iPhone gets an F for education: ACU’s iPhone experiment will fail

Abilene Christian University made headlines in February when it announced it would be the first university to provide an iPhone or iPod Touch device to all incoming Freshmen. The school’s chief information office and director of re-engineering had a chance to defend the gutsy move, but — despite the plan’s cool-factor — it’s still destined for failure.

We’ll admit: the iPhone is a cool device that takes advantage of some cutting edge technology, and we haven’t seen the device reach its potential yet thanks to Apple’s habit of crippling its own hardware. But the device was never meant to take on the needs of today’s university student.

Though before we go on, we must consider ACU’s reasoning. Representing the school is its IT department’s head geek Kevin Roberts, who was interviewed by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Roberts is also the head of the Christian university’s program to distribute iPhones to new freshmen this fall, and throughout the interview, the information officer seems somewhat uncertain about how to move ahead with the bold act.

It seems Roberts is still trying to figure out how to measure the iPhone’s effectiveness as a learning tool, and — despite having plans to use the mobile in the on-campus library — Roberts doesn’t know how that’s going to happen too.

"one thing i know they are thinking about is using the location sensing (not GPS yet) capabilities of the device to help locate resources. i don’t know where they are on that, but i know it something they were exploring."

But that can’t happen — at least not with the current iPhone. Perhaps the 3G iPhone’s GPS chip will help, but the current model uses satellite triangulation to find its position. Though this is enough for a set of simple driving directions, the iPhone could never tell the difference between rows, floors, and shelves in a building — and that’s only if it connects to a usable signal from AT&T indoors.

Roberts also recommends taking notes on the device, and — though this may be a good idea in the field — note taking in class is perhaps easier with a pen and paper or a simple keyboard.

ACU also assembled a video, documenting the school’s vision for a "connected" environment — all thanks to the iPhone’s capabilities. Despite the video’s mediocre production quality, which we’ll forgive, the video shows us some very unnecessary uses for the device.

For example, consider the graphic design portion at about 7:30. The students arrive in class, and the teacher says, "I hope you all received my class text message." He then goes on to explain exactly what he said in the message. The professor could’ve waited until all the students arrived in class, but telling them right before class and then during class was what he unnecessarily did. We’re sure many students  and professors would rather wait until class time to be bothered with class business, and a simple email can help to keep the private lives of professors and students separated without resorting to expensive but very cool hardware.

And this brings us to our next point: Thousands of colleges and universities already have their "connected" solution. They provide on-campus Wi-Fi coupled with a private web-based service that allows students to change classes, check schedules, etc. Add a small laptop to the mix, and suddenly the iPhone is more like a burden especially if students don’t want to deal with a small LCD screen and touchscreen keyboard.

We’re going to assume many will choose to use the iPhone because of the same reasons everyone else uses it: it’s a really neat phone. It’s not that we’re analysts or social scientists. We have this trait — it’s called common sense. We suggest the ACU invest in some of that and then return to the drawing board to properly evolve their school network.

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