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Australian Schools Go iPad-Crazy
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like it's not just Apple fanboys that are going wild for the iPad: in Australia, virtually every state education department is trialling the tablet in schools — and some schools are even trialling it without the official support of their department. One university in Adelaide has even abolished textbooks for first year science students and is allocating free iPads to first year students instead. It will be interesting to see what happens when the inevitable wave of Android tablets hits over the next six months."
I hope the students never need any help from Apple.
http://gawker.com/5641211/steve-jobs-in-email-pissing-match-with-college-journalism-student
whilst "interactive" may be an "awesome" teacher, interactING is an even better one.
the reasons why OLPC are good apply just as well in the first world as they do to the third, but teachers and governments got snotty about the shit colour and features of the XO-1.
you wouldn't think it, given the price of the ippad, but the cost of hardware is dropping like a stone and is far less than the cost of text books which can be out-of-date immediately.
showing someone f=ma on a graph is all very well, but who's going to write the graph program?
i demonstrated kepler's laws and the laws of physics and gravitation to myself by writing an orbital space game on a BBC micro in 1985.
putting a shit ippad or an anduroyyd tablet in front of kids is about as good as slapping a TV in front of them and saying "there! isn't technology great!"
you can hear the sigh of relief a million miles away from the teacher as they think "thank christ for that - now i don't actually have to think how to keep this little fuckers occupied".
so... mmmm, yeah. i'm really impressed with putting proprietary hardware/software in front of kids (that's remote-controlled by apple who might decide to "censor" certain types of "teaching" material) especially the kind of hardware/software that requires reverse-engineering to get the crap off it and regain control of it.
Although I'm an AC and this post will likely be buried, here I go anyway:
The author Theodore Roszak wrote a very interesting book on the subject of "Shiny Object Syndrome" in his book, "The cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking" (yes, that's the full title). It is a very, very interesting read.
One of the subjects Roszak covers is the trend in the 80's to say that "computers = education." The push to get every kid in front of a computer in the hopes that it will magically make education "better" did not work. By and large, the phenomenon was driven by corporations with something to sell, and not backed up by any research. When research was done, it showed the opposite...that having "technology" handy didn't increase test scores or make education "better."
So this nonsensical rush to put Apple's latest shiny object into every child's hands is likely doomed to failure. At least in the 80's they were trying to push educational software with it...what educational software is being promoted on the iPad? The damned app store? If they wanted to go the ebook route there are far cheaper alternatives that are not filled with iDistractions like the iPad is.
Recently, the idiotic premiere of Ontario made the headlines by saying he thinks every kid should have a cell phone in class, again using the "it helps learning" line of BS. Naturally this ignores a) the HUGE cost of wireless in Canada b) the fact that lower income families will be shut out and c) there is ZERO evidence that having a shiny e-toy in every kid's hands will help anything other than the government's bottom line from the taxes they'll pull in.
I think Roszak needs to update his book for the modern Apple-crazed generation.