We are living in an age of mobile media. It seems that we can’t live without them for a day. Most people own a cell phone, a laptop computer, a mp3 player, so on. We are almost addicted, and we even get nervous when we forget to bring them one day. And the devices have become multi-purpose; we play games on the cell phones, chat on our computers, watch videos on our iPods. But class on iPods?
What will podcasting a lecture do to our learning experience? Will it really improve the quality of our education by offering all the good services the technology has to offer, as some argue? I don’t think iTunes U will be the solution. For one thing, why would you bother going to class when you can watch the lecture from your own bed? And podcasts can’t take place of classes based on interactions and discussions. For the supplemental value, we already have enough outlets to complement our education, Blackboard being only one of them.
But is this really about educational purposes, or are they targeting the college students as their market?
We are paying over $30,000 a year, and the tuition is only going to keep skyrocketing. I don’t want anything else that might encourage the tuition to increase any more. Apple says the content could be downloaded onto any mp3 players, not just their own iPods. But not everyone has a mp3 player. It is a useful marketing strategy to reach college students, probably their biggest market. And the fact that the marketing has even entered our own classrooms makes me uneasy.
Tracy Steel @ Tue, 03/07/2006 - 7:19pm
This could be a good thing, if used as a supplement rather than a replacement to actual classes. When studying for a test, a student can consult the video of the original lecture rather than his scribbled, messy notes. Yes, some people might abuse this by not going to class at all, but I think college students would find just about any excuse to do that anyway.