Every couple of years, a hot new electronic device comes along that promises to transform education, if not life in general, and a few colleges give one to every new student. In the 90s, it was laptops. Three years ago, Duke University tried an iPod giveaway (The Chronicle, July 20, 2004). Montclair State University hands out cellphones (The Chronicle, May 11, 2007). And last month, Abilene Christian University announced that it will give every new student an iPhone (or an iPod touch, which can connect to the Internet via the campus network).
This week Oklahoma Christian University said it, too, will give iPhones or iPod touches to all new students, starting in May, in addition to Apple laptop computers.
Reaction to the latest giveaways ranged from hurrahs, especially in the Apple-fan blogosphere, to Huh?
A look at past projects suggests that such handouts rarely spread widely to other campuses (laptop programs are most popular, with about 200 colleges having one, either for all students or in a particular department). Sometimes the "first" college to give out a gadget is also the only one. Duke said its project was a huge success, but it has stopped giving away large numbers of iPods and now uses the music players only in certain courses (The Chronicle, May 1, 2006).
Still, the underlying dreams of such projects usually do come true—slowly and organically—as colleges gradually build services that work on the new machines and students buy them on their own.
For instance, students really do use laptops in all aspects of their daily lives these days, both to log on to course Web sites and to run their social lives—just as visionaries of the 90s predicted. Students arrive on campuses with an iPod or other digital music player, and they can download course podcasts of lectures from some college Web sites. And almost everyone has a cell phone, and the devices are becoming a key tool to distribute information to students and staff members in emergencies.
Many campus technology watchers predict that something like an iPhone will become ubiquitous on campuses in the next two to three years, whether colleges give out shiny new toys or not. That was one prediction of the latest Horizon report from Educause and the New Media Consortium. The report tracks near-term technology trends expected to affect higher education.
The devices will help break down classroom walls because, unlike laptops, students carry them at all times, says Rachel Smith, a vice president at the New Media Consortium. And they will prepare students for an increasingly connected work world. "It's a way to model the way work happens in a lot of professions right now," she says. (Yep, she owns an iPhone.)
Officials at Abilene Christian, in Texas, acknowledge that their project might seem like a gimmick, although they argue that it arose out of a five-year, faculty-led study of ways to use technology to transform education and services on campus.
"What separates us from some of the fads of the past is that this is not a technology initiative, this is a learning initiative," says Phil J. Schubert, executive vice president for the university.
The university produced a Web site outlining specifics of how iPhones will be integrated into campus life, complete with a slick YouTube video that offers a cheesy dramatization of what an iPod campus will look like.
But if something sounds like a gimmick, and looks like a gimmick, it might be a gimmick.
Some students on the campus think so, judging by a Facebook group at Abilene Christian, known as ACU, that formed to protest the project. The group, called Official ACU Freshman iPhone Policy Protest Group, has more than 200 members.
On the discussion area of the group, students questioned spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on iPhones when student tuition is being raised by 7 percent. (Officials said that the two are not linked, although they would not specify where the money for the iPhone project is coming from.)
Questioning the Values
Kristen Blanchard, a sophomore who started the Facebook group, said in an e-mail interview that she thinks the devices might do more harm than good in the classroom. She says she tried to take notes on her tablet PC when she first arrived, but that having the device was "a distraction" and that her grades suffered: "I abandoned the idea and went back to a regular pen and paper, and my grades improved."
Ms. Blanchard also argued that a Christian university buying flashy phones for students sends the wrong signal to the outside world. "We are being taught in class and by the Bible that materialism is a negative attribute," she said.
The university planned to hold a forum Tuesday night to try to allay such concerns, and to argue that the devices will improve education, establish the university as a technology pioneer, and help students become more effective Christian leaders. And some students already agree, and either defend the project or want it to expand. One Facebook group, called Give Us All iPhones!, has more than 400 members.
Success at Abilene Christian will ultimately depend on whether professors make use of services supported by the iPhones, says Jon Rickman, vice president for information systems at Northwest Missouri State University, which was one of the first institutions to require laptop computers, way back in 1994.
After the first few years of that program, officials decided that not enough courses made use of the machines to make the requirement worth the cost to students. They canceled the effort.
"In general we didn't get a good penetration across all of our classes," says Mr. Rickman.
But a few years later, once reality caught up to the rhetoric, the university reinstated the laptop requirement.
