General – Page 12 – Mark Shead

Do iPods help College Students Learn?

Last year Duke gave iPods to all of it’s incoming freshmen. An article came out today that gives a small overview of the program. It sounds like the iPod program wasn’t really studied. They basically just gave everyone iPods to see what would happen. The article has quotes from teachers saying that the iPods helped keep students engaged.

Professors reported that students seemed more engaged in classes where they could use the iPods. They also cited strong student use of the audio capabilities of the iPod in their presentations, and more accuracy in quoting from interviews they did using the iPods.

I guess that is great and everything, but I’m afraid that if iPod’s are what makes the class “engaging” then there is probably something wrong with the class. While I can appreciate the value of being able to record a conversation to reference it later, we’ve had this capability for some time in an obscure device called a tape recorder.

Just for the fun of it, take a look at how the article would look if we replaced the word iPod with tape recorder.

When tape recorders go collegiate
By Elizabeth Armstrong Moore | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

When Kenneth Rogerson walked into his newspaper journalism class on the first day of the school year, the professor could barely contain his excitement.

After a quick introduction he broke the big news: “We got the grant,” he told his class. “You all get tape recorders.”

As if on cue, the students exhaled an audible “whoa” and exchanged elated glances. Duke University in Durham, N.C., had already made many a headline as the first school ever to provide all incoming freshmen with their own 20-gigabyte tape recorders – enough space to store up to 5,000 songs.

Ok so now it sound silly. But why? Pretty much all of the uses described in the article are things that can be easily done with older technology. This is a fundamental problem with the way that technology is implemented in education. When the focus is on a new piece of technology instead of new educational processes, we end being excited about mundane capabilities as can be seen by the following (modified) quote:

Professors reported that students seemed more engaged in classes where they could use the tape recorders. They also cited strong student use of the audio capabilities of the tape recorder in their presentations, and more accuracy in quoting from interviews they did using the tape recorders.

It still sounds silly with tape recorders instead of iPods, but the substitution helps clear the head of technology utopia and puts the focus on what is actually being accomplished instead of what devices is being used. So students are using them in their presentations. That is really nice, but I bet if they gave every incoming student a fog machine professors would start to notice the use of fog in some of the student presentations. If it was encouraged, professors would probably even say that there was a “strong use” of fog in the student presentations. This doesn’t mean that the devices are helping education.

I think that technology is extremely underutilized in education, but usually this isn’t because of lack of technology. Duke’s experiement is interesting, but without a solid infrastructure in place I’m not sure what results they were expecting. They weren’t really giving students anything that they couldn’t do with a tape recorder. Technology only becomes wildly beneficial when the infrastructure is in place ahead of time. For example, putting a computer in every dorm room would be beneficial, but it is 100 times more useful if the dorms have network wiring, access to the internet and library databases, and the college puts all of it’s class assignments and resources online. In fact if a university concentrates on the infrastructure, the students will bring their own computers.

I think Duke should concentrate more on creating an infrastructure that provides content for devices like iPods. Here are some of my suggestions:

Record Every Lecture — These could be made available using podcasting tools, so students could “subscribe” to classes and they would be downloaded automatically. They could review it from their computer, iPod, hand held computer, etc. Students could increase the playback speed to review a lecture quickly just to refresh their memory or play it back in their sleep to try to benefit from subconcoius learning. (Ok maybe that is a stretch, but I would have tried it in college.)
If the university made the content available to the general public, you’d have people listening to the lectures on their way to work, while exercising, etc. They could even limit it to alumni which would help keep them connected with the donor base.
Publish Interviews — Record and make available interviews and conversations related to the class. For example say a journalism professor posted a 10 minute telephone interview with a well known journalist for the New York Times discussing ethics. Content like that could provide a wonderful starting point for a class discussion or just as a way to introduce the topic. Over the years the school could build a very large repository of content.
Share Lectures with Other Universities — Imagine that biology students at Duke University are studying how DNA is formed. If they could quickly access a lecture from Princeton covering the same topic it could greatly increase their understanding of the subject just by hearing things in a different way.
Suggested Listening Lists — If a school built up a large repository of audio content and indexed it properly, students could be given suggestions on what to listen to. This could be based on their current classes, but it would be even more interesting if it was based on what questions they missed on quizes and exams. Students could subscribe to their personalized RSS feed with audio enclosures. As the semester progressed they would be given various items to listen to based on areas where they demonstrated a lack of understanding. They could download the items automatically to their computer, iPod, or whatever device they used and listen to them in the evenings, in their car, while exercising, etc.

All in all I think it is an interesting experiment. It is always interesting to give people technology and see what creative things they do with it. If Duke comes back next year with a solid plan for creating a better infrastructure to support portable media devices to help facilitate learning, then I’d say the experiment was a success. If not I’d say that they are chasing shiny objects instead of focusing on real improvements to the educational process.

Regardless, the iPod experiement was probably well worth it. The publicity they recieved with their target audience was worth a lot more than the cost of the iPods. If that was their intention, then the program was a great success.

Why Google will Buy Amazon.

While I don’t anticipate Amazon selling out to Google anytime soon, much of the work done at Google is being duplicated by Amazon and vice versa. Google’s mission is to organize all of the content in the world and make it easy to find. This basically what Amazon has done for shopping. As both companies expand they are going to find themselves doing more and more work that is similiar–even if their end products are very different.

Here are a few examples of areas where there may be overlap:

Restaurant Menu’s — This seems like something in Google’s domain, but Amazon is the one implementing this.
Locate a Taxi — Given that Amazon is doing restaurant menus, this seems like it would be something similar, but Google is doing this one.
Search inside books — This seems like a perfect match for Amazon, but both Google and Amazon are providing this service. Google is currently working on scanning in Harvard’s library so the books show up in their search results. They will only let you view a few pages due to copyright issues.
Website Traffic Rankings — Amazon is providing this service through Alexa. The data is coming from Google though.
Directory of Websites — Amazon and Google both provide this, but they both pull their information from dmoz.org.
Access to Scholarly Papers — Google is doing this through Google Scholar. Most of the time it gives you links to websites where you can buy or subscribe to the information. However if you are part of a university that is working with Google, they can pass you right through to the information without needing to go back to your university library logon.

Much work being done at both companies is similiar. Both Amazon and Google are scanning in books, providing a way to search the book, and presenting the information in a way that protects copyrights. Both companies are trying to provide better ways of categorizing information on the web. Both companies gather information about movies. It seems like only a matter of time before someone realizes that a good portion of the “grunt” work being done at both companies could be done once and used in both places.

Process Architecture

As an organization grows it must develop processes to deal with the work that needs to be done. Those processes are either created internally or brought in from the outside. While most organizations will have some processes from both sources, they will usually lean toward one source or another. When their value to the consumer is based on having a unique product, organizations tend to use generic processes because their product is what differentiates them in the marketplace. When they offer a product that has become a commodity or is readily available from other vendors they tend to use custom processes in order to differentiate themselves to customers.

Progressive Insurance is a good example of a company that is using custom processes while a Rogers and Holland Jewelry is an example of a company that uses generic processes. Progressive works hard to create processes that add value. Their basic product is available from numerous other sources and there is very little differentiation. However their process of sending adjustors to the wreck site with the ability to issue a check to their client on the spot is what allows them to be much more efficient than their competitors. Their processes are what allow them to have lower prices in an industry where everyone offers an identical product.

Rogers and Holland on the other hand uses pretty much the same processes as the rest of their competitors. They differentiate themselves by their product not their process. The processes that support a purchase from Rogers and Holland are not significantly different than those at Zales or any other jewelry store. The product is what varies.
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Triggering actions by email

Sometimes you need to trigger events by sending email. For example lets say you want to create an email address that will accept messages and show them on some type of LED display. There are a number of ways to do this, but the simplest is to set the .forward file for the email account to pipe the contents of every message it gets into a program. The program can parse the message and do whatever else you want it to do.
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Simple Introduction to Reflection

Reflection is a mechanism in java that allows to to get information about a class without needing to know the type of the class. The program below takes a java class name as a command line argument and shows you all of the methods and field names that are in the class.

You call the sample program like this:
java ReflectionTest java.util.Calendar

ReflectionTest takes the string you pass in on the command line and attempts to find a class by that name. If it finds one it gets an array of all the fields and displays their name and their values. It then gets an array of all the methods and displays their name and their return type.
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