Distribution day: the big giveaway, 2004Photo: Jim Wallace

Stephen Clark '08 sings on the bus. "Humming," he corrects. "Not singing loudly, but humming." He hums the tenor part to St. Matthew's Passion by Bach, humming along, in fact, with the singers of the other three parts, recorded on his iPod. It was part of an assignment for a music class taught by Anthony Kelley.

Kelley had taught "Theory and Practice of Tonal Music I" before, but last fall, when his students all had iPods, he was able to give a new assignment. He told the students to enter the musical notes for all four voice parts of the Bach chorale into a software program and then remove the part--bass, tenor, alto, or soprano--that they sing. Next, he said, put this missing-voice version of the song on your iPod and sing along with it--on the bus, walking to class, or in your dorm--to practice your part.

That semester, Kelley says, "I began to hear something I never heard in a Music 65 class--and I've taught this course three semesters. The students said, 'Can we sing this?' "

Students in Michele Strano's first-year writing course did interviews and class presentations before iPods arrived on campus. But the presentations gained extra weight last year, when Strano asked her students to include audio clips from interviews they recorded on their iPods. Students Rita Baumgartner '08 and April Edwards '08 brought home their point that news media sought to fit the tragic Columbine High School shootings into well-worn themes, when they played an excerpt from their interview with the school's principal.

"If we could pinpoint one thing--if I could tell you the reason that [the student killers] Harris and Klebold committed this crime was because of A, B, and C, then people can say, 'Well, we'll make sure that other students do not do A, B, and C,' " Columbine principal Frank DeAngelis says in the clip. "But we can't. We don't know what the cause was. They took that to their grave with them." The class could hear the emotion in his voice, and his firsthand account had a power that the written word cannot match.

"One thing we emphasize about academic writing is that researchers are expected to move beyond speculation and support their claims with some form of evidence," Strano says. "You make a claim, and then you give data to support that claim. Incorporating the sound files made that expectation clear."

Despite their success, Strano and Kelley remain in the minority among their faculty colleagues. "Of course, there were plenty of faculty at Duke who were skeptical, and some remain skeptical," says Lynne O'Brien, director of the university's Center for Instructional Technology. "I think that the iPod's success as a consumer item for playing music in some people's minds kind of taints it immediately."

But, she adds, "they were far more positive than I had originally expected. Many of them had ideas right away for things they wanted to do."

Indeed, the biggest challenge, O'Brien says, is not getting the iPods into professors' curricula, but getting course-related audio materials onto the iPods. For each song, speech, or reading, O'Brien and her staff have to work with an instructor to obtain copyright permission, convert it into the MP3 format recognized by the iPod, arrange for a secure website to distribute it, and make certain students have the proper connections between iPod, computer, and Internet to download it. Under Duke's agreement with Apple, the company set up a special Duke iTunes website to facilitate the process, but the corporate team at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, has not always been prepared to meet every audio need of the professors in Durham.

"The logistics around it were definitely complicated and time consuming," O'Brien says. "There were certainly [instances] where we couldn't get copyright clearance within the time frame we had or the materials were available for purchase but not in the format that could be played on an iPod."

Even so, O'Brien points out that the number of courses using iPods has nearly tripled from a year ago. And many of the professors who used iPods last year are using them again this year.

Whether this will become a continuing trend or a passing fad is still being debated at Duke and other universities. Some experts are skeptical. "The longer I'm in the field, I just see this mistake over and over again--this race to get the latest and greatest technology," says Marjorie DeWert, director of the Ohio University Center for Innovations in Technology†for Learning. "I'd rather see a race to see how people learn, and then see how we can support it."

"It looks like Duke got really excited about the technology," she says. "I wouldn't view it as a failure, but it started with the technology, instead of [with] 'What are our instructional challenges?'" Grabbing for technology first and figuring out how to apply it to pedagogy later is what DeWert calls "PowerPoint-less."

"Just because we can add video and animation and links--why?"

No one at Duke disputes that the iPod experiment is an example of technology outstripping pedagogy. However, Provost Lange says, citing the example of now-widely used course websites, introducing a new technology even before it is in wide demand can "open up the horizons of students and faculty" members to new ways of teaching and learning. For Duke, Lange says, the iPod is "the thin edge of the wedge" for a larger effort, dubbed the Duke Digital Initiative, to put various digital media to instructional use.

Duke's initiative fits in with a wider trend of a world going increasingly digital and mobile, says Duke research professor Timothy Lenoir, the Kimberly J. Jenkins Chair in New Technologies and Society. "The iPod fits in with the wiki and the blog," he says.

To expose students to the new possibilities of "independent alternative sources of information" that come with digital media, Lenoir asks his modern biotechnology class to draft audio essays using their iPods and then distribute audio files over the Internet to the rest of the class using "podcasting" software.