iPod U: Profs get podcast tools, students get Cliffs Notes

The battle for students' academic souls moves onto the iPod, where more …

When last we visited the use of podcasts in the academic world, professors were using basic software to expand the classroom experience onto YouTube and the iPod. Since then, the effort to make academic material go mobile has become increasingly sophisticated and commercialized. On one end of the spectrum, software now has the ability to create a searchable, indexed database of all on-campus lectures. At the other, it allows students to avoid key parts of the academic experience by skipping the reading.

The New York Times ran an article describing the Campus 2.0 system from a company called Tegrity. Like some of the other software available, Tegrity software captures voice and video input and synchronizes it with the slides used in a publication, producing a video podcast of the results.

But Tegrity goes well beyond the basics—it indexes the content so that students can search for specific terms and identify the lectures that contain them. It also integrates with standard academic course management systems, such as Blackboard. Assuming it works as advertised, professors now simply have to hit a single button on their laptop before delivering a lecture, and the resulting podcast will be integrated into the entire campus computing infrastructure.

Cliffs Notes

That's the (apparently) good news. I'm less enthusiastic to hear that a company called Raybook is bringing the ultimate academic shortcut to the iPod: Cliffs Notes. These condensed descriptions of major works of literature are promoted as providing the sort of insight and overview of the work that you might receive in the classroom. In reality, they're generally viewed as providing a way to come to grips with the basic concepts of a literary masterpiece without bothering with the slow and messy process of reading it.

The iPod versions are said to contain the full text available in a Cliffs Notes pamphlet, along with character and chapter summaries and short quizzes. Any iPod that can display photos can also display character interaction diagrams and other visual material. The best thing (from the viewpoint of a desperate student) is that the material can be downloaded and installed at any hour of the night. Right now, the content manager is in beta, so I did not try one out myself in order to check out the quality of the material.

Regardless of the quality of the material, three trends are converging to make a professor's life ever more challenging: every student is carrying a growing collection of electronic devices, those devices are getting smaller and harder to spot, and they're gaining the capacity to hold an ever-larger amount of academic material. Pretty much any student can now turn a quick bathroom trip into a mid-exam cram session. Professors seem likely to face the choice between implementing draconian security measures during exams or defaulting to an honor system in the face of this electronic onslaught.

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