Penn students may have a new reason to be jealous of their Drexel neighbors.
The Drexel University School of Education, following in Duke University's footsteps, will distribute free Apple iPods to incoming students next fall in an attempt to integrate technology into teaching.
"A focus for us," Drexel's School of Education Director William Lynch said, "is on bringing technology to [solve] human problems and ... increasing human understanding through the use of technology."
With a similar objective, Duke gave all of its 1,650 freshmen 20-gigabyte iPods last fall.
After looking at the successes and failures of Duke's giveaway program, Drexel came up with a smaller-scale version of its own.
"This is a very focused, school-based, curriculum-centered initiative, as opposed to a schoolwide initiative," Lynch said.
Depending on the school's acceptance rate, between 30 and 50 students will receive the latest iPod Photo players -- which can display digital pictures as well as play music.
However, this is not a one-sided program, according to Lynch.
"This is a very collaborative project that we have going," he said. "The students aren't passive recipients."
Penn Graduate School of Education Dean Susan Fuhrman does not see such an initiative ever coming to Penn.
"We try to put as much money as we can into financial aid, and I doubt we'd be spending money on buying iPods," Fuhrman said.
She feels that technology is already incorporated into teaching at Penn in a variety of ways.
"We help people who are going to be teachers develop software and use all the various tools that are available," Fuhrman said.
With Duke's evaluation of its year-long experiment due within about a week, some question whether this type of program will become more common in the near future.
Lynch feels this will depend on the evaluations of the initiatives.
"People will build upon what we've learned. ... I'm almost certain that other people will pursue either similar or slightly different kinds of research agendas," he said.
Lynch addressed criticism that students would only use the free iPods for music-playing purposes.
"We hope it will be used as a music player because we hope that we can develop and discover a variety of ways to use the iPod, so ... it can also be used as a learning and information technology," Lynch said. "Rather than resisting a popular technology because it's popular, we want to embrace that as a way to be more effective in communicating."
But Fuhrman has her doubts.
"You could use audio for very interesting ways in instruction," she said. "But ... with all these other technologies that use many senses at once ... it's not likely that iPods are going to play such a major role."
