When my daughter entered college, her incoming freshman class was required to purchase an IBM laptop. It was, at that time, state of the art technology. She was attending a business college with a trading room and the laptop was considered a valuable tool in her business education. She didn’t even own a desktop computer at the time. It was quite exciting for her and also impressive that the school would offer a discount and keep the laptop updated with software and hardware updates for the four years while she attended.

The times they are a-changin. Not even 10 years later, another university is blazing a trail with its students. But this time instead of laptops, they are providing their students with an IPhones or an Ipod touch. Abilene Christian University in Texas is the first university in the nation to provide this technology for their incoming freshman. According to ACU’s Chief Information officer:

[Students] will use an iPhone or iPod touch 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.

Kudos to ACU for recognizing the value of these devices and for allowing their incoming freshmen to benefit from their forward thinking.

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