OC Rolls Out the iPhone
I walked into the Gaylord Student Center on the campus of Oklahoma Christian University Saturday morning and the first person I ran into was Dr. Mike O’Neal, university president. I was there to cover the first day of the school’s iPhone distribution to all full-time students for the fall semester. As O’Neal and I greeted one another I noticed he was carrying an iPhone in his hand. So I asked him to pose with it, and this is the result.
More about OC’s iPhone event in Tuesday’s Business section of The Oklahoman.
Business Reporter
The iPhone Goes to School
Oklahoma Christian University’s decision to provide an iPhone and a Macbook laptop to every fulltime student continues to earn national publicity for the Oklahoma City school. The latest publication to spotlight OC — and three other universities doing the same thing this year — was the New York Times, which published a feature on the iPhone program in Friday’s paper.
With a headline “Welcome Freshman, Have an iPod,” the Times article discusses some of the reasons schools are choosing to provide their students with iPhones and includes some criticism of the program. Professors fear that the iPhone will distract students during class and discourage participation. An excerpt:
“While schools emphasize its usefulness — online research in class and instant polling of students, for example — a big part of the attraction is, undoubtedly, that the iPhone is cool and a hit with students. Basking in the aura of a cutting-edge product could just help a university foster a cutting-edge reputation.
“Apple stands to win as well, hooking more young consumers with decades of technology purchases ahead of them. The lone losers, some fear, could be professors.
“Students already have laptops and cellphones, of course, but the newest devices can take class distractions to a new level. They practically beg a user to ignore the long-suffering professor struggling to pass on accumulated wisdom from the front of the room — a prospect that teachers find galling and students view as, well, inevitable.”
In addition to Oklahoma Christian, schools providing laptops to the students include the University of Maryland, Abilene Christian University and Freed-Hardeman University. As is OC, both ACU and Freed-Hardeman are affiliated with the Churches of Christ.
Jim Stafford
Business Reporter
Best headline of the week
“You’ve got jail! AOL spammer sentenced to seven years” from ars technica. (via dustbury, who knows a good headline)
Don Mecoy
Business Writer
Cutting the cord
I recently took three days off work to spend time with visiting family members. By 9 a.m. on my first day off, I was corresponding with my supervisor and sources via e-mail. My siblings likewise frequently checked messages via cell phone or computer during their visit (to the consternation of our mother).
It’s typical vacation behavior for a wired workplace, and it’s particularly common among executives, according to a recent survey. Fifty-eight percent of business leaders make themselves available to people back at the office on a daily basis, according to a worldwide survey of 235 senior executives and managers conducted by NFI Research. Eleven percent make themselves extremely available, while 47 percent make themselves somewhat available.
While on vacation, the majority (74%) of business leaders check their email,
use a computer (57%), use the Internet (55%) or use a Smartphone/PDA (54%).
According to the survey, respondents said that while while on vacation they generally:
As one business contact sagely advised me after I told him that I was answering his email while on vacation: STEP AWAY FROM THE CRACKBERRY.
Don Mecoy
Business Writer
Search party
We’re searching more on the Internet, according to a recent research study that I found while searching on the Internet. The popularity of search tops such virtual pastimes as checking the news, general web surfing or visiting a social networking site.
Nearly half of consumers perform an Internet search on a daily basis, according to the Pew Research Center study. Heck, there’s a 50-percent chance that I’m performing an Internet search of some kind at any given point in time.
Study author Deborah Fallows attributes the gains to the growing presence of home broadband and the wide variety of sites that offer search functions. The improvement of general search engines has made searching a more satisfying practice, Fallows surmised.
As a pre-Google Internet denizen who waded through pages of results from Alta Vista, Northern Light, HotBot and Infoseek back in the day, I can tell you that search engines perform much better than they used to. However, I suspect that users who dealt with less sophisticated search engines developed stronger searching strategies.
Don Mecoy
Business Writer
