Reconsidering Duke’s iPod program

The March 17 editorial, “Incorporate iPad selectively,” criticized Duke’s 2004 iPod program as a “failed experiment,” for reasons that have little to do with what we were trying to accomplish and that overlook the successes that have been noted by many inside and outside of Duke.

We weren’t trying to get all faculty and students to begin using iPods in their classes. We were trying to get people to think differently about how information gets disseminated, where and how learning happens and how we will integrate technology with everyday life and learning in the future.

That is, after all, what we’re about here at Duke. We are here to encourage experimentation, divergent thinking and new ways of looking at the world. Here are just a few ways the iPod experiment supported those goals:

Faculty and students across multiple disciplines moved from being consumers of media into creators of media. Our work building DukeCast, an early repository for all that media, led to our pioneering work with Apple on the creation of iTunesU. Finally, the iPod experiment led to the establishment of the Duke Digital Initiative, providing audio and video equipment via thousands of individual loans each academic year, and the Multimedia Project Studio, which makes multimedia editing software and workstations available around the clock.

In short, the iPod program played a significant role in building Duke’s reputation as a leader in the use of technology in higher education and as an early innovator in putting academic content on mobile devices. And while handing iPods to every incoming freshman gave technology-focused learning a jump start here at Duke, we also learned from it to proceed in small steps. That’s exactly what we’re doing with iPads, 3-D video, WordPress and every other technology we look at nowadays.

When you take the long view, the effective use of multimedia in academics at Duke and our reputation in higher education circles as a leader in this space make the iPod program a success.

Lynne O’Brien