At MIT, the iPad (they have one to lend) has a loan period of 4 hours. You can NOT renew the iPad and there is no overnight lending. All of this is done on a first come, first served basis.
What about software? Get ready and don't forget that this is a loan from the music library.
The iPad comes with more than 85 music apps. But, that's not all. It also contains a library with more than 3,000 tracks and music videos from CD's and DVD's that have been recently received by the Lewis Music Library.
That's quite a package especially if you want to see how the iPad deals with multimedia. It's also interesting that content and relevant software is included.
Although, MIT was the first library we have head of loaning iPads they are not the only ones. We've learned that North Carolina State University and Fairleigh Dickinson University are also lending iPads.
On April 8th, NCSU Libraries News reported that the were ready and able to loan iPads to the NCSU community. Loans are for 4 hours.
Finally, at Fairleigh Dickinson University, iPads are available for two hour loans to faculty, students, and staff. Each FDU Library (there are several) has one iPad.
Like many other schools including North Carolina State and MIT 1, MIT 2 and MIT 3, FDU also lends Kindles, Sony eReaders, and iPod Touches to faculty, students and staff for one week.
It's rather obvious that the three libraries listed are not the only three lending iPads. We would be happy to learn about others, not only from academic library world but also from school, public, and special library communities.
On a somewhat related note...
Shortly before we learned about the MIT iPad loans we were reading a couple of articles that are online about a Kindle DX in the classroom test at the Darden School of Business located at the U. of Virginia. It was not very successful.
[Michael] Koenig [Darden’s director of MBA operations] learned of the dissatisfaction from a mid-term survey that concluded with two key questions: Would you recommend the Kindle DX to an incoming Darden MBA student? A total of 75 to 80 percent answered “no,” said Koenig.
However, Amazon.com did get some good news.
The other survey question asked Kindle-using students: Would you recommend the Kindle DX to an incoming MBA student as a personal reading device? A total of 90 to 95 percent said “yes.”
Finally, a story on the Darden web site also talks about the Kindle test results.
The concern with the electronic reading devices is that they are too rigid for use in the fast-paced classrooms of the Darden School where the Socratic method and case-based pedagogy means students have to be nimble.
“You must be highly engaged in the classroom every day,’’ says Koenig, and the Kindle is “not flexible enough. … It could be clunky. You can’t move between pages, documents, charts and graphs simply or easily enough compared to the paper alternatives.’’
It's more than likely that similar classroom tests with the iPad are going on right now and it will be very interesting to compare the iPad results with what has already been learned about the Kindle DX.
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