spinningroundthebeltway

There was an interesting article in yesterday’s Times about a recent initiative on the part of some colleges to provide incoming freshmen with iPods and iPhones in an effort to bring the Internet further into the classroom and make its power increasingly accessible to students.

At least four institutions — the University of Maryland, Oklahoma Christian University, Abilene Christian and Freed-Hardeman — have announced that they will give the devices to some or all of their students this fall.

At first glance, I’m not sure what to think. On the one hand I’m tempted to think back to my high school’s decision to provide each student with a laptop in what it billed as the “1:1 eLearning initiative.” Well-intentioned, but it fell flat - the district was forced to adapt in ways it had not foreseen, such as by establishing a “laptop hospital” (no joke) to deal with all of the physical damage caused by drops, throws, etc., and by restricting the technological platform more and more each year to curb students from using email as a conversational tool or proxies to bypass the filters installed into web browsers.

I recognize that the context of this piece is college, not high school, and so students should ideally be more responsible. But this cannot be guaranteed, so the program naturally raises some critical policy questions with regard to privacy, consumer choice and effectiveness. They are, respectively:

• Can the educational institution in any way track or monitor these devices, and if so, under what circumstances?
• Is there a way students can opt out of the plan if they do not wish to be encumbered by the device(s), or is the plan mandatory?
• Will the institution be able to reconcile its plans for appropriate use with students’ propensity to use the devices for non-educational purposes? If not, what will become of the program?

The colleges have answered the first question, saying that they would not be able nor willing to follow their students’ habits on Internet-capable mobile devices, unlike the high school environment, where surveillance was a fact of life:

University officials say they have no plans to track their students (and Apple said it would not be possible unless students give their permission). They say they are drawn to the prospect of learning applications outside the classroom, though such lesson plans have yet to surface.

But the answers to the others, which may have come easily in the high school environment (as was the case with the first), are more elusive in the context of higher education. Opt-out provisions, which, according to futurist Adam Greenfield are critical to preserve humans’ ability to control their own actions in a society of ubiquitous computing, seem nonexistent. Linking students into data networks without their consent - neworks that they may not want to be part of for whatever reason, financial or otherwise - is a real problem, but there is no attempt to even address this issue (which, as Greenfield points out, usually goes largely unnoticed).

Worrying about the third question may seem childish at first. After all, the Times reports:

They began using the iPods to create their own “content,” making audio recordings of themselves and presenting them. The students turned what could have been a passive interaction into an active one.

But maybe not. Despite the classic narrative of Web 2.0 - power is redistributed into the hands of the masses, empowering them to create their own content with the possibility of making a lasting impact - reality cannot take a backseat.

That reality is that the institutions themselves reserve the ability to mediate and even control how the devices are used and are not used - they, in essence, have the “final regulatory say,” even if they purport not to. One need look no further than my own high school to this in action.

The real questions, then, deal with the extent to which these institutions - collegiate and otherwise - will impose rules to govern their students’ technological habits as they provide them with incredibly versatile tools such as the iPhone, whether or not the students desire the increased connectivity. It is something worth pondering as schools of all levels take the proverbial leap into the new media world, sometimes without fully knowing the characteristics of its landscape.

In Pascack Valley High School’s case, the results were semi-disastrous (read: it was rumored Sony dropped out of the educational tech market becaduse of us). Let’s hope that the four colleges blaze their paths more responsibly.

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