More Than Just Lecture Review?

I read Friday on the Chronicle‘s Wired Campus blog that the Journalism School at the University of Missouri will require each incoming student in the fall to purchase either an iPod Touch or an iPhone.  Statements from the school indicate that students will use these devices to review lectures (captured via Tegrity starting this fall) and access course material.  Comments on the Wired Campus blog post, as well as on stories posted by the school’s student paper and the Columbia Tribune, have been heated, to say the least.

I thought I might weigh in on the story, too, since I think having students merely use these devices outside of class as souped-up Web browsers is a missed opportunity.  A variety of tools already exist for turning iPhones (and iPod Touches) into “super-clickers,” allowing them to be used by students as part of classroom response systems.  Instructors at the U of M J-School could pose a multiple-choice or free-response question, have every student in the room respond to the question (on their own or after discussing it briefly with a peer), then share a summary of the responses with the class, providing a useful launching pad for class discussion or comments and explanations by the instructor.

One can implement this teaching method with clickers, of course, but the use of mobile devices like iPhones means (a) students can respond more easily to free-response questions, (b) students make use of a device that has many other functions, and (c) the possibility exists for new teaching methods (requiring, perhaps, new software) that expand the idea of a classroom response system in a variety of ways.  Check out Abilene Christian University’s “Connected” video and these two posts of mine for some possibilities.  It seems that U of M students have the skills and creativity to create iPhone apps along these lines.

I hope that faculty at the U of M J-School consider their options for leveraging their students’ iPhones and iPod Touches in the classroom, not just out of the classroom, this fall.  They’re likely to find ways increase their students’ engagement and interactions during class.  That might mean, however, that the lecture captures planned for the fall are a little less useful to students after class, if the instructors’ voices are the only voices captured!

(For those interested in the controversy to which I alluded above, make sure to read the comments by Elizabeth Eberlin here.  She’s the student mentioned in the Wired Campus blog post as starting a Facebook group to protest this policy.  Her comment clarifies the reasons she created the Facebook group and is worth reading.  Also, Brian Brooks, the associate dean heading up this initiative at the U of M, left several lengthy comments here that are worth reading.  )