The first semester (of 2005-6) saw a new honours course offering an extra auditory dimension to its participants: lectures, seminars, and informal student discussions are being recorded and distributed for (re)listening on personal music players such as the Apple iPod. (The recordings can also be heard on any desktop computer, and any MP3 player; but one survey showed a fifth of students already have an iPod besides another third with other kinds of MP3 player.) In this move into student-led educational technology, we first asked what modern technology already has a large niche in student everyday life, and then how it could be given an educational dimension. While "personal stereos" have become common since the Sony Walkman appeared, allowing someone to play music to headphones from a player no bigger than the stack of credit cards many people carry, the latest generation led by the iPod are associated with software that allows changing selections (playlists) to be passed around effortlessly, so that it can be used more like a tape of yesterday's radio news (updated every day automatically) than like playing a CD bought last year. Thus educationally, although it could be used to access an archive of lectures given weeks or months ago, it can also be used to pass on the next episode of student discussion: which itself can be recorded on iPods among other means.

The project aims to discover how widespread uptake might be, but already some students are enthusiastic. Those with long daily commutes from Saltcoats or Livingston are one natural constituency, but others suggest that time spent waiting for a tutorial, or queuing to use a student computer could be used to listen to such course-related "podcasts".

This pilot is the vision of a computing science student, Joe Maguire, who is carrying it out as his fourth year project, supervised by Steve Draper; but it is also related to large trials at Stanford University, Brown University, and Gracemount High School in Edinburgh. It is being trialled here on five courses in all, but the first convert was Susan Stuart of HATII who convenes a course on Consciousness. Several features of this course may make it particularly receptive to this extra learning resource: the academically controversial topic of consciousness, the centrality of critical argument as the main learning activity, and the interdisciplinary mix of psychology and philosophy students taking the course all make discussion central. The class is split into two seminar groups which have immediately developed different tones, and staff and students alike are interested in checking out what goes on in the other group!

A key element is ease of use. In this respect, iPods are in strong and strategic contrast to the growing complexity of mobile phones, with their large collection of tiny buttons. This is true not only of iPod players (four buttons with four universal meanings for everything), but also of downloading (once subscribed to the podcast, iPod owners just plug it into an Apple Mac and the stored files are updated with zero button clicks while the battery is also recharged) and recording. Any student present with an iPod and microphone can record the lecture or seminar or other discussion and have it added to the distribution, so capture does not depend on one piece of equipment and one technician being reliably present and working.

Other possibilities being tested in this project include distributing audioguide material (e.g. to replace the audioguides the library has for visitor induction), selected course related information such as timetables and staff contact details presented like mini-web pages on iPod screens, and translation facilities for foreign students. For a little more information, see http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/ipod/

Meanwhile we await Joe's final report before considering whether to roll this out further.