Duke University Giving iPods To 1650 Freshmen

baptiste writes "Duke University has entered into an agreement with Apple to distribute iPods to all of the incoming freshmen this year - that's 1650 iPods! This agreement is part of an initiative to "encourage creative uses of technology in education and campus life" The iPods will have audio and text on them including special university content such as "faculty-provided course content, including language lessons, music, recorded lectures and audio books." Faculty will be assisted in creating new content for these devices by Duke's Center for Instructional Technology And here you thought iPods were just for music!"

Tuition Hikes

[Dominatus]

I see the tuition hike posts being modded as funny, but there's actual seriousness to that. The university I go to decided to give "free" laptops to the engineers, but in return hike up their tuition another 2,000 dollars in addition to the annual hike the whole university got. Free...more like "forced"

Re:Why not a PDA?

[emilienne]

As someone whose friend was the student advisor to OIT (Duke's equivalent of the department that breaks computers on campus) on this monumental (and drool-worthy, click wheels...) project, I think that they made this decision based on several factors, including the "ooh, pretty!" factor.

Duke has reasonable coverage of computers everywhere, but their filesystem on campus is pretty esoteric (and a pain to navigate) if you want to transfer files back and forth. We're pretty much still stuck on Zips and transferring by email, etc etc. I think the latest stat was that 91% of kids on campus had one computer (at least). The thing is, though, you walk into a computer lab on campus and the bigger ones are almost always full of people, because it's a easy way to check email or do whatever without braving our really lame transportation system.

In the grand tradition of certain majors, too, we huddle in unix and windows labs at odd hours to program. Yes, we're still learning about OS using NACHOS. Duke's tried making us use CVS for stuff, but CVS is broken on our system and we have to resort to really weird measures in order to backup our files.

Sure, we could get a Zire, but how much would that cover with people carrying huge files back and forth? iPods are just hard drives anyways. I've seen some engineers (and computer science majors) hauling substantial fileage back and forth between dorm and class (and their Solaris lab, crappy as hell but comfy for all nighters).

At the same time, Duke's pretty much plastered with iPods already. A frosh class with ipods will just be the equivalent of previous frosh classes with their little Duke lanyards. A thousand or so more really won't make THAT much of a difference.

And let's face it, when you're talking 20000 for tuition, 4000 for an average crappy double, then 2500 or so for meals and way too much for books later, a few hundred for a white hard drive that your kid is going to phone home about in a few weeks and whine to get isn't going to hurt anymore than what you're already shelling out.

Besides, Duke's already raised the tuition for this year, even before the inclusion of the iPod. My firstborn is being auctioned on eBay as we speak.

iPods ~ Cheating

[Lifix]

I will be a senior at a "laptop school" on the east coast. At my school, each student is forced to rent an iBook to use during the four school years. Now since the entire school is based on Macs, many many students purchase iPods to go along with their Macs. In the last month of school, several dozen students found a program that would allow iPods to display text from files on the iPod. Six of these students were caught cheating on their final exams, and two were caught after having downloaded a 32 gig dictionary to their iPods and using them on the SAT. iPods are a great tool as long as everyone realizes that they are not radios, they are hard drives and can be used to remove data surreptitiously, or to covertly access data, or just general data storage.

Re:Why not a PDA?

[Matt - Duke '05]

but their filesystem on campus is pretty esoteric (and a pain to navigate) if you want to transfer files back and forth

Are you serious? Have you ever used AFS [duke.edu] on campus? There is absolutely no need whatsoever to use a floppy/zip disk. If you don't have your own computer, every single Mac/Windows computer on campus has a shortcut on the desktop to your AFS home directory and if you login from a Unix box, your home directory _is_ your AFS directory.

As for CVS being broken, again, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

1. setenv CVSROOT ~/MyRepositoryDirectory
2. cvs init
3. pts creategroup myusername:mynewgroupname
4. pts adduser someuser myusername:mynewgroupname
5. pts adduser someuser2 myusername:mynewgroupname
6. pts adduser someuser3 myusername:mynewgroupname
7. fs setacl ~/MyRepositoryDirectory myusername:mynewgroupname write

If that doesn't suit your needs, you can always setup an account on sourceforge.cs.duke.edu. All of this information was almost certainly provided to you in whatever class you took, by the way.

Re:Why not a PDA?

[emilienne]

I have used AFS, which died three times on three or four computers that I owned the first two years I was at Duke (I've also been using DukeNet for about 10 years now, but that's another story). Saving to AFS is a pain. It's slow and inconvenient and more often than not, it's confusing for the users. Saving a word file to AFS at times can be a test of wills while you wait for it to write and discover that the pretty new IBM boxen has frozen. Granted, it works pretty well mostly, but sitting in Teer at 1 in the morning and realizing that the filesystem crashed utterly (files don't exist for this hour) is not really something you want to go through more than four times.

As for CVS, we pretty much gave up on it due to the fact that it never worked while we slogged through 104 and 108 (even 110, it might have worked, but then it was a choice of either track down whatever the hell it was or get some sleep).

All this information was almost certainly provided and was certainly received, but was it certainly put to use effectively? I'm guessing certainly not.

emi
CS, Trinity '05

Re:I'm sure all the students will think this is gr

[Moofie]

You can't work enough over the summer to pay for tuition at Duke. You've either got a loan, a grant, or a rich family.

Well, if you CAN make $30k over a summer, you're kinda wasting your time in college....

$299 iPod/$30,000 tuition = an insignificant fraction.

Re:FREE! OH BOy!

[Hobadee]

That goes on a lot in high schools. I've heard of for example, "Nike" gym at a high school. My high school was a "Pepsi" campus. (eww... Pepsi - I hate the stuff even more now) I have heard of other crazy stuff like that, however, it seems unprofessional for a college to be doing that.

Re:Speaking of Microsoft

[lmfr]

Because it wasn't Apple's decision:

Duke officials said the iPod distribution is part of a pilot program between Duke and Apple Computer, Inc. that will be evaluated after a year. Duke is paying for the project with strategic planning funds that it has set aside for one-time innovative technology purposes. The total cost of the project is expected to reach $500,000, which includes hiring an academic computing specialist for the project, grant funding for faculty, associated research costs and the purchase of the iPods, which Apple is providing to Duke at a discount.

And even if Apple decided to give the iPods for free, it would still cost them money. How much would cost Microsoft to give 1,650 licenses of Windows and/or Office?

Finally, the iPod is usuable under other plataforms than Apple's.

Financial aid

[IdntUnknwn]

There have been some references so far to how much Duke will cost you yearly ($27,000), and I just thought I'd point out for anyone who doesn't happen to know that Duke's financial aid works on 100% financial need. Basically they calculate how much your family is capable of paying, and they go find the grants to help pay the rest. For example, I received a $20,000+ financial aid package, although I think it was more around $23,000.

Just something good to know for anyone who's still considering colleges and is worried about cost. A number of other colleges operate on the same system (i.e. MIT, CMU, Yale, etc), so keep your eyes open.

Re:In other news...

[Flerg]

Duke is most certainly NOT part of the UNC system. It's a private institution, UNC is public.

Re:FREE! OH BOy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, you could put solitaire on a PDA!

3G iPods and up also come with solitaire.

iPod U.

[Dan Crash]

I would love to have these universities that are beginning to put courseware online start providing downloadable audio lecture files. (OGG or MP3 to make them as vendor-neutral as possible.)

The University of Minnesota is already starting to do that with their Digital Audio Initiative [umn.edu]. Want to learn Pashtun or Punjabi? You can. [umn.edu] You can also study Shakespeare [umn.edu], British literature [umn.edu], science fiction [umn.edu], or learn how to write a short story [umn.edu].

More courses can be found here [umn.edu]. They're adding courses, but slowly. It's worth bookmarking.

Re:iPods ~ Cheating

[RevAaron]

I use my PDA on college tests all the time. I could cheat- and boy, would cheating be easy. But I don't. I use my PDA as a calculator, as I'm more comfortable using GNU Maxima, Octave, a Lisp interpreter, or Palm OS LyME [calerga.com] than a TI-8x calculator. That, and I don't have a fancy calculator and no desire to buy one or carry one around. I take all of my notes on my PDA.

In Computer Science exams where calculators were allowed, I've had profs who were a little wiser about it. In those cases, I gave them the memory card out of it and told them that's where all of my notes were. In some cases, that's been true, but for soem of the other PDAs I've owned it wasn't. I've never used it for cheating, but someone easily could.

You can store a lot of information on those fancy TI and HP calcs. Sure, not as much as on an iPod or PDA, but enough that it isn't that much different from an iPod or PDA. In high school, we used to store our formulas on the calculators. I used to have a math teacher in HS that would go through and clear each and every student's calculator's memory before a test.

But then again, neither a calculator, nor an iPod nor a PDA would be allowed on the SAT verbal. What kind of slacking proctor was running that show?

Re:And the Freshman assault rate rises 5,000%

[luge]

I hear from friends still at Duke that they will be laser engraving all of them. Seriously. No word on whether or not the university logo will also go on them. I'm personally waiting for them to be made in Duke Blue and offered to alumni. :)

Re:FREE! OH BOy!

[47Ronin]

Yes, but by graduation the non-replaceable battery will surely be toast leaving you with nothing but an overpriced hunk of plastic to go with your overpriced degree.

Huh? Well, trollboy, once the battery's endurance gives out about three or four years from now you can always replace it with one of these [ipodbattery.com], these [smalldog.com], or these [macsales.com].