Abilene Christian University (ACU) announced yesterday that they would be issuing iPhones or iPod Touches to incoming freshman for use in their college courses and day to day lives.
At ACU - the first university in the nation to provide these cutting-edge media devices to its incoming class - freshmen will use the iPhones or iPod Touches to receive homework alerts, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, get directions to their professors' offices, and check their meal and account balances - among more than 15 other useful web applications already developed, said ACU Chief Information Officer Kevin Roberts.
They specifically mention the use of web applications that they've developed, but extend this concept in a demonstration movie (Youtube link) called Connected. The movie shows how a fully deployed mobile learning environment might look, with mocked up examples of true iPhone applications:
The movie details a fully integrated iPhone and college experience, with integration into coursework, class participation, payment system, directory and 3d mapping. They caution that the movie is entirely speculative, of course. Some demos of their iPhone web apps are available at http://acu.mobi/.
This news, by itself, would only so interesting if the university was acting on its own, but MacRumors has heard that Apple is taking an active role in deploying the iPhone in university settings to try to regain some of their historic educational marketshare. Besides ACU, pilot projects are expected at universities such as Harvard, MIT and Stanford in the near future. The new iPhone SDK is expected to also play a role in future iPhone/University integration, though it appears that ACU does not yet have access to it.
In 2004, Duke Universityhad a program in which they issued iPods to incoming Freshman to allow them to listen to lecture materials. Similarly, the iPhone will have tight audio/video integration with each school's iTunes University content.
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 2:05 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
