iMPRESSED
Love, love LOVE the effort being put forth by Georgia College and State University in embracing the iPod as a community building and learning tool.

Some excerpts from the article...

At least 100 of the rural school's employees are turning iPods into education or research tools -- impressive for a college with only about 300 faculty. But it's more than simply making class lectures available -- a practice now routine at many colleges and even a few high schools.

History professor Deborah Vess asks students to download 39 films to their video-capable iPods so she doesn't have to spend class time screening the movies. Psychology professor Noland White has found a new-age answer to office hours: a podcast of the week's most asked questions.

And the 5,500-student campus has organized a group of staff and faculty to conjure up other uses for the technology. Called the iDreamers, the team bats around ideas that could turn iPods into portable yearbooks and replace campus brochures with podcasts.

This school year, it started iVillage, a virtual community that encouraged incoming students to start communicating before the start of classes. The first dozen freshmen recruited for the effort were asked to think up innovative uses for the iPods.

The team is creating an iPod-based freshmen survival guide that includes advice on classes, dorms and nightlife in this sleepy community 100 miles south of Atlanta.

Bobby Jones, a freshman from Rome, said he's found life in a "virtual community" surprisingly satisfying.

Brilliant stuff. It's no wonder that GCSU was rewarded for its iPod ingenuity when it was chosen to host Apple's Digital Campus Leadership Institute in November.

How great is the change in the education dynamic when the students are telling the teachers how they can (and are willing) to learn more? How much of an impact does it make when the teachers listen to that feedback and build the tools to not just help their students learn better, but to embrace the tools themselves and become better teachers?

There may be hope for the American education system yet!

Here's a link to something that got me started on this riff --

iAmplify.com.

It's a pretty cool new site that provides downloadable podcasts on a variety of personal development topics, by a wide range of recognized experts. I plan a spending a bit of time poking around on this site, and perhaps looking into providing some DTIG content to their menu.