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Sunday, November 20, 2005
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myPED UD’s intrigued by the latest higher education technology, a pocket-sized, professor-summoning device called the myPED. An academic version of the iPod with some astonishing innovations, myPED is an iPod upgrade which allows college students who do not wish to wait a month to hear a particular lecture on their iPod (desperate to keep students attending class at schools like American University, Purdue, Stanford, Hawaii, and Duke, where increasing numbers of them are absent because they can listen to all lectures on their iPods, some universities are now mandating that students wait a month to hear the lectures), the myPED gives students able to afford its $550.00 price tag a distinct advantage over peers forced to cool their heels for lecture content. myPED or no, many university professors, in a bid to sell their in-class performance to customers who don’t have to buy it, have already been pumping up their pedagogy -- in the classroom (“These days, Purdue criminal-forensics professor David Tate makes sure every one of his live lectures includes key visual components like blood-spatter patterns or bomb-disposal techniques. Students who opt to listen rather than attend, he says, ‘miss a whole lot.’") and on their iPod tracks (“Some professors actually act more like DJs than Ph.D.s, composing musical intros, adding gong sounds, jokes and other aural cues to emphasize important ideas on the digitalized version of their lectures.”) But with the myPED, the professor comes to you, anyplace, anytime. A version of the physician’s pager, the myPED sends a signal to professors who are “on call” (different universities have different blocks of hours during which faculty must respond to myPED calls) to deliver their lecture to myPED owners. UD’s school, George Washington University, is still studying the myPED technology and deciding whether to introduce it. But UD is not waiting around. In order to assure bodies in seats in her classes, she now begins random classes (she thanks Purdue's David Tate for helping her think outside the box on this) with a short rambling account of her depressions, and then takes out a little knife and half-heartedly scratches at her wrists. All it takes, UD has discovered, is a few drops of blood for students to come back for more. |