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You have to learn to let go. The idea that books, magazines, databases or any form of information source can and should be kept for perpetuity is laughable. Items in a library need to be weeded and space is the major reason why. I know all of you want to keep your precious books, and I do to. But who’s going to pay for it, you?... — the other me
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June 17, 2009
U. of California at San Diego Gets an iPhone Application
The University of California at San Diego is the most recent college to make its way onto student’s iPhones.
A free iPhone application created by the university offers an interactive map of the college’s campus, including where particular classes are located; up-to-the-minute college sports scores; and the ability to call, text, or e-mail students and faculty and staff members. A similar application is being created for the Blackberry.
While the university says this is the first iPhone application created at a public university, an unofficial iPhone application was created by students at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Duke and Stanford Universities offer similar applications, and several other universities have created cellphone programs to improve student safety and crack down on attendance. —Marc Beja
Posted on Wednesday June 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [6]June 10, 2009
Princeton Alumni Association Introduces iPhone-Friendly Web Site
Princeton University alumni didn’t have to search for information about last month’s reunions weekend. There’s an app for that.
Thanks to a new iPhone-friendly Web site developed by the university’s information-technology office, alumni celebrating class reunions at the university’s campus this year could access event schedules, maps, and news alerts on iPhones and other smartphones.
The site is believed to be the first of its kind for a college or university reunion, said Andrew Gossen, senior associate director for the university’s Alumni Association.
Mr. Gossen, who is a 1993 Princeton graduate, said the site attracted 1,590 unique visitors and 15,368 page views during the weeklong event, which typically attracts 9,000 Princeton alumni and 20,000 total visitors to the campus. Graduating seniors as well as alumni from classes as early as the 1970s used the site. The most popular features included event schedules, hotel information, and a global-positioning system that tracked campus shuttle buses.
The introduction of the site also coincided with the event’s 150th anniversary.
“I think the alumni are into that, being able to mark this kind of an anniversary with a new concept like this,” Mr. Gossen said. “We like the statement it makes about the potential to incorporate new technologies into longstanding traditions.”
Building and publishing the application, called Reunions 2009, cost around $7,000, Mr. Gossen said. That’s far less than the cost of paper brochures that he said could contain as many as 52 pages each. Printing about 9,500 copies of those brochures each year costs nearly $10,000.
A number of other factors played into the decision to develop a version of the site for cell phones Mr. Gossen said, including several studies that indicated that smartphones will account for 23 percent of all new handsets sold per year by 2013.
While Mr. Gossen said the university isn’t ready for reunions-weekend information to make a full leap to mobile yet, over the next few years it will gauge whether going paperless is possible. —Erica R. Hendry
Posted on Wednesday June 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [3]June 1, 2009
iPhones May Help Japanese University Catch Absent Students
The days of skipping class for students at one Japanese university are over.
At least that’s the hope of administrators at Aoyama Gakuin University, in Tokyo, whose School of Social Informatics will give Apple’s iPhone 3G to 550 of its students as a way to track attendance with the phone’s global-positioning system.
Attendance is an important graduation requirement at the university, the Associated Press reported, and in the past, students would fake attendance by asking friends to answer attendance roll calls or hand in signed attendance sheets with their signatures.
In the new system, students will be required to enter their ID number into an iPhone application at the beginning of class. The phone will pinpoint the students’ location when they do, to ensure they are actually on campus.
Administrators at the university acknowledge that students could give their iPhones to classmates to sign in for them, but say the young men and women are not likely to part with their mobile devices.
The university also hopes students in the school, which focuses on Internet and technology use in society, will use the phones for other purposes, like developing new applications.
Programs at several American colleges and universities require students to use iPhones for class or assignments. Abilene Christian University was the first to give away iPhones or iPod Touch devices to about 1,000 freshmen last fall.
Bill Rankin, director of educational innovation at the university and also an associate professor of English, said he thinks his university would be “leery” of using the phones to track students.
“One of the things we want to remember is that this is a place that people are becoming adults and taking on responsibility, and one of those responsibilities is showing up for class,” Mr. Rankin said. “We have attendance policies in place, but if a student decides to take a day to do something else, and some of those things are useful, that’s their prerogative.”
If the university were to use the iPhones’ global-positioning system on campus, Mr. Rankin said, it would likely be an “opt-in,” not an “opt-out,” application, meaning students could choose whether to participate.
Professors at the university do have a Web service that shows pictures of each student when attendance is called, Mr. Rankin said. The university has also talked about creating a system in which students could sign into class using a pin code, though that has yet to be developed. — Erica R. Hendry
Posted on Monday June 1, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [9]April 23, 2009
Forget 'Blue Light' Safety Phones -- Now Cellphones Can Ring Campus Security for Help
Stephanie Bellevue, a student at American University, held down the “5” key on her cellphone, and a loud alarm soon began to ring in the cramped operations room of the university’s public-safety office. On one of the facility’s many computer monitors, the student’s location popped up as a dot on a campus map, and next to it was a photograph of her and a list of details to help find her: height, weight, hair color, and eye color.
In this case it was a false alarm — the student rang the system to demonstrate it to The Chronicle. The university’s director of public safety, Michael McNair, explained that cellphones have become an important additional safety feature on the campus — used for more than just sending mass text messages in case of emergencies. Since just about everyone on the campus has a cellphone these days, the devices are easier for students to get to than the 28 emergency phones (noted by shining blue lights) positioned around the campus. “Students can have at the touch of a button instant access to public safety,” said Mr. McNair.
Sure, people can use their cellphones to call 911 in an emergency, but at American University, those calls go to city police rather than to the campus’s public-safety office. So when officials installed an emergency text-message alert system last year, they looked for other features to turn any cellphone into a mobile “blue light” phone.
Perhaps the most unusual service American University set up is called “guardian.” It lets students who have signed up for the service call for a virtual police escort late at night if they’re walking home alone. Students simply call a number (or use their cellphone’s Web browser) to request the service. They set a timer, and if the student has not called back to deactivate the service by the end of the time limit, campus police are notified, along with the student’s location information. Students can also leave a voice message detailing their route, to help police track them down should trouble arise. For instance, a student might leave a message saying: “I’m about to walk from the library to the parking lot.”
So far few people have used the guardian service. Other than in tests, the alarm for it has only rang once so far, and it turned out to be a student who accidentally set it off. Ms. Bellevue said that some of her friends are reluctant to sign up, wary of sharing their location information with the campus police. “Other students think it’s a tracking system,” she said. Officials say that the system gives them no way of seeing any student’s location until the timer runs out on the guardian or unless the students ring the “panic button” feature.
Students decide how much identifying information to give officials when they sign up for the AU Campus Connect service (so far 3,000 people have signed up). All of that private information is kept on servers off the campus run by Rave Wireless Inc., which the university has hired to run the campus alert service. Todd Miller, vice president for operations for Rave, says the company take pains to protect that data. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Thursday April 23, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [6]March 26, 2009
Blackboard Releases iPhone Application
Blackboard unveiled a free application for the iPhone today to let students check their grades and get updates about their courses at colleges that use the company’s course-management software.
The application, called Blackboard Learn for Apple iPhone, can be found in Apple’s iPhone App Store. Blackboard designed it so it will immediately work with any versions of its software made since 2006. Colleges’ administrators can choose to turn off their Blackboard server’s compatibility with the service if they have concerns about security or other issues.
Students can’t take tests or dig into course content using the iPhone application — the focus of the system is to notify users of when new material is ready for them in the full Web-based version of Blackboard.
The application may have extracurricular uses as well — such as letting a student send a note to a classmate. A “rosters” section lets students communicate with others in their courses.
Several institutions — including Duke University and Stanford University — have created their own iPhone applications that let students check campus bus schedules and access other services from their Apple smartphones.
What about students who bought some other company’s smartphone? Blackboard is considering creating a similar application in the future that would work on BlackBerrys, said Jessica Finnefrock, a senior vice president of product development at Blackboard, in an interview Wednesday. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Thursday March 26, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [8]March 4, 2009
Duke U. Unveils Application Suite for iPhone
Duke University has become the latest institution to join the mobile-application arms race, announcing today the release of “DukeMobile,” a suite of programs for students who use the iPhone and iPod Touch. The applications weren’t actually designed by Duke students, though—they were developed by a company run by students at Stanford University.
Among other functions, the software allows users to watch Duke content on YouTube and iTunes, look through the university’s course catalog, and pinpoint the location of campus events on a searchable map. By March 30, those using Blackberrys with multi-touch capabilities will also be able to use the software.
Similar software bundles have been developed at other campuses, including the University of Cincinnati and University of Maryland-Eastern Shore.
Duke is encouraging students to participate in a competition to design applications geared towards the university. But DukeMobile was created by TerriblyClever Design, which is run by Stanford students and which released a similar mobile-application suite for Stanford in October. —David Shieh
Posted on Wednesday March 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [4]February 25, 2009
Teaching With Technology Face-Off: iPhones vs. PC's
An experiment this semester at Houston Community College compares two sections of the same course, one in which students are given iPhones and another in which students use old-fashioned PC’s to view course materials online. The question: Will students with the smart phones spend more time watching course videos and interacting with peers than those without them?
The course, called “Anatomy and Physiology II,” is a hybrid of distance education and traditional classroom teaching — the students meet in person once a week and are asked to watch lecture videos and follow assignments online for the rest of the material. There are 20 students in each section, and the only difference between the two is that one group got iPhones on loan at the beginning of the semester and the other did not.
The professor, Lifang Tien, an instructor at the college, said in an interview today that she had asked students in both groups to keep journals recording how much time they spend using course materials, noting when and where they log in. She said that students in the iPhone section were reporting working on the course at odd moments while they’re on the go. “One of my students goes to the playground with her kids and can study there” using the iPhone, she said. “Another one logged on while waiting in the dentist’s office.”
The students with iPhones still watch some of the videos on their PC’s, of course, but Dr. Tien said that preliminary results of a survey of the students showed that students with the iPhones spend more time studying than those without. Some of that difference could just be the novelty of the technology, however.
“It was kind of like an icebreaker,” said Dr. Tien, who noted that because most of her students are working adults, they do not usually interact much outside of class. “This is the first time I’ve seen students so close to each other — they were forming study groups right away.”
She now plans to ask students in all her courses to exchange telephone numbers or e-mail addresses at the start of the semester, whether she’s handing out iPhones or not.
We plan to check in with Dr. Tien at the end of the semester to find out how the experiment turns out. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Wednesday February 25, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [13]February 11, 2009
Students at Georgia Tech Create Unofficial Campus iPhone Application
A homemade iPhone application at the Georgia Institute of Technology has gained a following — and won its student creators some fans.
The application, called GT Login, is essentially a cellphone-friendly interface to several existing Web-based campus services. With a few taps, users can read their campus e-mail, see which laundry machines are available, or check when the next shuttle bus will arrive using their iPhone or iPod Touch. The application is free, but it requires a Georgia Tech account to access the services.
Adrian Smith, a senior at the university majoring in computer engineering, made the application for fun — because he wanted to learn how to program applications for the iPhone. He has now teamed up with some fellow students to form a company to build other iPhone applications, and he says he spends between two and 10 hours each week tweaking the functionality and adding features to GT Login. More than 1,000 people each week use the application, according to Mr. Smith.
One fan of the service is Brian Mathews, who works in the library at the university (his title is “user-experience librarian”). He e-mailed Mr. Smith and suggested that they add a feature that would let students see which computers in the library were available and which were occupied. The library has such a service on its Web site, so the programmers simply needed to integrate it into their iPhone application — which they quickly did.
“I really like that it came from students rather than us doing it,” said Mr. Mathews. “It has more of an underground kind of vibe to it.” —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Wednesday February 11, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [8]January 5, 2009
Stanford U. Unveils iPhone Application That Will Soon Let Students Locate Each Other
Stanford University recently unveiled a free iPhone application that ties into the university’s student-registration system and offers a range of services for students on the go. Soon the service will let students call up a campus map that shows the current locations of other students in the area who also have iPhones (and who have granted permission for the service to spot them).
Development of the application, iStanford, was led by two students at the university, Kayvon Beykpour and Aaron Wasserman. They weren’t just doing the job for fun — Stanford commissioned the software from the students’ software company, Terriblyclever Design. Last week their creation was touted as the next big thing by Time magazine.
In an interview with The Chronicle last week, Mr. Beykpour said that the new features of iStanford would help students find their friends and send them instant messages right from the interactive map. He said his company was already working with two other universities to build similar applications for their campuses.
It will be interesting to see whether students — or professors — allow friends to track their every move.
For those who do not have an iPhone, Stanford also offers many campus services on a Web site designed for other Web-capable cell phones.
If you know of other innovative college uses of mobile phones, send them our way for our Mobile College Apps series. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Monday January 5, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [11]December 15, 2008
Mobile College App: Turning iPhones Into 'Super-Clickers' for Classroom Feedback
Professors usually don’t ask everyone in a class of 300 students to shout out answers to a question at the same time. But a new application for the iPhone lets a roomful of students beam in answers that can be quietly displayed on a screen to allow instant group feedback.
The application was developed by programmers at Abilene Christian University, which handed out free iPhones and iPod Touch devices to all first-year students this year. The university was the first to do such a large-scale iPhone handout, and officials there have been experimenting with ways to use the gadgets in the classroom.
The application lets professors set up instant polls in various formats. They can ask true-or-false questions or multiple-choice questions, and they can allow for free-form responses. The software can quickly sort and display the answers so that a professor can view responses privately or share them with the class by projecting them on a screen. For open-ended questions, the software can display answers in “cloud” format, showing frequently-repeated answers in large fonts and less-frequent answers in smaller ones.
The idea for such a system is far from new. Several companies sell classroom response systems, often called “clickers,” that often involve small wireless gadgets that look like television remote controls. Most clickers allow students to answer true-or-false or multiple-choice questions (but do not allow open-ended feedback), and many colleges have experimented with the devices, especially in large lecture courses. There are several drawbacks to many clicker systems, however. First of all, every student in a course must have one of the devices, so in courses that use clickers, students are often required to buy them. Then, students have to remember to bring the gadgets to class, which doesn’t always happen.
Using cellphones instead of dedicated clicker devices solves those issues, says William Rankin, an English professor at Abilene Christian who is coordinating academic uses of iPhones there. Because students rely on their phones for all kinds of communication, they usually keep the devices on hand. The university calls its iPhone software NANOtools — NANO stands for No Advanced Notice, emphasizing how easy the system is for students and professors to use. “We see it as a kind of super-clicker,” he says.
Some companies that make clickers, such as TurningPoint, are starting to sell similar software to turn smartphones into student feedback systems as well.
Know of an interesting mobile application for the college setting? Send me details to jeff.young@chronicle.com and I’ll consider it for the next installment of our Mobile College App series. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Monday December 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [15]