Education & Technology: Duke issues Free IPODs to students

(Visit link: Duke puts restrictions on free iPod program CNET News.com)

Duke University made a most innovative move to push its educational environment ahead of the pack. To create the "digital student," they introduce high-tech perks such as campuswide wireless Internet access (which is NOT new), subsidized legal music download services (which is gutsy and highly valued by the youths) and free iPods. Are the iPODs used as a carrot to draw students? Or is it meant to be used as a learning tool? Cleverly, Duke offers classes that used the iPod - such as music and language classes are among the most frequent educational uses for the devices. Possibly these could also be used to download audio lectures.

Universities all round the world are already hard pressed to manage the bandwidth problems caused by music downloads. The additional woes of illegal or pirated music is a separate and real legal issue as well. Hence Duke's programme is seen by many as innovative but risky without any clear guarantee of positive outcomes.

The question is - did the decision makers thought through the potential danger of being perceived as encouraging copyright breaching activities? Even though the legal risk is somewhat remote, it is indeed quite laudable that the University is willing to follow through in the name of creating a true digital educational environment.

In any case, I wonder whether any university is working with a smartphone company to work out a similar programme to integrate a large digital storage facility on their Windows/Palm/Symbian smartphone so as to have the connectivity of wifi, gprs as well as large storage for digital data of music, movies, AV presentations etc. That would most certainly push the envelope of the "digital student" - at the very least increase the student applications for admissions. :-)