ACU, Abilene Christian University, has announced that they intend to give iPhones to their incoming freshman students. The university began thinking about the mobile/education convergence on the iPhone/iPod Touch platform in early 2007 and appears to have begun testing the device on campus midway through the year.
Today, along with the announcement of the forthcoming initiative, the university released two video which dramatize several mobile computing issues they can foresee using the device for. They have higher resolution versions available, but here are the YouTube versions: (Fair warning: some cool ideas, great production, somewhat hokie screenplay)
Connected, part 1:
Connected, part 2:
How does a small religious school in central Texas get to this program before bigger, more prestigious schools? Could be several reasons, but I’m sure a relatively small campus population certainly aided in their agility.
See the very smart mobile web portal they already have up: http://acu.mobi/ (Best viewed on a mobile device, especially Safari. Will render on desktop Safari, too). These guys are good.
One of their web developers offers this on his blog:
There are a number of challenges when it comes to creating applications for the iPhone. I won’t go into all of them but the biggest is usability. Some people say content is king, well I say usability is king. This is true with any program or website but especially true on the iPhone, where you have a very limited interface. Thanks to all the classes on usability and design standards with Dr. Susan Lewis in the JMC department that I thought I’d never need, I’m able to (hopefully) design with usability in mind.
Apple rumor site MacRumors believes this is only the first of several universities about to deploy such a program, with Apple’s active involvement. They offer up “Harvard, MIT and Stanford” as the other schools, but as typical of Apple rumor sites, I think they just made this one up. No offense to ACU, are clearly very tech savvy, but considering how much earlier Stanford (whose picturesque Palo Alto campus resides near Apple’s corporate campus in Cupertino, CA) was on iTunes U, I just don’t see them leap frogging these academic powerhouses if Apple was spearheading the program. I think the credit here all goes to ACU.
If nothing else, the program is a PR coup. Of course, they run the risk of becoming “the iPhone school,” but I imagine that’s a risk they’re willing to take to be out in front of this. Duke ran a One iPod Per Child (er, ahem, student) program for several years, before curtailing it. But I feel that this may just have more staying power. The looming question for me is “what about the AT&T contracts?” I haven’t seen this referenced anywhere yet.
Prediction: this program is the sound of the train horn in the distance. The freight train of mobile connectivity in education is coming this way… and it’s nearly here.
(updated with the web developer’s comments minutes after original post)