Going with the iPod flow
Bridgewater State College has joined the iPod generation, only in ways that you might not anticipate. Following a national trend in higher education, Bridgewater has developed an academic version of iPod use. Appropriately dubbed bPod -- the B is for Bridgewater, of course -- it offers lectures by professors, and pertinent information about college events, via iPod. Rather than listen to Professor Kryzanek drone on in the classroom, my students will be able to downlink the lecture onto their iPod s and listen to my pearls of wisdom anywhere they like.
Although iPod lectures are in the early stages of development, expect them to be the next big thing on college campuses. Students these days are not only tuned in to technology, they clamor for new ways of learning. iPod learning is just that.
As the new Bridgewater State bPod program gets underway, I think about how far we have come from the early days in Greece when Socrates and Aristotle took their young charges out under a large tree and imparted knowledge just by talking.
Since then, things have progressed pretty much in this order: books, newspapers, radio, television, mimeographs,
Tomorrow, who knows; it could very well be that all my lectures will be available on cellphones or perhaps there will be a "knowledge chip" that can be inserted into the student's brain that will contain all the information necessary to pass tests and graduate from college. The possibilities are endless.
Anytime there is a new mode of learning, there are skeptics who question its academic effectiveness. My view: If the bPod gives student s a new learning option and plays to their lifestyle and skills strengths, then such an option should be applauded.
But I do wonder what may happen to the more contemplative student who, for whatever reason, hasn't taken to the sensory overload that comes with our new technology -- the student who like s to quietly pursue the life of the mind the old-fashioned way. There is much to recommend sitting with a modern-day Socrates or Aristotle and just talking and listening and thinking. I wish more of my students would yearn to develop such contemplative skills, just as they have mastered text messaging, cellphone photography, and PlayStation 3.
I worry, too, about whether we are losing the capacity to think critically about contemporary issues, the ability to raise important questions and concerns about ethical problems, and the capability to argue and debate from two different sides of an eternal question.
There is nothing inherently misguided about listening to a lecture rather than being at a lecture, but lost in the process are human contact and intellectual give and take. It enforces a kind of intellectual isolation that is the opposite of what I think many of my students -- already distracted by commercial culture -- need.
Not that there's much choice. These new modes of learning have a life of their own, and we would be wise to go with the flow. iPod lectures are just the latest in what is certain to be an ever developing string of new modes of learning, and there's no way to stand still in this stream of techno-evolution.
Yet it is important to remember that learning is not just data and formulas and models that can be easily transmitted through the new technology. Learning is analyzing data, assessing the value of formulas, and critiquing models. Learning is being able to make reasoned judgments and candid evaluations.
Knowing that in the future my students may be curled up in bed listening to my lecture and falling asleep is a modern-day reality check.
Michael Kryzanek of Whitman is professor of political science at Bridgewater State College. He can be reached at mkryzanek@bridgew.edu. 
