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December 2004

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From:
Steve Cavrak <[log in to unmask]>
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iPod at UVM Campus Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
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Duke University's iPod program revolutionizing students' experiences
with language studies
Saturday, December 04, 2004 - 11:04 PM EST
http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/4400/

"Duke spent more than one half million dollars this fall to supply each
incoming freshman with an Apple iPod. The program is aimed at getting
lectures, language materials, Duke maps and fight songs into the hands
of each incoming freshman," Alexander Rafael and Emily Anderson report
for Newsweek.

"For Lisa Merschel, a professor in the Spanish department at Duke, the
program has revolutionized her students' experience with language.
'Before, I would just play a CD in front of the whole class and there
would be some students whose eyes would glaze over after the first
couple of seconds and some who would get this intense look of fear on
their faces,' she explains. 'With the iPods, each student can listen at
their own pace and they have the control to pause or replay certain
parts... I find that the slower students have more confidence.' The
technology has made her grading process more efficient as well. 'It's
digital, easier, and faster.' Merschel even believes that the iPod
program has helped to break down traditional barriers between
professors and students. 'It's extremely beneficial, especially for
languages, and I have to say I'm getting a much closer relationship
with my students,'" Rafael and Anderson report.

Still, not all students are convinced. 'They're really useful to listen
to music on - while I go running or on the bus - but mostly I don't
need them for my classes and I haven't heard of anyone needing them. I
think the program has a lot of room for growth. If the professors get
more involved and know more ways to use the iPod during their classes,
it would be really beneficial,' says Katie Brehm, a freshman at Duke,"
Rafael and Anderson report.


read more at http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6596310/site/newsweek/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

How Technology Is Changing the College Experience
   College Life 2.0
   CURRENT MAGAZINE
  MSNBC.com

   By Alexander Rafael and Emily Anderson, Harvard
   URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6596310/site/newsweek/


Winter 2004 - Picture this. You drag yourself to your 9am Colonial
History class, coffee and laptop in hand. The lights fade and a
hologram appears. You pinch yourself as you realize it's Benjamin
Franklin, unmistakably attired in eighteenth-century garb and bifocals.
Opening a battered copy of his Autobiography, he begins to address the
class.

Ray Kurzwell, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines, predicts that
scenes like this one—a product of the advancing capabilities of virtual
reality—will play an increasingly dynamic role in the future of college
education. With technology revolutionizing the way universities work,
bringing historical figures back to life is only the beginning.

The rapidly accelerating pace of technological innovation has
transformed life on college campuses from one generation to the next.
Universities in 2005 will operate in a radically different way than
they did just five years ago. “When I graduated in 2000, the first
PowerPoint presentation was when I was a senior,” says Katarina Mucha,
a graduate of Duke University. Such presentations are now standard fare
in college lectures.

While the conveniences of the technology-driven campus abound, this
digital revolution has proved to be somewhat of a mixed blessing for
college students. Technological innovation is about more than playing
with cool graphics and gadgets. New and increasingly accessible
resources have changed the quality of academic work that professors now
expect from students. Years ago, the absence of a comprehensive campus
library might have limited the scope of college assignments, says Peter
Buck, a professor in the History of Science department at Harvard
University. “I give short primary source assignments, which I couldn’t
do before — go look at the testimony from this case, or find some old
New York Times articles about that,” he says. Today, students can
access a vast array of materials — newspapers dating back to the
pre-Civil War era, collections from museums around the world and all of
William Shakespeare’s manuscripts—through Internet portals.

But the easy access to information available on the web makes teaching
far more challenging for Daniel F. Melia, a professor in the Department
of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley, who believes
students overlook a vast array of print resources when they rely
exclusively on the Internet. “A really thorough Google search will only
turn in about ten percent of what’s out there,” he says. “I have to do
more to push people into the library and to use the print sources.” He
tells his students, “Anything you find on the net you have to also find
in a book.”

For some students, however, the accessibility of information on the
Internet has led to its abuse. There is “no question that shady
academic dealings have gone up,” Buck says, citing “embarrassingly
large” problems with plagiarism, including cases in which students have
downloaded large sections of papers from websites. “Sometimes this
plagiarism is blaring,” he says, recalling a student’s paragraph that
started, “When I was deputy treasurer...”

Indeed, technology has made cheating today easier and, as a result,
more prevalent than ever. A recent survey by Rutgers’ Management
Education Center of 4,500 high school students found that 75 percent of
them engage in serious cheating—and there is no reason to suspect that
they will mend their ways in college. Websites such as
research-assistance.com and schoolsucks.com have only exacerbated these
tendencies. While some of these online paper sites claim to offer
papers for research in the same way that the Lexis-Nexis search engine
offers articles for research, other sites with slogans such as
“download your workload” make no attempt to disguise their purpose.

But the fight for academic integrity has its own online weapons.
Turnitin.com provides services to institutions and professors that help
verify the legitimacy of a student’s work by enabling professors to
upload papers from their entire class. Using algorithms, the website
checks its bank of over 4.5 billion websites, millions of printed books
and millions of student papers previously submitted to their site.
Turnitin.com can find matching paragraphs and even sections that,
despite being shuffled, reveal similar word patterns.

At the University of Virginia, a school famed for its stringent honor
code, a scandal made national headlines in 2001 when over 100 students
were caught in plagiarism schemes. While technology allowed the
students to blatantly exploit the work of others, it also facilitated
their detection—their professor had created a computer program to
detect identical phrases in the students’ papers.

But Internet-driven technology creates problems beyond plagiarism. Some
university affiliates find that drastic changes in the dissemination of
research and academic material challenge in a very fundamental way the
value of the educational institution itself. According to Buck, online
technology presents a conundrum for major universities that devote
considerable energy to the expansion of these resources. “They are
investing money into online projects, but, by doing so, they are
devaluing their own hard library system,” he explains. “You don’t have
to be at a major university if you are an economist or a social
scientist... Programs like JStor allow you access to any journal you
would need.”

Buck also questions the survival of the academic press in the wake of
online journals. “Academic publishers are getting out of [the] practice
of publishing monographs because library budgets are drying up.
Presumably, even historians will publish in journals because that’s
what people read today.”

Professors are not the only ones concerned about the fallout from
technological innovations on campus. University health professionals
increasingly worry that the impact of the Internet-focused campus can
cause serious mental health problems on campuses nationwide. Students
may be plugged in, but they’re pulling out of the libraries, the dorm
rooms and the student centers that once stood as the social
cornerstones of the college experience.

Dr. Mark Macleod, the director of the Counseling Center at Emory
University, believes that technology can severely hamper social growth
during the college years. “I would say that maybe 10 to 15 percent of
students come to college without very good interpersonal skills” —a
growing phenomenon he attributes, at least in part, to virtual
communication. “People are so wired into distant communication. It has
become harder to be a part of a community.”

John Stilgoe, professor of the history of landscape at Harvard,
explains that with the proliferation of technology on campus, it’s
nearly impossible to be unreachable today—and therefore “impossible to
act independently.” Dr. Gregory Eells, director of the Counseling and
Psychological Services at Cornell University, voices similar concerns.
“With cell phones, college students are speaking to their parents
several times a day. This often takes away opportunities to grow and
make decisions.” He also questions the ability of technology-dependent
students to develop personal skills. “Emotional, psychological, and
spiritual growth often come out of silences,” he explains. “Technology
takes a big chunk out of that—with technology, there is no silence.”

Newer resources have also dramatically transformed the
student-professor relationship. Years ago, students communicated with
professors during office hours, and before and after class. Now,
professors are just a computer touch away. Despite the drawbacks of a
technologydriven university culture, colleges have not been deterred
from making the expansion of on-campus technology a major priority.
Duke spent more than one half million dollars this fall to supply each
incoming freshman with an Apple iPod. The program is aimed at getting
lectures, language materials, Duke maps and fight songs into the hands
of each incoming freshman.

For Lisa Merschel, a professor in the Spanish department at Duke, the
program has revolutionized her students’ experience with language.
“Before, I would just play a CD in front of the whole class and there
would be some students whose eyes would glaze over after the first
couple of seconds and some who would get this intense look of fear on
their faces,” she explains. “With the iPods, each student can listen at
their own pace and they have the control to pause or replay certain
parts… I find that the slower students have more confidence.” The
technology has made her grading process more efficient as well. “It’s
digital, easier, and faster.” Merschel even believes that the iPod
program has helped to break down traditional barriers between
professors and students. “It’s extremely beneficial, especially for
languages, and I have to say I’m getting a much closer relationship
with my students.”

Still, not all students are convinced. “They’re really useful to listen
to music on—while I go running or on the bus—but mostly I don’t need
them for my classes and I haven’t heard of anyone needing them. I think
the program has a lot of room for growth. If the professors get more
involved and know more ways to use the iPod during their classes, it
would be really beneficial,” says Katie Brehm, a freshman at Duke.

Colleges are also beginning to support student technological needs
beyond the classroom. A number of schools, including Middlebury,
Cornell, George Washington and the University of Southern California,
have purchased campus rights to the now legal file-sharing program,
Napster, which was infamous for paving the way to illegal copyright
infringements and lawsuits targeting college students. And students
aren't complaining. “I know many people were frustrated with the
illegal download sites due to the viruses and potential fines that they
can cause, so when Napster was introduced as an option most took
advantage of it,” says Emily Vaughn, a sophomore at George Washington.

Students are not only taking advantage of on-campus technology, they’re
also pioneering new technological services for their peers. Mark
Zuckerburg attracted national attention in the spring of 2004 when he
launched thefacebook.com. The website has virtually revolutionized the
college social networking scene, linking students on campus and across
the country. Zuckerburg, who is currently taking time off from Harvard,
launched his latest project, Wirehog, a program that allows individuals
to share files, including photographs, videos, and music, with friends,
on November 14, 2004.

This growth of technology on college campuses seems unlikely to lose
momentum in the future. The digital age is shaping the face of the
American university, bringing unprecedented possibilities for education
and promising a Pandora’s box of new challenges for college students
and administrators. And if Kurzwell’s predictions prove true, perhaps
you really will be seeing Benjamin Franklin sometime soon.

Alexis Deane, Caitlin Hartman, Kendall Kulper, Rebecca Rohr and
Kathleen Smith contributed to the reporting for this article.


URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6596310/site/newsweek/

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