The iPod experiment is a chance to test whether new audio capabilities can improve education. Success seems likely -- envision a history class that includes recordings of Martin Luther King, whose voice has the power to shake souls even when it's heard on recordings.
Students will be able to use the devices to record field work notes in an environmental science class, or study sound in an engineering class, or as a mini-hard drive in classes where students need a convenient way to transport large files. Duke will also have a website where students can download course content such as foreign language lessons, lectures, and audio books.
Students should also be able to post content -- such as music performed by student bands or recorded editorials from the school newspaper -- that their peers can download. And the hope is that they will experiment and find additional academic uses.
More interesting than the project will be the assessment that the university plans to carry out in the spring. Duke officials have yet to set assessment criteria, but they are likely to look at a variety of uses and impacts across subject areas, according to Lynne O'Brien, director of the school's Center for Instructional Technology.
A more pressing issue for Duke and its higher education peers is whether iPods in particular and technology in general improve a student's journey to the heart of education. A pen is an ordinary object. Its power comes from being used to take the notes or write the papers that plumb the depths of philosophy, science, and history. Can an iPod be as useful in its own way?
The challenge is to bend technology to the goal of enlightenment -- without being pompous or contrived. Duke's and other experiments have to address lingering fears that the Internet will change us to a society where websites replace books, research is reduced to using a couple of search engines, and knowledge is something you look up on the Web instead of having in your head.
Exploring technology's contributions to higher education is all part of the long courtship that will help determine what kind of marriages can be made between gadgets and intellectual achievement. 