Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/55957
For instance, after discussing Ice- land's banking collapse with officials from the Central Bank of Ireland, two students immediately began film- ing on the bank steps. "While that video didn't end up being used, the activity forced both the filmer and the filmee to reflect on and articulate what they'd just heard," says Watkins. Joshua Leight, a sociology and political science major, took part in the Iceland experience. Without the video blog, he says, students might have been so caught up in the excite- ment of the trip, they wouldn't think to make deeper inquiries into their experiences. "The video prompted us to ask a unique question of every situation," he says. It also captured smaller moments—such as students trying to learn to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull, the name of Iceland's now-infamous volcano. In that way, the technol- ogy helps create an instant and more complete record of the experience, says Rich Aronson, director of the Martindale Center. "It captures the essence of each moment," he adds. The video also gets the Lehigh community excited about its global curriculum, says Brown. After she and her group returned from Singa- pore, she says that many alumni and parents contacted her, offering to connect her to people they knew in Singapore who might help arrange future trips. So far, Lehigh has created video blogs for trips to Singapore and Iceland, where there is easy access to wireless networks. But it's likely that faculty will have to adjust this model for upcoming visits to China, where censorship could restrict access to some file-sharing sites, and Africa, where bandwidth is limited. In China, the school plans to use its own private file-sharing system; in Africa, students will upload photo- graphs rather than large video files. "We're learning as we do this," says Bernstein. "The technology is evolving so quickly that, no matter how hard you try to keep up, you're always learning." On their first day in Iceland, students captured this stop at Reykjanes Peninsula, an expanse of hardened lava outside of Reykjavik, in a short video blog entry they called "A Lunar Landscape." To see "The Iceland Experience" and "The Singapore Experience," Lehigh's interactive travel blogs, visit www4. lehigh.edu/news/lehighonlocation.aspx. iPads in Education: So Far, So Good A number of business schools have begun piloting the iPad in their classrooms, and early reports are promising. Educators find that the device seems to offer a good balance between convenience and functionality for students and faculty. IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland, has deployed iPads in four of its executive programs. Executives in these courses received all informa- tion pre-loaded on the devices— information that represented up to 1,000 pages of printed material. "We've evaluated several different pieces of hardware, e-book readers, and tablet computers, but we never found anything that fully met the needs of our participants until the iPad," says Iain Cooke, IMD's chief technology officer. Cooke says that the iPad has scored well in screen quality, battery life, and user inter- face. IMD is beginning to use it more integrally for personal commu- nications and networking support. Other schools plan to roll out pilot programs with the iPad this semester. Oklahoma State Univer- sity's Spears School of Business in Stillwater will supply 125 students in five different courses with free iPads, which they'll get to keep. Tracy Suter, associate professor of market- ing at Spears, and Bill Handy, visit- ing professor in the School of Media and Strategic Communications, will lead the initiative. "By using the iPad, we can replace paper-and-pencil research with the immediate process of data collection, review, and sum- mary over a Web interface," says Suter. "Collectively, we will dis- cover new uses a single individual BizEd SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 67