IPods for learning?

According to canada.com Duke University is going to distribute over 1,000 IPods to the ipcoming frosh class as an experiment to see how well an infusion of this technology influences the students' experiences. Kind of sounds like an IPod-version of the famous ACOTT study, and I'm sure Apple was excited to comply. The students' IPods will have campus maps, orientation info, the school fight song, and (I'm sure) much more. This raises some questions:

1. What does Canada care about Duke anyway?
2. Do we really think students will use these for much more than listening to rap during Fine Arts 100?
3. How are they going to allow students to always have their IPods with them and keep them from being distracted?
4. Why not just give them PDAs instead?

And the most important question:
Why isn't my school giving out IPods? I want one!

Seriously, I am all for innovative uses of new technologies and looking for educational purposes for technologies that already exist. However, this seems to be a lot of research money down the drain. But who knows? Maybe I'll be surprised. At the least, it's an interesting project that I hope to hear more about after they have completed it.

Weblogs and two major problems in education

In his blog, David Carreher of Harvard believes there are two problems with education:

1. Constraints on Students As Active Producers of Knowledge
   1. in most schools students have little access to
      • primary sources of information (NY Times, Diário de Pernambuco, meteorological data, museum artifacts) and to
      • multiple interpretations of complex events (history and current events are typically presented from a single view posing as factual)
      • simulations
   2. students' expressions of their understanding and beliefs are chanelled through the "test and essay grinder" (assignments given to them by teachers); Drawbacks include:
      • stultification: students feel their contributions are given exclusively in response to course requirements, to doing the teacher's assignments;
      • isolation: students' ideas do not benefit from the considered reflections of others.
      • devaluing of emergent ideas: students are discouraged from registering their thoughts before being polished or in final form.
2. There is a firewall around the classroom
   1. Research about learning and teaching in classrooms is not built into the present system. Researchers are viewed as intruders into schools. At best researchers encounter the benign tolerance of administration and staff.
   2. Curriculum developers are shut out of the system. They occasionally gain restricted access in order to field test curriculum materials.
   3. Teacher education has little access to everyday learning and teaching (This is somewhat improving as teacher education courses draw increasingly upon video taped classroom episodes.)

He believes blogging can help solve these problems by doing the following:

1. Allow students to keep track of their thinking over time, to pose issues, to receive comments by others.

2. Teacher weblogs could allow teachers to keep track of their own ideas over time. Certain sections could be open to students, others to teachers, some to both.

3. Researchers would find a treasure trove of things to study in weblogs and online discussions. They wouldn't have to physically enter classrooms and disrupt ongoing discussions. Researcher weblogs would let researchers document the evolution of their research over time and to share their thoughts with others.

4. Curriculum Developers could access examples of student's, teachers, and researchers' thinking. A developer weblog would serve the developer, but it would allow researchers to understand how developers think and make decisions over time.

5. Teacher educators could discuss examples from actual classrooms. Teacher educator weblogs would document the evolution of their thinking over time. Teacher education itself becomes a documented field subject to study and analysis.

I don't know if blogging is the cure-all for these educational difficulties. In fact, I know it isn't. But he does bring up some good positives of using blogs in schools ...