Abilene Christian University announced this week that they would outfit all incoming freshmen with their own iPod Touch or iPhone, to enable the students to receive homework alerts, answer in-class quizzes, and use about a dozen other web applications the university has developed for the devices.

ACU’s plans for have attracted the attention of executives at Apple and administrators at other universities. ACU Chief Information Officer Kevin Roberts returned to Abilene Monday from Apple headquarters, where he was asked to present the university’s “creative vision for converged media devices” to executives and to selected leaders from universities including Harvard, Yale, MIT, Duke, Stanford, Oxford, Princeton and UCLA.

The university’s overall plan for using mobile technology in education has been captured in a film called ‘Connected.

“We are not merely providing cutting-edge technology tools to our incoming students,” said Roberts. “We are also providing the web applications that ensure these tools will become critical to the students’ learning experience. Because 93 percent of ACU students bring their own computers with them to college, we are choosing to take them to the next level by providing converged mobile devices.”