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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."
"It will be interesting to see what happens when the inevitable wave of Android tablets hits over the next six months."
No.. Not really.
It's just some adults having fun and burning money in the process. If it's about text books, why not give them Kindles which cost a lot less? Oh, because they're not as sexy and cool as an iPad.
When the price of [used] textbooks at Uni bookstore for two semesters/quarters equal the price of a tablet computer [which does considerably more than the textbooks], can you really blame them?
Whether it be ipad or an Android tablet, I would love to see a interactive tablet for students that shows g or f=ma or the basis of trig in animated form. i.e. an animated triangle that shows what sin cos and tan really are... Oh, and chemical reactions. Those could be awesome for someone interested.
Also a way to read to young children where they see the word as they hear it. Although parent(s) reading to their kids would be better in my mind...
Hopefully this doesn't turn into a distracting of students or virtual experiments that don't react like in real life.
The summary says "One university in Adelaide has even abolished textbooks for first year science students and is allocating free iPads to first year students instead." yet the article says "The University of Adelaide jumped into the handheld computer revolution headfirst last week when it was announced last week that students who enroll in science degrees will receive a free iPads." Getting free iPads is completely different than abolishing textbooks. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
When I was going to school, some people with laptops were playing games in class, too. Does this mean employers should avoid graduates from the classes of 2002-2008 as well?
You've summed up the reason for our high unemployement rate with two sentences. Congratulations!
I hope the students never need any help from Apple.
http://gawker.com/5641211/steve-jobs-in-email-pissing-match-with-college-journalism-student
Meanwhile school administrators and your wife's employer are delighted at the restrictiveness of the device.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
I'm much freer on Apple DRM iphone4 than I ever was on the open Nokia I had.
I have come to the conclution freedom has to be governed, otherwice freedom will close it self up. Perfect exaple of this is the mobile market in USA. The American way is the liberal way, however, my mobile is much freer in Finland an many other countries due to the fact that there are governing laws on how competition is allowed to act.
In my homecountry Finland, GMS and NMT mobiles where never allowed to be sold with a carrier plan. Result was that carriers didn't have huge stocks of phones in their shops. Yes they had some phones, but most people piced up their phone at a regular store or electronics store. Then they opted for their carrier.
The law was reviwed to boost 3G development, now the carriers are allowed to sell phones with contract and even lock the phone to it. However, no carrier is allowed to build their own antennas in an area where there allready exists an antenna. Eeach carrier can compete on bringing the anntenna first to an area, but are forced to rent the bandwith to competitors. And that is freedom for everyone. The consumer and the carrier.
A reslut of that is that new carriers have turned up, who have no network them selves but rent from the bigger carriers. And yes they are competitive. No maintenance costs, and can bargine high network trafic prices with the network owners. It's again a win win situation.
But the market is not free as in free beer ala American market. And I've seen the same with the iOS products, yes they close me to Appstore, but infact that has been a positive thing for me as an consumer. And I argue that it generally has been a positive thing for developers, though there are exeptions.
But Nokia OVI sucks because the market is fragmented, and that is true for Androids also I experienced last week.
What to do when the battery dies?
Well, I'm not a Doctor, but I assume you'd just plug it in. Considering the ubiquity of laptops in college these days a lot of classrooms have power outlets built into the desks themselves, and I've never heard a student complain they couldn't do their work because their laptop didn't have power. That and how often do you really use a textbook in class anyways? Usually class is lecture time and the textbook is used back at the dorm at night with reading/problems assigned.
Whenever stories like this crop up (notebooks in, paper out; turn everything into a game), the future of the next generation looks to be dumber, fatter, lazier, more demanding, less-attentive, and more commodity-like; loath-able yet not by their own fault. Basically: less fit to survive.
I've read this more than once and I still can not understand your point.
From what I can surmise is that you are comparing "I put up the infrastructure and you people may rent it" to "I control what products and services you can use" and concluding that since one worked the other does too.
Monopolies are always bad for the consumer - the problem is this:
"but are forced to rent the bandwith to competitors"
That is the breaking point of your argument. They are forced NOT to have a monopoly in the area. This is the total OPPOSITE of the Appstore - you have a monopoly and they don't need to rent it to anyone, they can choose to disallow stuff at a whim, they can add their own rules (No VMs!).
Now I don't understand what you mean by 'market is fragmented'. I have a symbian myself. I use the Nokia OVI store. I also downloaded some applications from sourceforge, and an e-reader from another website. That's called freedom, and that helps the consumers.
I work at multiple schools in Australia as the IT Guy and there are two major differences.
One of my schools has purchased one and is genuinely looking to use it for a worthy purpose but then our statewide firewall has a proxy so anything besides Safari isn't compatible with it.
My other school suffers from shiny object syndrome/Apple fanboy syndrome and we seem to be buying them with every cent we have available. It also doesn't help that the Principal is saying that flash is coming to the iPad, and that we will be using all our online flash educational websites using the iPad in the future and that we will no longer have to buy regular computers. I do try to educate them but its like telling them there is no santa and they are in denial. I also frequently walk in on classes full of students playing racing and shooting games when they are meant to be learning on them.
The only time I've seen iPads do something decent is at Special Schools where the special apps and the touch pad work very well. Besides that I think people are generally wasting their money.
I think there is a proper space in schools for something more open like an Android tablet, the iPad is just annoying and is just a constant "Can we do X task that we do on our PC's on the iPad because its cool and hip"
Nice to know that the Australian government is wealthy enough to afford overpriced hardware and makes its purchasing decisions based on marketing and not, say, system specifications.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
What to do when the battery dies?
You obviously haven't used an iPad. The odds of a student using the entire charge of one without having a convenient opportunity to recharge it are somewhere between none and fat chance in hell. Seriously, the battery life on the iPad, even under heavy use, is considerable and more than adequate for a student's needs. They will be back home and able to charge the device before it runs out of power.
What to do when you forgot your iPad?
Probably the same thing that people do when they forget their notebooks. And, let's be serious - it's far _LESS_ likely that a student will forget an iPad, which is light and cool and fun compared to them forgetting a collection of notebooks which are heavy and boring and dull.
Any other hypotheticals you'd care to throw out there?
Meanwhile school administrators and your wife's employer are delighted at the restrictiveness of the device.
I think at least half of them are just excited at being able to be trendy. I've worked in education and a friend's school did this when the buzz was, I forget, not laptops, PSPs or something. Anyway, as an actual teacher rather than someone who got to go to local conferences and talk about being "innovative", his impression of a kid with a new gadget was... rather memorable. In University's, I've heard some right nonsense talked about "mobile learning". Mainly by managers who got to apply for grants on the back of it and go to conferences to talk crap about it to other people who then talked about new educational paradigms. (Sorry, you get lynched if you use out of date buzzwords in Academia. I think they're new pedagogical models or something now).
It's like technology. First you it doesn't exist so you can't use it. Then it exists and the muppets start using it everywhere like a fucking kid that's just learnt a "naughty word". Then people denounce it as not the radical wonder-fixall it was "supposed" to be. Then people settle down and start using it when it's appropriate. We're not at the last phase yet, we're in the muppet stage. There's a lot of good potential in electronic devices in school. A school is unlikely to get Richard Dawkins to give a lecture to a class. But a hundred schools, watching and asking questions electronically, can. There's a lot you can do with interactive quizzes, seeing at a glance which kids are struggling or excelling in real-time, or group work with such devices that's worthwhile. But what they ain't, is a drop-in replacement for manageable class sizes, actual teaching and knowledgable teachers.
Also, the choice of iPad's is a bad idea which goes right back to the real motivation of a lot of these schemes which is for people not doing the actual work to pat themselves on the back and be trendy. If they had any sense, they'd hold off a little and use one of the open platforms as they become available. Aside from saving money (always helpful in schools), they'd be able to have an open platform. If Apple get any kind of lock-in in Education, it will be bad, same as it's bad when any group gets a lock in. Find me one teacher in the UK that you can put a polygraph on who can say the the name "Capita" without their pulse hitting 150, and I'll show you a headmaster who hasn't done any real work in a decade.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
This is a shoot-from-the-hip effort. Abolishing textbooks for Kindle books would be great; abolishing textbooks to move to Kindle today would be a disaster due to lack of content. We're not prepared for the iPad to be worthless; they'll all find that electronic devices (not iPad, ALL electronic devices) are worthless by this attempt, and go back to just books. There's no consideration of content availability etc and maturity of the platform, much less consideration of what platform or what goals you have. This is mainly an "OOH SHINY" reaction.
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I have dreamed for years about how rich a learning experience could be if textbooks had motion and video. For example, imagine how easy it would be to explain the difference between frequency and phase if you could have a couple of sine waves on a graph that change as one drags a slider back and forth? How would you even do that on a Kindle?
Then there's the whole app thing, where you can build applications that target specific learning needs.
Kindle is really great as a replacement for printed novels, but it just doesn't cut it for the education market.
Book publisher money grabs are not new. I remember having to buy the same calculus book 3 times in college - Why?
The publisher moved around the chapters and slightly altered some of the problems. Never mind that calculus hasn't changed in hundreds of years.
These "new editions" instantly made the old books worth zero. If you took a chance on an old used textbook, you ran the risk of not being able to do the assigned work.
Book publishers are money grabbing scum, and they don't give a damn if poor students go broke trying to get an education.
The iPad is just another tool in their toolbox.
-ted
What to do when the battery dies?
You obviously haven't used an iPad. The odds of a student using the entire charge of one without having a convenient opportunity to recharge it are somewhere between none and fat chance in hell. Seriously, the battery life on the iPad, even under heavy use, is considerable and more than adequate for a student's needs. They will be back home and able to charge the device before it runs out of power.
What to do when you forgot your iPad?
Probably the same thing that people do when they forget their notebooks. And, let's be serious - it's far _LESS_ likely that a student will forget an iPad, which is light and cool and fun compared to them forgetting a collection of notebooks which are heavy and boring and dull.
Any other hypotheticals you'd care to throw out there?
You obviously have never met humans. It's a lot easier to remember a giant heavy thing that a light fun thing. Oops, I left my iPad next to my bed last night instead of putting it in my backpack. Too bad the backpack felt exactly the same with and without it. Oops, I forgot to charge my iPad last night. Seriously, have you met any kids in the last 10 years? At any given time, a quarter of the cell phone toting kids in high school have either forgotten their phone somewhere or forgotten to charge it. The iPad's going to be worse, because it's used for learning, not exciting socializing.
The iPad's battery life is terribly short. If a kid needs to use it in most classes throughout the day and then for homework at night (which will already be pushing its single charge limits on a busy 16 hour school + study day), they only get one chance to remember to charge it.
Also, while the iPad is good for quickly flipping through pages, it's nowhere near as good as a textbook. Most everyone in advanced science or math classes (and I'm probably foolishly discriminating against history, psychology, etc. here) spends a lot of time with several (>2) pages bookmarked and accessed several times a minute while sorting out new concepts in challenging problem sets. This is mostly a software problem, but as of now the available reader software is going to make this more painful than it is with a textbook. Furthermore, the low resolution of the iPad screen just can't compete with the 300 dpi printing on an 11" tall textbook, so the information that took 3 textbook pages flips will now take several more pages of on the iPad.
For that matter, students drop things all the time. Textbooks get bent a bit. iPads shatter.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I'm taking a couple of online class this fall towards a Masters degree. I just bought a Kindle and decided that it would be a cool experiment to buy the Kindle version of the text books. That way I could have them with me all the time without having to lug 150lbs of textbooks. Plus it would let me do some reading during down-times at work (the classes are work sponsored).
However, after only a week I found that the inability to see a whole page at a time and the inability to flip through the pages to find something quickly within the chapters that are part of the reading assignment for the week makes it much harder to learn. I've taught myself how to scan and read pages and paragraphs. I've also taught myself how to scan through pages to find relevent material. You just can't do that with an e-reader. As a result, I have ordered the physical text books. I'll still use the digital editions when I go on vacation later this fall, but my primary reading material will be in book form.
That being said, it's quite possible that someone starting out with an e-reader in school and continuing on through College would almost do as well as I do with text books. I still think that e-readers (Kindle or iPad) have a long way to go. To finally be usefull, you need to be able to copy and paste, search within a chapter range, etc.
David
I hate to point this out on a site like Slashdot, but the openness of a platform is not always the most important thing when buying a product like an iPad. And trendiness isn't why the ipad is so popular, either.