Slashdot Mirror
iPads On American Campuses? Maybe Next Year
Velcroman1 writes "Slashdotters have read extensively about the iPad pilot programs at colleges and universities: Australian schools are iPad crazy, we read yesterday, and thanks to the iPad's success, 2011 will be the year of the tablet. But on US college campuses almost half a year after the iPad's launch, it's a whole different story — at least so far this year. FoxNews.com reports that high-profile schools like Duke and Stanford are far more cautious about the device than has previously been reported. 'It definitely facilitates studying and recall because you don't get bogged down by all the paper,' noted first-year Stanford med student Ryan Flynn. But it's still a work in progress. 'The iPad isn't the best input device. Some people have gone back to paper and pencil.'"
College students on a budget would also have a hard time justifying the cost of a laptop or high-end netbook, while having only half the functionality. Ditto for universities looking to purchase them for students.
With the way most colleges and college students are going nowadays (as far as finances are concerned), this shouldn't be much of a surprise...
Living With a Nerd
Most people my age (I'm going back to school in the spring, at 24), are pretty tech savy. They're also pretty broke. Buying an Ipad means that they can't hook up their laptops to a TV to watch the legions of entertainment that netflix on demand/thepiratebay offers. not to mention the ubiquitous use of USB flash drives that people wouldn't be able to use.
If there was a tablet that offered the functionality of a laptop, I'd say sure. but college kids, as much as we love the newest gadget, will more often than not chose functionality over form when it boils down to what saves money.
I suppose it's a good thing to see a locked down system like the iPad slowly displace relatively unrestricted computers in college. Convince everyone as they go through school that restrictive, vendor controlled platforms are the way things should be, and you'll make them all the more amenable to heavy DRM.
It's not only tablets. Try to efficiently draw a diagram or reproduce a table on a laptop/tablet.
If you want to write your thesis, fine, use either one. But if you study science or any other topic where notes are not only pure text, it's bound to be very limited.
Glad to see that rational thought is shining through the morass of hype. It's a good tool - but just that, a tool.
Seems both American and Australian universities are launching a few trial programs with the iPad; however, yesterday's story seem to spin it that the iPad was taking over schools whereas today's article has a different slant.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I think a lot of folks miss the point of what makes the iPad attractive for organizations. Bottom line; there's little-to-no need for IT support. It is nearly impossible to corrupt or otherwise screw up the OS. If a user gets lost, there's a single button on the faceplate that takes them back 'home'. The functions of the iPad could be replicated by any number of competitors, but as of right now the most compelling aspect of iOS is in its simplicity. Which is a little ironic because most /. readers are going to consider the limited functionality of the OS to be the iPads biggest drawback.
The point is that the rules suck and that a device that is being pushed as a educational tool by schools and universities is locked down stopping kids from learning how to program. Not enough people being distracted by 'Ooh shiny' know about this.
Not just that, the app store rules are ambiguously and capriciously enforced. For example, Lua for game scripting has been approved though it violates the rules. There's no way of telling what will and will not be approved.
This space for rent.
As long as one entity is in control of the content being delivered on the platform, you will only get what said entity deems as appropriate. Anyone who thinks this is a good idea has been smoking too much of the Apple kool-aid.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Naysayers keep missing a critical point about the iPad: the iPad is NOT a computer/notebook/netbook replacement. It augments.
The iPad is designed as a peripheral to a computer. 'tis obvious it lacks the mass storage, big screen, rapid input, etc. of a full-blown computer - it's not supposed to, so stop harping on that. While it may spend most of its time unconnected, it still relies on a host computer.
Some 20% of what you do with a computer (YMMV) is hardcore computing requiring full keyboard, nuanced/specialized input device, big/multiple screens, mass storage unto terabytes, etc. - stuff which either requires an all-out desktop computer or severe compromises for a notebook. The remaining 80% is lightweight stuff which can be done, and you want to do, anywhere anytime in a superlight package - THAT is what the iPad is for. By breaking out the 80% from the 20%, you no longer have to compromise the 100% into a tiny under-capacity notebook.
Put your textbooks, email, browsing, and suitable lightweight apps on the iPad so you can take info & access everywhere easily. Use the iPad's microphone (! hey naysayers, ya didn't know it had one, eh?) to record the lectures while you focus thereon and Dragon Dictate (or some such) them into editable/searchable text later. Work on assignments whenever/wherever you find a few minutes to. ...and when you need to do "real work", go home, sync up, and do the work on a real computer. [insert notebook-vs-desktop type parody of naysayer rhetoric here]
Stop bashing the iPad for not being what it isn't.
If a product doesn't do everything you want, then - brainstorm! - maybe it's not for you.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Also there is the potential for the cost of a tablet to be offset by saving from going to digital textbooks.
haha. That's funny. Last textbook I purchased online for $30 dollars used. I could probably get about $20-25 resell so I'm out about $5-10. New, the book was $130ish and Kindle I noticed it was about $80ish. Unless ebook prices seriously drop, or they let you resell them (not happening), electronic college textbooks will never be priced competitively with traditional textbooks.
a device that is being pushed as a educational tool by schools and universities is locked down stopping kids from learning how to program.
It pisses me off to hell that schools are pushing the iPad when it lacks the one thing that made tablets a killer tool for education: a stylus. I did my undergraduate degree in physics and I used tablets throughout for note-taking. I started with a HP TC1100 and moved on to a Latitude XT, but I would not trade a tablet PC for a pen and paper ever.
Tablet PCs with a digitizer for stylus input have very good precision and ink reproduction for comfortable writing. Applications like Microsoft OneNote have amazing features like on the fly handwriting recognition, note indexing, searching, tagging, aggregating, and sharing. I used to keep wiki style class notes my friends and I would edit on our tablets. In Windows "Ink" is a datatype recognized across applications, so you can copy/paste and edit your notes in different apps.
The iPad eliminated all of this functionality. I've tried capacitive pens and they suck hard by comparison. The palm rejection algorithms suck, there's no handwriting recognition to speak of, and the applications are as robust as "put ink on canvas." If that's all I wanted to do, I would use paper.
The sad thing is that tablet PCs never really took off in education, and now that the latest generation of tablets (sans PC) lacks EVERYTHING that made them worth while, they're suddenly being adopted. This tells me one thing: It's not about how well iPads work as teaching tools; it's a marketing ploy. I can see the University Administration sitting around a table saying "The kids love these whiz bang things, lets give them away and maybe they'll come to our school!" They did it with iPods, they're doing it again with iPads.