It has been more than 40 years since Marshall McLuhan wrote that the “medium is the message,” a lesson that Duke University has had to relearn the hard way concerning its iPod giveaway this academic year to some 1,650 first-year students. Almost immediately, the “iPod First-Year Experience” was dubbed a trendy gimmick, and the university went on the defensive, emphasizing that the Apple music player was the device of choice for a variety of educational tasks meant to keep pace with a mobile generation of learners. —Michael Bugeja —The Medium is the Moral (Inside Higher Ed)