While the iPad’s long-awaited release yielded impatient lines outside Apple stores last month, 75 incoming Honors students will be handed the gadgets for free this fall.
The university’s Mobility Initiative — a program meant to study how mobile technology affects students’ learning experience — has been giving out Apple products for nearly two years. So far, 280 freshmen in the Banneker/Key Scholarship and Incentive Awards programs have received either an iPhone or iPod touch.
The initiative’s latest Apple gadget donation will be given to the Honors College’s new Digital Cultures and Creativity program — a two-year living and learning program that aims to combine the humanities with new media and technologies — which will incorporate the iPad into its curriculum starting this fall.
“The point is for students to become informed users through awareness of the different kinds of design decisions that went into the tools they have in their hands today,” said DCC Director Matthew Kirschenbaum, an English professor.
Along with the 75 iPads to be handed out in late August upon the new students’ arrival, the Mobility Initiative will be giving 160 more newly enrolled DCC students an iPhone or iPod touch.
Although Kirschenbaum said the funding would come from the Mobility Initiative and other units associated with DCC, he would not specify the exact cost of the iPads, which are sold by Apple at a starting retail price of $499 each.
The price alone has some students concerned.
“Given the state of our economy, I feel that the Honors College could spend their money in a much better fashion,” said junior government and politics major Neil Costello, adding that kind of money should go toward a philanthropic cause instead.
Junior elementary education major Courtney Pisani shared these concerns, though she said the technology aspect has its merits.
“I feel that there are other, more necessary ways that the money to purchase all of these iPads could be spent. Maybe then the university wouldn’t need to implement furlough days,” Pisani wrote in an e-mail. “However, I do think that they could be a useful integrated curriculum tool. … As an elementary education major, we’re constantly discussing how to successfully integrate technology into the classroom. It’s becoming even more of a vital twenty-first century skill and tool.”
Senior Sarah Martin, an English language and literature and studio art major, said administrators have the right idea, but the focus should be on software rather than expensive gadgets.
“I think it is essential that designers and marketers know their technology,” she said. “I would love it if the art school or Art Scholars began giving out free Adobe Creative Suites, but there’s a difference between handing out iPads and handing out Photoshop, now isn’t there? I can’t play Roller Ball or Monkey Island in Photoshop.”
egan at umdbk dot com
