DURHAM, N.C. - Duke University freshmen are using their school-issued iPods to learn Spanish vocabulary, recording lectures, analyzing music, and - no surprise here - for downloading their favorite tunes.
Among those is Pelen Powelson, who said she's mostly used her iPod to record more than 1,000 songs, which take up about one-fifth of the iPod's 20-gigabyte capacity.
"I have almost no use for CDs anymore," she said.
About 1,650 freshmen were given the iPods in August at cost of about $500,000 to the school. The devices are theirs to keep as long as they hang onto them through the end of the school year.
As an accessory to the iPods, Duke handed out microphone recording modules made and donated by the Belkin Corp. The program is costing the university about $500,000 for the devices and additional equipment and support staff time.
Duke is evaluating the pilot project, and a report is due next month. By late March or early April, the university will decide whether to continue the program in some form with a new crop of freshmen next year, said Lynne O'Brien, director of the Duke Center for Instructional Technology, which is overseeing the experiment.
"It's going very well," O'Brien said.
Eleven courses were part of a pilot program in the fall semester. At least 14 - most of them courses that weren't in the first group - are participating in the spring semester, according to Duke's iPod Project Web site, and the Divinity School Library is using the devices to teach patrons how to use databases.
The iPods have been used mostly for recording lectures and interviews and replaying them on the go. Other academic uses include analyzing music, not only in a music theory course but also in engineering labs, which examined music from the standpoint of its sound properties.
Widespread publicity about the program has prompted queries from textbook publishers, who might include more audio material with their print offerings as a result. That is an unexpected benefit, O'Brien said.
"It's a signal to the publishing world that students have these kinds of devices," she said.
Students' private use of the devices is OK, O'Brien said, as long as it doesn't violate copyright or other laws.
Powelson's instructor in macroeconomics, Lori Leachman, is among faculty members who use the iPod in the classroom. Leachman posts recordings of her lectures on a class Web site.
Besides the recordings, Leachman also puts up interactive graphics to help students understand economic principles, she said. The electronic aids extend her reach in the 300-student course.
"I have a number of technological accoutrements," she said.
Freshman Sharon Obiala also used her iPod in a first-year writing course last semester, when she interviewed students about their tendency to segregate themselves by race and ethnic group.
An instructor in the writing program, Michele Strano, had her students recorded interviews for last semester's writing project and included excerpts from the recordings in computer slide-show presentations that accompanied their 15-to-20-page papers.
"It's a way of making writing public," Strano said. "I want students to have this idea of writing as having meaning to people besides me and them."
In another course, Computational Methods in Engineering, students extract 10 seconds of a favorite song from their iPods, put it on a computer, and alter it in such ways as changing computer sampling rates and boosting particular frequencies.
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