Since the announcement last year that Duke University would give all incoming students an iPod, I've been watching with some bemusement as others have hopped on this bandwagon: the Drexel University School of Education recently announced that they would launch their own iPod initiative; Apple has set up an iPods in Education site; a some quick googling reveals a slew of other sites either advocating or musing on the educational impact of Apple's music player (see iPodEd and articles at MacUsingEducators and IN3 network). To my mind, this is an example of education's infamous faddishness at its worst.

Don't get me wrong. I love my iPod. It has already produced a major shift in the way I listen to music and it is beginning to transform the way I think about discovering and purchasing new music. But I can think of few digital gadgets currently on the marker that are less well suited to meaningful educational applications.

The great merits of the iPod, outside of its trendiness, are that (1) it holds a whole lot of stuff in a very small, very portable package and (2) it is very simple to use for its main function as a music player. The first point gets emphasized a lot by advocates: the Duke iPods are crammed with stuff from welcoming addresses, to academic calendars, to the school's fight song. But really, if it's just about storage space, why use an iPod? There are plenty of cheaper and/or more capacious external hard drives on the market (LaCie's tiny Porsche-designed, external drives cost under $300 for up to 100GB; their somewhat less aesthetic terabyte drive costs under $1000). Or simply give the students 20GB of server space with which to do anything they please.

Yes, the iPod differs from a simple hard drive in that you can access the data stored on it without being attached to a computer, but this is true only to a certain extent. The listening to audio part, of course, works very well, but how many times does one really want to listen to the Fight! Blue Devils, Fight! (and what is the great value in doing so)? As for other content, reading even a small amount of text on a tiny iPod screen strikes me as painful. People routinely complain about not wanting to read text on a regular computer screen, how will they react to trying to read a textbook or the course catalog via a tiny monochrome screen? Drexel's initiative will use iPod Photos, so those students will have access to images and color... on screens that are still tiny. There is still no support for video playback on an iPod. So except for information presented in audio format, the vast amounts of "stuff" that can be theoretically be loaded on an iPod would be only barely-accessible to the user.

The more fundamental problem, though, is that the iPod is essentially a playback device. It is a delivery mechanism for canned content, not a device for authoring or creating one's own content. This is exactly the kind of "educational" technology that has failed time and time again to make a significant positive impact on learning (radio, film, and TV were all once touted as transformative educational tools), and the same "consumer" model of learning that educational reformers have been trying to overthrow for decades. In a serendipitously named article, "Pianos not Stereos" (1996), researchers from from MIT's Media Lab compared the educational value of the two eponymous devices.

The stereo has many attractions: it is easier to play and it provides immediate access to a wide range of music. But "ease of use" should not be the only criterion. Playing the piano can be a much richer experience. By learning to play the piano, you can become a creator (not just a consumer) of music, expressing yourself musically in ever-more complex ways. As a result, you can develop a much deeper relationship with (and deeper understanding of) music. So too with computers. In the field of educational technology, there has been too much emphasis on the equivalent of stereos and CDs, and not enough emphasis on computational pianos.

I fear that these iPod initiatives are making the same mistake.

I will grant that an iPod has a little more potential than some of its predecessors. There are some limited methods of generating content directly on an iPod. A trivial example is the On-the-Go playlists featured on newer iPods. One can imagine some uses of this feature (an identification test for music history classes), but certainly not one of widespread application. There are, of course, third-party voice-recording accessories, which could have some real usefulness in some fields (for interviewing, taking field notes, doing talk-aloud protocols), but portable tape recorders, which have been around for decades, provide the same functionality and have not become prominent educational tools outside a few specialized disciplines, so I don't see why a very expensive digital recorder would be more successful.

There are also some very clever, if obscure, iPod applications being developed that may eventually make me eat my words. There's an open source project underway to run a version of Linux on iPods, providing more interactivity and perhaps opening the door for future development of iPod-based applications. A company called iPodSoft has dedicated itself to creating iPod-related software. So far, their offerings look like utilities for better managing the stuff on one's iPod, but one, iStory Creator, is intriguing. It is advertised as a tool for building text-based games (or interactive fictions) that can be played/read on an iPod. Still not, strictly speaking content creation with an iPod, since the actual authoring is done on a computer, but certainly a step in that direction.

Ultimately, though, the iPod's justly-praised simplicity, seems to make it inherently unsuitable for truly constructive educational applications. While a scroll wheel and five buttons are an adequate interface for selecting from lists of songs, these provide only a crude user interface for manipulating or entering new content (even navigating the calendar feature with this interface is fairly clunky, in my opinion). I suppose someone could come up with a way to use these keys for typing, or develop a portable keyboard like those available for PDAs, but any of these moves would be struggling against a device that was designed to do one thing extremely well.

I'm all for innovation, and if developers want to spend time seeing what tricks an iPod can be made to perform, more power to them. My objection is to schools spending sparse resources (Duke puts the price tag of their effort at $500,000) trying to turn a stereo into a piano without even the beginning of an idea about how to make that transformation. Take this comment from their VP for information technology, Terry Futhey:

We're approaching this as an experiment, one we hope will motivate our faculty and students to think creatively about using digital audio content and a mobile computing environment to advance educational goals in the same way that iPods and similar devices have had such a big impact on music distribution.

This approach of handing educators and students new gadgets and saying, "use this to help people learn" is what has doomed almost every previous attempt to integrate new technologies in the classroom. The iPods are not being used to answer an identified need, nor because anyone has developed good educational applications for them. They are being used because the kids think they are cool, because they attract attention, and (I would speculate) because Apple cut the Duke a huge break in exchange for the PR bonanza that this brings them. They might as well have handed students Xboxes or Tivos or used Segway scooters for all the educational foresight that has gone into this initiative.