Thoughts on the Duke experiment: anyone for iPodagogy?
Friday, July 23rd by Kern Trembath
The media are abuzz with the news that Duke University is going to spend a half million dollars to put iPods into the backpacks of all students in its incoming freshman class, plus several hundred faculty who need them. As an early user and advocate of digital pedagogy myself beginning about 15 years ago, I thought that it might be instructive to do a proof-of-concept assessment for this experiment as we would have done at my former university had this possibility been available to us then.
Let me start, though, by recounting a story that is curious to some and scary to others. I have written two books in my life. (Yes, this is scary, but that's another column.) I completed the first one in 1983, double-space handwriting several hundred pages that I collected in a three-ring binder and then entering them into my university's mainframe. I completed the second one in 1990, writing it entirely on a Mac Plus using Word 3.n and then printing it on my own $3,000 Apple Laserwriter. I didn't notice until I was done with the second book that its paragraphs were extremely constant in length and -- surprise! -- approximately the same size as the Mac Plus screen. By contrast, the paragraph size in the first book varied from a few sentences to nearly a page in length. Function, it seems, followed form.
This gives us a yardstick by which to measure the Duke experiment. How does the iPod lend itself to the intellectual dynamics of academic life? The prospects suggest that this year's high school seniors should go ahead and ask Santa for an iPod rather than wait for State U to give them one.
1. The experiment will work well in a relatively few number of academic departments -- specifically, the humanities. Music appreciation, history, English and other languages, theology, and history should be good contexts in which to deliver learning materials from the teacher to the student, both because these disciplines can use both audio and textual "notes" and (perhaps more importantly) because in general they do not use symbolic and quantified language.
2. Philosophy, art, the social sciences, mathematics, and the natural or bench sciences will have a very difficult time achieving the success level of the humanities, because images, textual symbols and quantifications have not yet been devised to fit onto the iPod's screen. This might change, of course, but if it does...
3. ...most users will immediately find that the screen size and line length will impair their understanding. If you have ever watched mathematicians at work, you know that they occasionally write symbolic sentences and formulae that require several blackboards to complete. Exactly how are these to be fit onto an iPod? And going to the other side of campus, exactly how were you planning on viewing the Mona Lisa on that little screen?
4. The pedagogy of the iPod -- let's go ahead and call it iPodagogy -- is regressive. The digital age has given teachers and students unprecedented freedom to collaborate in the learning environment. When I taught undergraduates at Notre Dame, I started the semester by giving them very comprehensive notes for the entire course, plus the questions for all of the exams. (On exam days, I randomly selected some of those questions for the students to answer in their bluebooks.) Doing this allowed me to walk into my classroom and ask the students "OK, what did you think about the lecture that I didn't give today?", and if they had done their homework (literally), we would then discuss that material from a much higher critical plane than their predecessors were afforded. Why? -- because the later course discussions began where the previous ones had ended: at the point where the basic materials were conveyed and now we could critically discuss them.
So far, so good. But my students got their notes in electronic form, and could edit and revise them both in class and at their homes. Because the iPod's text-input capabilities are so cumbersome, at best it mimics the technology of a textbook rather than a laptop, which is unidirectional. This tends to reinforce the "father knows best" model of teaching, and is exactly the wrong pedagogy for American education to return to.
5. In line with the same point, if the essence of learning today is collaboration, then pedagogical resources have to share simply and seamlessly -- you know, like Apple software. Bluetooth and Wifi make this extremely easy, but the iPod has neither. This has to be addressed. Will it then become easier to cheat during exams? Yes, but then technology will have to climb this hill as well. It's not insurmountable. A bunch of students at St. Thomas of Canterbury College in Christchurch, NZ, just developed a cellphone detector that will end up helping teachers to determine whether students are using SMS to cheat, and in principle it shouldn't be difficult to do the same for whatever wireless protocol iPod might end up using.
Function follows form. Given both its current capabilities and Steve Jobs' recent dismissal of the idea that the iPod will become a video player, what can we expect from the Duke experiment? Well, it can store and move notes, calendars, and audio files, so academic functions that use these features will do well. It will be of great use to sight-impaired students who can now record hours of lectures and transcribe them to text later on without having to juggle dozens of cassettes. At the moment, though, it cannot do much beyond these.
To become a serious academic resource, the iPod needs an easy text-entry feature and a screen that is at least as large as a standard PDA. If these can be resolved, then guess what? Once again, function will follow form.
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