Photo: Jim Wallace

"Shakespeare on the iPod, calculus on the iPod," Peter Jennings quipped last fall at the end of an ABC TV news report featuring Duke.

Jennings was musing on Duke's decision to issue Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod digital music players to every member of the freshman class in hopes of harnessing a new medium for class and campus life.

"We wanted to show ourselves to be adventurous in the area of the utilization of technology in teaching and learning," Duke's provost Peter Lange said about the iPodding of the Class of 2008. "The iPod is such a pop-culture phenomenon that we wanted to see if there was a way to use it to enhance the academic experience," Tracy Futhey, head of Duke's Office of Information Technology, told USA Today.

ABC and USA Today weren't the only news media to notice that the iPod phenomenon of techno-chic and mega-profitability was taking an intriguing turn toward the elite academics and prestigious reputation of a university such as Duke.

"Dude, I just got a free iPod!" MTV News began its report on Duke's program. "The 'kudos factor' is unmistakable on campus," a BBC TV reporter pronounced. And a CBS News segment cut from a scene of Duke students demonstrating an engineering experiment with iPods to a flurry of lights and rock music at an event in California where Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Irish rocker Bono introduced the "U2 iPod."

	wHat iS iT?
	Digital Campuses

"It was sort of an iPod moment," says Steven Levy, chief technology writer for Newsweek and author of a cover story, "iPod therefore i am," that came out a week after Duke announced the program. "If you're going to make a timeline of important iPod events, the Duke purchase would definitely be on it."

"People have accused us [of] or admired us [for] having been either incredibly manipulative or prescient with regard to the publicity that it got for Duke," Lange says. But "the one thing we most clearly did not anticipate was the degree of attention and publicity we got from the iPod experiment."

The cause for all the attention was Duke's deal with Apple to buy 1,800 iPods--enough for all 1,650 members of the Class of 2008, plus 150 extras to loan staff and upperclassmen involved in the program--in exchange for help from the company in adapting this new generation of Walkman to the classroom. It was the first deal of its kind for Apple, as well as Duke. The purchase price was kept confidential, but Duke's cost for the entire program--the iPods engraved with the Duke shield, additional technical staff, and supporting equipment--was announced: $500,000, drawn from a university fund designated for technology innovation.

The idea was that iPods could be used to record lectures, store computer files, and listen to course-related audio segments. The university even set up a website with the idea of posting talks given on campus, which anyone at Duke could then download and listen to at their leisure. But Duke's efforts to surround the iPod with an aura of academic seriousness are being played out against the powerful image created and backed by Apple's marketing muscle: iPods as sleek, sexy, must-have gizmos for pumping out music--rock music, really, if you've watch the ads with the gyrating silhouettes.

How is Duke going to "deal with the perception that one of the country's finest institutions -- with selective admissions, a robust enrollment, and a plush endowment -- would stoop to a publicity ploy?" wondered an editorial in Inside Higher Ed. Yann Chong Tan '08 says that even some of her friends back home in Singapore who wished they could have gotten in on the high-tech giveaway "see it as a publicity stunt."

The Chronicle was more pointed. In an April 11 editorial, the student paper declared, "The University seems intent on transforming the iPod into an academic device, when the simple fact of the matter is that iPods are made to listen to music. It is an unnecessarily expensive toy that does not become an academic tool simply because it is thrown into a classroom."

Toy or tool? That's what a committee of faculty and administrators tried to discern last spring. After an evaluation of the iPod project, they decided not to supply every freshman with an iPod this fall. (Sorry, Class of 2009.) Instead, only students taking classes that officially require the device will be issued one. (It will be theirs to keep.) There are more than thirty such courses this semester--including Spanish 1, the "Portraying America" writing course, "Intro to Jazz," and "Principles of Computer Science"--that are using some 700 new iPods.

The decision to make iPod distribution course-specific was based, in part, on a report by Duke's Center for Instructional Technology. The center found that only forty-eight of the approximately 2,000 courses offered last year incorporated iPods into assignments. By way of comparison, 1,150 Duke classes last fall used another technology, a course website provided through the university's online course management system.

However, a survey in the report showed that three-quarters of students in the Class of 2008 used their iPods at least once for class, mostly for recording lectures or transporting computer files. The report found that the other main academic uses of the iPod were distributing audio materials, such as famous speeches; recording interviews and field notes; and facilitating oral exercises, such as repetition of Spanish vocabulary words.

There's no doubt students use their iPods, if not always for class. Walking around campus it's easy to pick out the telltale white ear buds. Next to the cell phone, the iPod has become the most visible digital device sticking out of students' pockets, purses, and backpacks.

Walking across the East Campus Quad, Jeff Smith '08 is tuned into Ben Harper's folksy "Brown Eyed Blues." Michael Schapper '08, finishing a sandwich in the Great Hall, says he's playing hip hoppers "Black Eyed Peas." A stationary cycling class in the Wilson Recreation Center pedals to a mix of songs programmed into the instructor's iPod. Aboard a women's crew scull, a coxswain records her calls on an iPod sealed in a zip-lock bag, so that her coach can critique her later.