Recently, the Detroit News carried a very interesting story about University of Michigan dentistry professors uploading their lectures onto iTunes. Students can then download missed lectures, or lectures needing review, and listen to them anywhere.
During our Visioning sessions, educational futurists Ian Jukes and Ted McClain referred to today's students as "digital natives" as compared to non-tech savvy people who are "digital immigrants." A clear example of this divide is the commentary in the Detroit News article from those professors resisting the technology like Prof. William Kennedy who is quoted as saying, "My concern is students not taking notes will have a lasting effect on their true mastery of the material."
It is clear that times have changed and rapid adaptation of technology is no longer an option in today's hyper-competitive world.
Updated 12/28/05: Here's an additional article that appeared in today's Hartford Courant.
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051220/BIZ04/512200364/1026/SCHOOLS
Students plug into iLectures
No more excuses for skipping class
Doug Guthrie / The Detroit News
December 20, 2005
ANN ARBOR-- There's no such thing as a missed lecture for University of Michigan dentistry students, who are transforming their personal iPods into the latest college learning tool.
Slept through the talk on craniofacial biology? Go to an Internet iTunes store set up exclusively for future dentists in Ann Arbor. There, students can download the professor's recorded wisdom to an MP3 player for easy listening while strolling across campus, working out or cramming for an exam.
For years, tech-savvy professors have made recordings of lectures available on the Internet. But the dental school is among a wave of colleges now offering lectures in the MP3 compressed digital data files that make classes portable.
"It's not a better way of learning or a worse way. It's just a new way. Our way," said Jared Van Ittersum, 24, a second-year dental student from Spring Lake. "It's about maximizing our time. But, frankly, there have been a couple of lectures, early morning ones, where I just didn't get up."
Although some contend this latest use of pop technology cheapens the learning experience, it's the latest in a series of technological changes that have transformed the nation's campuses, which now frequently are equipped with wireless Internet connections and other advances.
"My concern is students not taking notes will have a lasting effect on their true mastery of the material," said William Kennedy, humanities professor and director of teaching and faculty development at Michigan Technological University in Houghton.
There, some professors, including Kennedy, have experimented with making recordings of their lectures available on personally managed Internet sites. "The interchange of what happens in the classroom is the value of a good education," he said. "My fear with all these things is that students who are prone to not be engaged will use this as a tool to be even less engaged."
Cathy Cheal, assistant vice president of e-learning and instructional support at Oakland University, said the sudden clamor for MP3 recordings is driven by the successful marketing campaigns of commercial products like Apple's popular iPod music and video players. Although virtually everyone on campus seems to have one, Cheal said the university is not yet convinced it's wise to make them a part of the curriculum.
"Right now, Oakland University isn't going to Apple to ask to start something like that here," Cheal said, adding that whether to make recordings of lectures available is being left to faculty members.
Tech revolution rolls on
Marketing-driven or not, proponents say the trend reflects a new generation's adaptation to technologies that can meet growing demands for increased productivity on campus and at work.
"It's like saying the Internet is a crutch because back in the day we used to go to the library and pore through the card catalogs to spend two more hours finding some information," said U-M dentistry student Paul Lopez. "That's not what happens in the workplace anymore, so why teach it? This is about new modalities here and everywhere. It will not reduce the college experience. It is in line with modern and practical expectations." The expansion of technology in classrooms could barely be envisioned when the first pocket calculators began selling for under $20 in 1975, sparking debates about whether the devices would ruin math education.
Instead, the lament of the slide rule was the start of a revolution.
The evolution in speed and power of personal computers brought students to consider the Internet as an integral tool. Laptops and wireless campuswide connections now bring the Internet to the student wherever they might be.
All of Michigan's public universities have dormitories wired for Internet access, and many are converting to wireless Web access. Western and Northern Michigan universities boast completely wireless campuses. Western is listed as the second-most wirelessly connected campus in the nation, says computer processor maker Intel. Northern, which about five years ago required all students to have laptop computers, now has included wireless connectivity to the walking corridor from campus to downtown Marquette.
Cell phones and multimedia handheld devices bridge other gaps -- and cause other problems.
"The first thought is that this is fanciful, working out and walking or drinking coffee while listening to a lecture, but it is growing," said Brock Read, a researcher for the Chronicle of Higher Education. "There are about a dozen universities involved (in MP3 lectures) so far."
Stanford and Duke universities were among the first to offer lectures in an MP3 format. Philadelphia's Drexel University is giving the newest video iPods to all students, Read said. .
Deal with Apple costs nothing
"Thirty years ago, students used to be in class reading newspapers and passing notes. Now, they are IMing (instant messaging) each other while surfing the Web and having text-message conversations on cell phones," said Dennis Lopatin, a professor and associate dean of the U-M School of Dentistry.
"It took a long time for some of us to get into computers, but this is what these students grew up with."
He gave permission to his students to use a computer in the back of his lecture hall to record him, then instantly send copies to the school's download site. The Internet site is managed by Apple Computers Inc. and downloading is free to students with proper identification.
"When students told me they were listening to my lectures while working out, I thought I had become the Richard Simmons of the dentistry set," Lopatin said.
Lynn Johnson, head of computer teaching technology at the U-M dentistry school, said the deal with Apple costs the school nothing. The commercial site's system is simpler and more familiar to students than previous university efforts to offer streaming video and audio files on private Web sites.
The marketing advantage to Apple is obvious.
Johnson said more than a dozen demonstrations of the project since have been made for administrators of U-M programs outside the dentistry school. A forum will be held in January to discuss how to incorporate the concept campuswide.
"The clamor has been such that it is no longer a question of if it should be done, but how," Johnson said.
It's a study tool
Van Ittersum said he has rigged lecture files to play at a faster speed so he can review the content even faster while walking to a class.
"The vast majority of my use has been supplemental," Van Ittersum said. "It's an intense program, and I haven't noticed any real drop in lecture attendance because of this."
Lopez, 32, routinely employs the popular MP3 technology.
He has downloaded about 20 of the nearly 200 lectures posted on the U-M Dentistry iTunes site this term. Most were for review because he said the sessions are fast and jam-packed with technicalities.
"It's kind of hard while you are taking notes in a hurry to write something like parvo cellular nucleus," Lopez said. "I reviewed one lecture the other night for an exam and I picked up on several points that I had missed in my notes."
But Lopez admits he skipped one lecture to attend a sonogram examination of his unborn child.
"With the amazing time demands on students here, something that allowed me to do something as significant as seeing my first child for the first time, well, I was grateful," Lopez said.
Teaching With Ipods? Of Course By ROBERT A. FRAHM Courant Staff Writer December 28 2005 STORRS -- As students stroll across the University of Connecticut campus wearing earphones plugged into their iPods, not everyone is listening to the latest rock music. Some are tuning in to Professor David B. Miller. The veteran educator, who once thought about becoming a disc jockey, is recording small group study sessions from his psychology classes and offering them as free podcasts, audio recordings that can be downloaded from the Internet and played on the Apple iPods or similar portable digital audio players. He is believed to be the first UConn faculty member to experiment with podcasting, a tool that is emerging on campuses as a means of conveying information to a technologically savvy generation of young people. "They're carrying these devices anyway. Why not give them something other than music to listen to?" said Miller, a self-described technology enthusiast. The entertainment industry has leapt into podcasting, making available an array of radio and television shows, film reviews, documentaries, sports and other content. Colleges have just begun to explore the technology. The idea came to Miller one day early this fall as he was driving from his home in Tolland to his UConn office, where he had scheduled a study review with about a half-dozen students from his introductory psychology course. Using a microphone in his laptop computer, he recorded the session and loaded it as a podcast on the Internet, where students could download it. Subsequent podcasts of the review sessions were made available free from the Apple iTunes Music Store website. "The students loved it," Miller, 57, said recently as he sat in front of his office computer, wearing an iPod and earphones draped around his neck. "As soon as the word got out I had done this, it traveled like wildfire. They could stop [the recordings], take more notes. I got e-mails from students saying they were walking across campus listening to it." He has recorded more than a dozen weekly podcast study sessions since then. Students who do not have iPods or similar devices can listen to the study sessions on computers. Among other colleges experimenting with the portable devices is Duke University, where officials distributed more than 1,600 iPods to all freshmen a year ago. This year, Duke gave iPods to students in courses where professors made specific proposals for using the devices. "We saw mobile and portable computing as a significant trend in the consumer world and educational world," said Lynne O'Brien, Duke's director of academic technology and instructional services. Aside from creating podcasts of lectures - also known as "coursecasting" - Duke faculty members used the iPods to provide classroom materials such as lectures, songs or historical speeches, according to an evaluation of the program conducted by the school. In some courses, students created podcasts of their projects. Some skeptics worry that making classroom lectures available as podcasts will encourage students to skip classes. Miller doesn't podcast his lectures for that reason. But at Duke, O'Brien said, there has not been any "substantial drop" in attendance. At Purdue University, faculty in about 75 courses began creating podcasts of lectures this fall in a new program called BoilerCast. "We're getting about 8,000 downloads a week," said John Campbell, the university's associate vice president for teaching and learning technologies. The program is a more convenient form of an earlier service that provided tape recordings of lectures in the undergraduate library, he said. Stanford University has made available a wide range of podcasts on Apple's iTunes Music Store, covering lectures, speeches, interviews, music and sports in addition to curriculum materials created for specific classes. As the technology becomes more popular, one potential drawback is the difficulty of sorting through a deluge of podcasts, said O'Brien. "Some of them are good," she said. "Some are junk." At UConn, students who listen to Miller's podcasts "use [them] mostly as a review for the test," said Jessica Muirhead, an 18-year-old freshman from Manchester who took part in the recorded sessions with Miller's study group. "I got e-mails from people I had never heard of before ... saying it was really helpful," she said. "Just doing the podcast was very helpful because you got one-on-one experience with the professor," she said. Miller has experimented with classroom technology since he began teaching at UConn in 1980. "I started out with slide projectors. ... Then I got my first computer in 1988," said Miller, who once created the software for a computerized, self-paced psychology course. Today, in classroom lectures, "I use very little text - a lot of video clips, audio clips," he said. Miller is encouraging UConn's faculty to find other creative uses for podcasting. Chemistry Professor Harry Frank, for example, has begun creating podcasts of prominent scientists who come to campus. "It's like an oral history. ... I have them sit down for five minutes and explain what they're doing," said Frank, who is also associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. "My students know these names and know their work. ... This kind of summarizes it. It personalizes it. My students can now take these [podcasts] with them and listen to them any time." Copyright 2005, Hartford Courant |
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