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Melbourne College May Give iPad To Every Student
daria42 writes "It looks like Apple's hyped iPad tablet may find a functional use beyond the early technology adopter set. In Australia, a Melbourne University college recently completed a trial where a limited number of students were given an iPad to aid in their studies. The outcome? The college has now recommended every student be given one of the Apple devices, following in the footsteps of the University of Adelaide, which is handing out iPads to every first year science student. Sure beats lugging around the old textbooks!"
Don't you mean "Adding to tuition costs"?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
You've got it all wrong. They're going with style (easy, sexy, and makes for good admissions brochures) over substance (tedious, frustrating, difficult to market).
I'd be suing, if I attended there.
What for? Let me guess: overexerting and possible spine damages. TFA
Trinity found through its trial that iPads were not a replacement for desktop or laptop computers — or even other educational technologies — but were an “enhancement”.
So, not a replacement for textbooks, desktop/laptop. Dam'!!! Will they at least let the students use it during an exam?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Because these students probably already own laptops, and at any rate does this school not have any computer labs? If you're just wanting text books, there are much cheaper options available. I'm not sure why one ought to own an iPad and a laptop, or more specifically why one ought to be required to get an iPad when a laptop is a more general tool. I just can't imagine typing up a ten page report on an iPad.
Moreover there are better products for just reading ebooks, albeit mostly in black and white.
(No, I don't go to an Australian University...)
The main problem with the iPad educationally is the fact that the content is not there. Out of the 10 or so texts I purchased this semester, NONE were available for the iPad. Now a few were available through...alternate means, but a good number of them (e.g. the heavy ones) were not available digitally (and I know where to look).
I've had a lot of problems on my University's Wi-Fi that aren't present on Windows/Linux PCs, Macs, or any other devices. Complete inability to multitask is a problem. Lack of Flash/Java support (the latter is used in a number of educational software systems).is a problem. The iPad is nigh useless for taking notes because of the lack of a keyboard; if you get a dock, you might as well be carrying a 14" or smaller laptop around because it's comparable in size and heft.
Positive notes would be the battery life (it really does last 8+ hours) and the simple nature (can't fuck it up). Instant boot is nicet. It's "neat to have", but I'd be pissed if it were added to the tuition - it occupies a strange middle ground between my iPod Touch (which is instant on and pretty much always connected to Wi-Fi for quick lookups) and my Latitude E6400 (which is fairly lightweight, decently powerful, and gets 4 hours of battery life without turning absolutely everything off/to minimums).
My point is, educationally the iPad - or an iPad like device - could be great. My experience suggests that it's little more than a bragging point in real life though - the limitations on practical use would make it a hard sell to me. The limited functionality relegates it to a toy-like device - bigger and more difficult to lug around than a smartphone, but not substantially lighter than a laptop. If the books were there, I could see more of an allure. But they aren't.
“iPads are effective, durable, reliable and achieve their educational aims of going further, faster and with more fun,” the college wrote.
Now there's a line straight from marketing that manages to mean jack shit. Might be this is an Apple subsidized push akin to Microsoft's educational license deals; Get em hooked before they enter the workforce.
Ice Cream has no bones.
"It looks like Apple's hyped iPad tablet may find a functional use beyond the early technology adopter set."
Is it possible to mention Apple or Apple devices on Slashdot without gratuitous and misguided denigration, even if implied?
The iPad is a perfectly workable tablet device. In fact, it is the cheapest tablet device in its class (quality level, feature set) and also the first to market, and also the one with the largest number of applications and the largest installed user base.
It clearly has uses beyond the early technology adopter set given the anecdotal array of adoptions in vertically integrative environments/scenarios.
In my own case, I use it for teaching. The iPad offers a minimal, lightweight platform on which to track attendance, grades, lesson plans, and so on and to connect them to projection devices for showing media of various kinds, from outlines and presentation slides to YouTube videos that supplement the lecture.
Come on. This is supposed to be a technology blog. Instead, it's a bunch of why teenagers with strong, if ill-informed, political-affective poses.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I'm not sure about Australia, but up here in the US, a lot of that gets written off to scholarships, assuming you're lucky enough to get one. So, the prices of education keep going up and the politicians keep assuming that it's only the rich that can't get scholarships.
But if you can't get a scholarship what you end up with is a massive amount of loans and probably a hard time actually paying them back since a bachelor's degree is mostly about making a bit over minimum wage.
I hope there is an opt out and get a tuition discount option.
Does apple give kickbacks or bulk rate on things like this? Perhaps an apple holy warrior happens to be in charge.
Sent from my PDP-11
as Linux slid into obsolescence and/or irrelevance alongside the Windows-vs-Linux debate. Basically, it's one more community that time has left behind and that doesn't realize it, a network of enthusiasts-of-the-anachronistic.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
It sure does beat lugging around those old textbooks. Unless you fancy being able to mark them up, re-sell them, or refer to them in 2020...
The professors will probably adore the levels of class participation and attention enabled by everyone having a school-approved internet browsing/PMP device...
My criticism of this scheme isn't iPad specific(though the education sector often does leap on Apple-related tech crazes); but more general:
We still don't have something that can replace a notepad and a mechanical pencil when it comes to ease and unobtrusiveness of taking notes(keyboards are faster for straight text, and produce better final copy; but are a bit clicky for class and, unless you are a LaTeX god, slower for equations, diagrams, and similar). Somewhat similarly, your basic dead tree actually works pretty well for textbook-style distribution. Durable, can be marked according to personal preference, can be held onto or resold at will, printing them doesn't actually cost all that much.
Ebooks have some compelling convenience advantages, particularly for light reading(casually pick up a novel over whispernet, etc.) or for technical reference(grep obscure_command_foo...); but they aren't going to do much about the central complaints with textbooks: Absurd prices and constant version churn(in fact, with DRM, they likely make those worse). Unless this "Hooray! Tablets!!!!" scheme is integrated into some way of actually re-making how the course is taught, I predict no savings, major distraction, and people accustomed to scribbling in marginal notes learning exactly why UI elements in capacitive touchscreen systems are as large as they are...
On the plus side, Melbourne College's Angry Birds team will be a Division 1 powerhouse....
It's not that we're Luddites, it's that we've been around this particular block before and it takes more than something shiny to turn our heads. When I was in college (not THAT long ago) there was the mandatory "buy our laptop" program which thankfully hit the class after me. It was a terribly stupid idea for me because I already has 24/7 use of a work provided laptop that was pretty much the best money could buy.
This isn't that different. I have a laptop. I have several desktops with various OSes. I have an iPhone. I don't want an iPad because, to me, it's nothing but a less portable iphone.
You might have also noticed a university education has become ever more expensive, at a rate much faster than inflation. Trinkets of dubious value to not impress.
Meanwhile, Slashdot continues to brush the neckbeard hairs out of their $350 Linux netbooks.
Spot on.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Quite likely so, given that the Xoom is even more expensive, and has no clearer relevance to the educational mission of the school(along with the general geek distaste for being ordered to buy a specific gadget, rather than the one they want...).
There is a long history of these "school decides to standardize all pupils on $TECH_TOY because it is The Future of Education(tm)" stories. They generally starkly underperform expectations.
If the university was giving the Motorola Xoom instead, I'd be very impressed, considering they are essentially vapourware in this country (and virtually everywhere else outside the US). I've heard all kinds of hype about them ... but has anyone actually ever seen one? At least the iPad is a real, shipping product in Australia :)
You've got it all wrong. They're going with style (easy, sexy, and makes for good admissions brochures) over substance (tedious, frustrating, difficult to market).
Yeap. Being a college that prepares overseas students for undergraduate university entry (TFA) and given that the number of international students studying in Australia is dropping, the competition is heating up: anything to lure them students is welcomed, they are paying higher tuition fees anyway.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
There are quite a few luddites, but I think there's an equal measure of people who are simply more cautious. I'm far from a luddite, and I think my posting history will attest to that -- the sheer number of posts I've made will attest to that -- but I don't have a Facebook account. Not because I'm afraid of technology -- on the contrary, I know enough about technology to really, really hate what Facebook is doing to the Internet.
So, take these iPads. Sure, etexts are a hell of a lot better than forcing students to carry around a textbook. I'll be the first to admit that I would prefer them, that I would be the first to buy them, that I'd spend several times the price... ...except for the DRM.
It's not just that the iPad is a great idea as a general-purpose computing device that's been shat on by Apple's need to control everything, that the very first thing people in the know do with it is "jailbreak" it -- contrast to Android, where a free SDK is available for any OS, any student could just start developing apps, and share them with their friends without needing Apple's approval.
It's not just that I worry about the iPad "app" becoming the only option for a textbook, with other platforms shunned, even print. That's a long way off, but it is already happening -- there are apps with exclusive content for iStuff, and there are more than a few which would work fine as websites, but have been app-ified to cash in.
It's certainly not just that I worry about this being done horribly wrong, like the iPad-only publications which are, not even PDFs, but raster images of pages, because the entire process is still driven by a print-oriented workflow -- the lack of text thus completely destroying the biggest advantages of it being electronic, such as bookmarking, hyperlinks, and search.
No, the biggest thing stopping me from buying electronic textbooks, and being very skeptical of any school district which forces students to not only buy electronic, but to buy specifically from Apple, is the thought that right now, I can lend my book to a friend. I can either sell it for a decent price -- buying used and selling at the end of the semester is almost, but not quite, as cheap as renting -- or, if it ends up being useful, I can keep it. I can use it where I can't get power, let alone an Internet connection, and while I think these concerns are minor and becoming less relevant all the time, the few ebooks I buy, I have as DRM-free PDFs that work wherever I am, on any device I get my hands on, because I can make them work.
I'd be the first to suggest this sort of thing, if there were any hope of it being done right. Give students an open device, and if you can't get Creative-Commons texts, at least make them DRM-free -- it's not like there's an incentive to pirate if the school just blanket-licenses the books they need. Force the teachers to adapt to students who simultaneously have access to every distraction imaginable, and to the sum of all human knowledge, all at their fingertips and during class -- better make that lecture more interesting than who's dating who on Facebook, better make sure you teach something more than an aggregation of facts, better learn to hold their attention. Don't just give students thirty seconds on a multiple-choice quiz, give them an interesting problem to solve that can't be done with just a Google search, but can gain some advantage from the strengths of such a device.
Problem is, as soon as I hear the word iPad, that's my first clue it's not even going to be close to right.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
$200 textbook are better then $160 locked down e-books that some times have a Expiration date.
On the bright side this isn't like what Idaho is facing where some unqualified idiot was mistakenly elected and then turns around and drops a plan that his republican cronies support but the rest of the population doesn't that involves firing teachers and replacing them with laptops and online classes.
Yeah, they want to give the laptops to 9th graders and expect them to survive 4 years.
And the businesses who would directly benefit by supplying the online classes gave donations to help him get elected.
But even according to the article, this is supplementary. Meaning that it doesn't replace the laptop that the student probably already owns and likely won't do much for the cost of text books. Additionally, if you're looking for savings, the only savings that I see is the savings on chiropractic visits when your back gets bent out of shape from carrying books around.
At this stage, I don't personally see any reason why a school should go out and buy the iPads for the students. Seems to me to be a waste of student fees and/or taxpayer dollars. Now, in the future when they cost less, can do more and there's a legitimate need, then perhaps it will be time to consider the matter. Right now though it's a waste of money that could be spent on more important things.
Not really. University tuition fees (for Australian residents) are heavily subsidised by the government (to the tune of 75%+ of the real fee) and regulated/standardised across the country. So what the students pay is predictable and set in stone by legislation for several years into the future. They can't be arbitrarily adjusted.
Having said this, TFA mentions that this particular university is mostly for foreign students, not Australian residents. These students are unsubsidised. They are referred to as 'full fee-paying students', due to the fact that they get into the university simply by paying the (huge) fees to do so, rather than based on academic merit and high school performance (like subsidised Australian residents would be). Statistically speaking, most will be from fairly well-off families in places like China, Singapore, India, and other Asian countries. They are already paying (or more likely, their parents are already paying) huge amounts of money to study abroad in Australia. A few hundred extra for an iPad wouldn't be noticed (if it's even actually coming out of their tutition fees in the first place, which I doubt). Indeed, it may even be perceived as a desirable reason for these students to pick this university over others: competition for these students among the universities is high, as they are full fee-paying and hence pure profit as far as the universities are concerned.
i have one complant w/ apple and the rest is fine they make good hardware and software but...
even the best kept walled garden cant touch the beauty of a forest
and apple didnt let a forest grow, and remains nearly barren
warning pointless sig
IF buying an iPad were actually a replacement for buying texbooks, then this really would be a good idea. I would gladly pay out of pocket for an iPad if it allowed me to exclusively use ebook versions of my textbooks. In fact, I would even refrain from pirating those ebooks if they were sold for a reasonable price
In reality though, I doubt it would work that way. Because ebooks are easily pirated, textbook publishers would have a hard time sustaining their racket if universities started switching over. For some reason, universities seem to actually care about what happens to publishers, so I can't imagine that many universities would be willing to require professors to choose only textbooks that have an ebook version available.
Even if it did happen, professors would just say "exams are open-book, but no computers are allowed." This would force students to spend $200+ on a physical copy even though they already paid for iPads with PDFs of the textbooks.
Basically, nothing that makes education cheeper or more convenient for students will ever work. Universities don't care about students.
The eee tablet line includes multiple products.
The capacitive touch product that is in the same class as the iPad runs Android. Fewer apps.
The Windows product that has more apps has a Wacom digitizer, not capacitive touch. Different product class. Not comparable.
You are, in short, wrong.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I own an iPad and think it's great, but in order to use one effectively in an environment like a large institution, it needs to be integrated. Textbooks on an iPad? Great... do they have them yet? Does the College have apps written that take the place of, say, campus info guides etc. Until things like that can be addressed, it's not really going to add anything.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
"Apple knows how to build things that work"
And yet their products still can't view Youtube. Cognitive dissonant... it comes with every Apple product.
Great Intellect...
Especially when you can get the last edition or a used copy for 10-40% of the price of a new textbook. I spend less on textbooks than people who buy only electronic copies.
Great Intellect...
Uhm, methinks you're talking out your ass, and it shows.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
You're so entrenched in the Apple camp you can't even perceive reality objectively.
Motorola Xoom? This is what Slashdot would look like:
Disclaimer: 3 out of 4 of my previous phones ran Android. So far I'm happy with it. On my phone that is.
It's a shiny gadget*, of course they'll say yes. The fact that 20% said "no" really means that more like 90% would have said no if they were paying for it themselves (and of the 10% who say "yes", 90% of them will be getting a big allowance from rich parents).
{*} Too shiny in fact. Is it really just me who can't see anything but reflected lights on iPod screens?
No sig today...
If you think the people who criticize apple are using Windows CE, Palm or Symbian devices then you're not paying attention. At all.
Yep. Wouldn't it be a good idea to be able to copy/paste bits of text from your book to your computer?
No sig today...
"Too shiny in fact. Is it really just me who can't see anything but reflected lights on iPod screens?"
It seems like only yesterday people were complaining about the "low contrast matte" screens that Macs used to sport. For some people it does not matter what Apple does, they will always have an emotional reaction against it.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Especially if it provided the necessary citations in a convenient manner. I was just looking at Barnes & Noble's etextbook software. Seems to do quite a bit. I'm not likely to consider it as my netbook is somewhat anemic and I doubt the prices are reasonable, but it's far more reasonable to buy a $500 laptop than a similarly priced iPad. You just get so much more, and you end up with a device that you can actually write papers on. $500 for a laptop these days gets you quite a bit.
It's a shiny gadget*, of course they'll say yes. The fact that 20% said "no" really means that more like 90% would have said no if they were paying for it themselves (and of the 10% who say "yes", 90% of them will be getting a big allowance from rich parents).
I think it depends upon how much of the difference would be made up by the cost of textbooks. Most textbooks are somewhat cheaper in electronic form. Over the course of four years, I bet at least half of the cost could be made up.
Moreover, I think your estimates are a bit low. Given the number of macs I see on campus every day, there are plenty of people with money to burn.
There's also convenience--which wouldn't be realized by most of the students if the program were voluntary, but which will likely benefit the majority of students. Heck, making the program mandatory means that other massive things can be done--completely eliminating paper books (eventually) which has benefits beyond the school.
{*} Too shiny in fact. Is it really just me who can't see anything but reflected lights on iPod screens?
I have an iPad, and I couldn't agree more. I bought a matte screen protector--not to protect the screen, but to cut the glare.
We've got a similar problem here in Seattle. The school system is broken, but rather than look to fix the parts that are broken, the board and superintendent will almost certainly choose to go to the other extreme. If we were doing a lot of integrative fuzzy stuff, soon we'll be doing rote memorization, and back and forth. This sounds a bit like that, trying to use technology to fill a whole which might better be filled spending the same amount of money on tutors or resources to help the students learn the materials. Curriculum development and training for staff also might not be a bad idea.
I don't know how much the iPads would cost, but you can get a lot out of well chosen training programs for staff.
"but not substantially lighter than a laptop."
Perhaps you have a different definition of "substantially" than I do. The iPad2 will weigh in at 1.3 pounds. That seems quite a bit lighter than most laptops.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
textbook form factors, are actually not so differently priced (Kindle DX ~$300, iPad WiFi ~$500) when you consider the differences in capabilities.
And are you seriously suggesting that the /. crowd of today would behave any differently if the story were about Kindle purchases for students?
I would be just as critical of the Slashdot response to Kindle, which—if you go back and look—has been very similar to the Slashdot response to iPad, despite both devices' obvious utility and popularity. In fact, the Slashdot crowd takes popularity amongst actual users to be a bad thing, taking the role of the Basil Fawlties of IT: "The world of technology would be perfect if it wasn't for all of these damned users!"
Disclaimer: I own both devices. But I also have plastic disk file full of about 130 Slackware Linux floppies and a set of SunOS media on DC600 tapes. That gives me a little bit of cred. Yes, the much (not all) of the Slashdot crowd has taken on ludditic and technoemo characteristics in recent years. And the story quality has gone down as well. The general public is now more geeky and technological than the Slashdot crowd.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I'd rather waste my tax money in public education (even if you might consider some of the spending irrelevant, which should be debated) than use it to fatten military contractor's wallets.
Not trying to create a false dichotomy, my point is that complaining about taxpayers money going towards education as a bad thing might just be one of the most reckless attitudes I can imagine for a society as a whole.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
shrill, but it's not like I just got here. And despite the decline in quality, I've continued to try to like Slashdot.
But now this dynamic has emerged by which the editors post a slanted Apple story and the crowd responds by rabidly tearing Apple and Apple products to bits... once again... often in factually incorrect ways.
It all reeks of the propaganda and mob response, turned toward profit. Apple-bait from eds, Apple-decry en masse from posters and mods. Two stories later, Apple-bait from eds, immediate Apple-decry en masse from posters and mods. And of course the content of their discourse is (ironically) the sheeple-ness of Apple users.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
What on earth are you talking about?
Notwithstanding the fact that every iOS device ever sold ships with the YouTube app, and has from day one, the YouTube ~site~ itself has allowed you to view stuff using HTML5 rather than Flash for quite a while now, which works just fine on standard iOS browsers.
Yes there are plenty of Flash-based sites out there that you CAN'T use with an Apple product, and yes that sucks. But you picked a terrible example to make your point, considering YouTube is one of the few sites that DOES actually work perfectly. :)
When I was in Uni (not too long ago) I was swept up by the promise posted on many a form (Linux ones mostly) that in the not-too-distant-future, we'd be living in a technological paradise where open source, open platforms reigned supreme, where proprietary standards and closed systems were the minority. This was going to occur because people wanted and were eventually going to DEMAND openness in their technology, and hence anyone who didn't capitulate would find themselves without market share.
Goddamnit. We're going backwards. Either that or we were all damn naive then. But I was in Uni I suppose, and didn't understand exactly how the human mind works.
As an aside - iPads really are quite nice, and I can definitely see the benefit in a well designed tablet. I just wish someone made a well designed Linux-based tablet at a reasonable price which could kick Apple's arse for a change. The Xoom's cost and current limitation to the US means it's not.
You seem to think (unlike nearly everyone else) that the primary competitor to iOS isn't Android on touchscreen but Windows on Wacom. I presume the primary competitor to Android, therefore, is OSX-on-iMac?
Meanwhile, your link points to a device with a 5 hour battery life. Enough said.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Whatever was the point in making 30 children/young adults/adults write down what someone else had written for an hour per class?
Surely with internal networks, Applications, podcasts, classes can move past "right, write down all this to kill time"? I hated it when I was in high school, who wants to write for 30 minutes+ straight?
Why not allow students to copy/save/download/whatever resources to their tablet computers (iPad first of course, but with provisions for any standard format to work), and then spend class time on working WITH the information they have, rather than gathering it? More "tests", "quizes" etc, you know, seeing if the stuff has stuck in their minds?
About bloody time. A local school (located "in the ghetto" too!) was giving all students iPads, and JUST before iPad 2 came out too! Too funny! If I were the principal I'd be in tears, thats a hundred grand, made obsolete in a matter of days!
For people of all ages, its hard to beat learning on an iPad. Yes, its most noticeable with younger children, who can fall in love with touching their fingers to a screen that reacts, and engages their mind. But its "cool" for teenagers, and very capable.
EVERYONE is going to have a computer, going to have a tablet. Why not embrace that? If the schools cannot afford to give them, or students to own them, sure, why not still allow paper? Lets not fight progress.
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Why would people complain about a matte, sunlight readable screen?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I love the idea of ebooks for university. I think it is an idea who's time has not only come but we are now late on. Have a device (my suggestion would be something more like a Kindle) that automatically can get all the books, all the course notes, etc. Does mean you can't take notes on them, but then nobody is stopping you from using a normal pen and paper, or for that matter smart pens can be used to tie the notes to context, like what page you are on.
Regardless if done right it would be much easier for students, and cheaper too. While the device would have an upfront cost, the reduced costs in printing and distributing books and notes would make up for it easily.
However the problem is that you have to take on the textbook publishing industry first. Right now, you can't get most, if any, textbooks on a digital reader. That means you aren't in fact saving money or hassle. Students will still have to carry physical books around for most things.
So if universities want to do this step one is to fix textbook publishing. No I'm not saying it'll be simple, but that is where you gotta start. No point in handing out expensive hardware until the content is there for it.
This is just a stunt.
I guarantee this whole thing was spearheaded by an Apple fanboy, or more than one of them. Stuff like this, particularly when it involves a company like Apple that is expensive, happens because of fanboys. A person in the position to make the decision in the university likes the shiny technology and buys in to the hype, and thus pushes it, regardless of actual utility. Since they don't have actual reasons for it, marketing terms are used. It is a case of "I think these are cool and so we should use them even though there's no good reason."
University is a long time ago for me, but I learned by writing my notes, rewriting them, condensing them, further condensing them, until eventually I got down to 3-4 sheets of paper for a semester's worth of info. It was the very act of thinking about the notes and rewriting them that taught me the material.
I've no doubt my grades would have suffered if I had been able to get copies of the lecture notes at the push of a button.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
did you even TRY to get the textbooks on TPB?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
And what do you think happens when people save money (they don't put it under their mattresses)? It goes in the bank. The bank can make more loans, a huge problem ATM. And investment? Oh noes, more investment in stocks and bonds, which turn into R&D and expansion and jobs.
I guess it's much better when the government "stimulates" (more like sedates) the economy by stealing from the private sector and sending out one-time checks. It's like giving yourself a transfusion from your right arm to your left arm, and spilling half the blood on the floor.
And BTW, Reagan and Clinton cut cap gains, and the economy flourished each time. How anyone can look at the Reagan era and say "trickle down" didn't work is laughable. 19 straight years of Dow growth (1981-1999), after 20 flat years.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
apple also knows how to push updates that disable features like aspect locking on the ipad and promote the same function as "new" on the ipad 2.
if i had been one of the suckers to buy an iPad i would be at the nearest apple store raising hell until they gave me either a full refund on the ipad which was sabotaged by apple in violation of the law, or a free upgrade to an iPad 2 to replace the features that were removed without my consent.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Now farm subsidies are a Republican fetish? Since when? It's both sides of the aisle pandering to the Iowa caucuses that keep farm subsidies alive.
As for DoD, well that's what the Constitution actually says Congress is supposed to spend money on. I'd prefer not to imagine the world without 11 Nimitz-class carriers floating about.
And tax breaks for the rich? They pay all the taxes (the top-5% pays almost 68% of the taxes!), so they are likely candidates for tax breaks.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Sounds very antiquated, I'd imagine for *most* students, a sort of "learning by rote", never to be revisited.
Whats the point in just taking up the required time, when students could be *learning* in class? Hence more tests etc, applications could easily handle this, and for all age groups on the same hardware. Multiple choice, answers to be typed in and marked by teachers. Imagine how fast teachers could grade each individual answer if all they needed to do was say "turn in your papers", if necessary the Teachers app could actually see what any student had on their version of the App, and they could either "tick or cross" (if you wanted to be "cute"), or choose boxes, was that sentence right, or was it wrong? None of this "turning in your papers, I'll stay up until midnight marking" malarky!
If you havnt seen the iPad 2 event video, I highly enjoyed it. The sections about doctors and teachers using iPads was very emotional. Its probably easiest to download the video as a podcast, I dragged it out of iTunes, renamed "m4v" to "mp4", and watched it in Quicktime.
http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1103pijanbdvaaj/event/index.html
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I wonder how much of Apple's gloated iPad sales are from situations like this? Aka, companies, schools, and other institutions buying them in bulk and handing them out instead of individuals choosing to purchase them. By the way, I like that they ignore the fact that "the best" doesn't necessarily mean "worth while". Just because it is the best option among that group doesn't mean the entire endeavor is justified. How about cut tuition and let students decide if they want to purchase one? Maybe even hire more teachers instead?
> It seems like only yesterday people were complaining about the
> "low contrast matte" screens that Macs used to sport.
Matte screens were not specific to Apple. They were common on all LCDs until around three years ago.
They can still be specified from some vendors such as Dell and HP for "business" laptops. You know, vendors which still offer choice to their customers.
I just can't imagine typing up a ten page report on an iPad.
Not even if you got a keyboard for it?
And how does having an iPad prevent you from writing your notes?
I've known lots of students who after a semester had not a single handwritten note in their textbook, but still had tons of notes for the books.
I've known lots of students who used their laptops for most note taking and using handwritten pages for stuff they couldn't write in text.
Being given an electric screwdriver does not immediately turn every single problem you face into a screw. It just makes it easier to screw stuff in place, and I think most competent people know that at times they'll need pliers, saws, hammers and lots of other tools.
What is it with you clowns? The money comes directly out of the pockets of the students or their families and for that they get a place to live while studying and now also an iPad. From misunderstanding that very badly you get a launching pad for a political rant?
I suppose it doesn't help that "University" is too long a word so you can't tell the difference between that and the College where the students are staying. As you gangsters in suits keep saying but never listen to - It's ENGLISH - learn to speak it!
Overseas students are a major export industry. They're not mining or farming, but they're still significant. These institutions have to do something to keep them coming back. Maybe the feds will pay attention to the sector again.
They're probably using Apple.
Don't delude yourself, the drop has nothing to do with the quality or the price of education. Would they want the education industry booming, the feds should address the immigration policies, this was what made Australian colleges and TAFEs attractive for foreign students during Howard's govt.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
At my university some of the students would buy a book, break the bindings and feed it through an automatic document scanner. Between the group of them it ended up costing them ~$10 each for the textbook and they had an OCR'ed digital copy of the book they could lug around on their laptops. Much more convenient for note taking than lugging around paper books.
I have a keyboard/dock for my windows 7 tablet and while it takes some adjusting for me, as my keyboard/dock is not full sized, it generally fine. Took a bit of getting used too, but now I don't notice any difference between using it and my PC.
that's all
Experiments and other stuff
Those Australians really seem to have a superb understanding of computing technology... Not only is it the most expensive, it's most likely the least functional... I'm betting with in 1 year digital textbook downloads will be over $100 per ebook, since students will only be able to get them through the publisher at the app store.
But do they get to run whatever software they want/need or do they have to count on there 'being an app for that'?
I guess for the most part students used it as mobile internet and to kill time between lessons, that's probably what I'd do anyway.
They say themselves there's no easy quick way to transfer information between apps and unless there's a properly good word processing app with all the bells and whistles then who's even going to do work on it? Netbooks FTW! Just as mobile as an iPad and pretty much the same functionality as a notebook/PC.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
The main problem with the iPad educationally is the fact that the content is not there.
The iPad is too new for all the content to be there. Of course, once more colleges start to use them, the content will follow.
I study at Adelaide University, and have seen what these introduced species do in the wild. Guess what the number one use for iPads in lectures is? Facebook. The wireless that used to be rather fast is now rather slow, due to the large influx of these new devices. This may just be the university not giving the network department more money for infrastructure updates though (they run quite a decent system, so you can't blame them).
Expensive residential on-campus dorms exist at many Australian unis to cater for (a) internationals (b) interstaters (c) country kids (d) rich city kids whose parents want them out of home (e) not so rich city kids whose parents want them to fully experience campus life.
Trinity is merely offering a carrot for students - the cost of lodging would dwarf the price of an iPad. With free wifi, it makes sense to subsidise everyone with a free iPad. To en masse 'think different' here means looking down on your "povo" living-at-home classmates who are stuck with a used 3yo toshiba satellite, if they carry a laptop at all.
Any bet half these pads get stolen, broken or mislaid by the end of first semester?
For people of all ages, its hard to beat learning on an iPad. Yes, its most noticeable with younger children, who can fall in love with touching their fingers to a screen that reacts, and engages their mind. But its "cool" for teenagers, and very capable.
I completely disagree. It's easy to wast a bunch of time scrolling around on an iPad, but learning? Sure, it's probably OK for reading and
I teach engineering. The only real way to learn is by doing. That means doing hard problems on paper. It means doing tricky things in labs and having to figure them out. Perhaps the iPad could take place of some labs with simulations. Perhaps. Ironically, it could never take place of the computer based labs, since it's far less suitable (no screen, keyboard, compiler, JTAG interface) than an actual real computer.
Additionally, you've just increased the workload of the teaching staff enormously. It is actually very hard and very time consuming to design new courses and update existing ones. It takes a lot of planning, testing, resource management, more testing and so on before you can feel comfortable deploying it to 40 to 400 students. But with the iPad, assuming it's more than just a textbook reader, you have to design ,implement and debug a whole bunch of programs to suppsot the course as well, which is expensive and difficult.
But seriosuly, I'm having a hard job imagining where one would use an iPad (or any tablet) for learning on a university engineering course. Perhaps I'm lacking imagination, but I can't see the use.
And, in case you're interested, I don't expect students to write down a whole bunch of stuff in lectures. As is common in my university, I hand out reasonably extensive lecture notes. The notes have gaps in to be filled in by the students, where I feel the need to emphasize that they should record a bit of what I'm saying, or where ordering matters, for instance building up a diagram in stages. Oh, and apparently noone wants to use a laptop in my lectures. But then, the lectures (but not the classes or final exam) are strictly optional.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Slashdotters don't care whether something works, as long as it appears as unrefined and kludgy enough to emphasize their "geek" credentials as they stand next to it.
Er, you know you're a slashdotter right, so that applies equally to you? And you know that the entirety of slashdot is not a hive mind who all behave exactly as you do, right?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
That is one stupid fucking rejoinder. Of *course* a larger proportion of taxed income comes from the rich than the poor. That's because 1% of $1m is more than 1% of $10k.
But it's always better from a point-of-view of material comfort -- *always* -- to be earning, eg, $250k than $25k. At $250k, your take-home income at the end of each month is vastly in excess of what it would be at $25k. A 1% rise in marginal tax rate for someone earning $250k might piss them off, but it won't make a substantive difference to how they live their lives. For someone earning $25k, it will do just that, because, doh, their unavoidable costs will be a larger proportion of income.
I wouldnt dream of telling you how to run your engineering classes.
You mention the only way to learn engineering is "by doing". Your next sentence mentions "doing hard problems on paper". Surely there was a time when the John C Dvorak's of the world would have scoffed at THAT technical aid, "bah, you have to cut down all the trees, and loggers die all the time felling them, not to mention processing the pulp into flat sheets, oh, and I spose you'll want them bleached the same exact shade of white, sold in packs of 500 at a time..."
I'll repeat this part of my second comment:
If you havnt seen the iPad 2 event video, I highly enjoyed it. The sections about doctors and teachers using iPads was very emotional. Its probably easiest to download the video as a podcast, I dragged it out of iTunes, renamed "m4v" to "mp4", and watched it in Quicktime. http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1103pijanbdvaaj/event/index.html [iPad 2 event]
One video shown at the presentation has teachers giving out iPads to young children, they are having a great time learning basic skills. It also shows autistic children learning, and one mothers story about how her son really engages with the iPad, that hes learnt to be more self sufficient through working on it. Its very heart warming, and it shows how tablets really are the present and future of accessible computing.
Of course the video also shows older children, and students at work too. I liked the medical sections, with doctors conversing with patients, it would be great for bed side manner, as they show scans, results, explain procedures through apps.... The list is endless, anything that could be done through that beloved paper, all fifty bits of it to shuffle through, and more.
I live in Invercargill, New Zealand, near the very bottom of the world. A recent edition of a local newspaper mentioned one school "not able to afford a laptop per student". It also had mention of another school where EVERY child received an iPad (first gen, days before the iPad 2 announcement!), about how trial programs at this school in a rough area were so encouraging that they went ahead with a full rollout of the tablets. Its working in Apple PR videos, its working here, at the other side of the world in my rural city of 50,000.
We'll see in time how things go for all students. I'm optimistic.
---
A local school (located "in the ghetto" too!) was giving all students iPads, and JUST before iPad 2 came out too! Too funny! If I were the principal I'd be in tears, thats a hundred grand, made obsolete in a matter of days!
Well obsolete seems to be the wrong word. There is nothing the thing can do which is now suddenly stopping to work, is there? The enhancements for iPad 2 strike me as unimpressive anyway. (Nothing wrong with that, it makes sense to simply upgrade, sometimes.) The new features should not matter much for a school. It might even make sense to supply them with older devices now - they should be cheaper to get. Also, didn't Apple offer a rebate for recent purchasers of the iPad?
I would have figured Swinburne (the tech oriented uni in Hawthorne, at least when I was attending in the late 90s) would have picked up on this....but Melbourne University did have a baseball team (rather important for a Yank who needed something familar to do...)
Oh wait, we're talking about Apple products ... never mind...
That's more to the point than most of the criticisms I've read.
Fortunately, Android tablets are starting to come out, and Canonical clearly has mobile computing very much in mind in development for Ubuntu. Hopefully, FLOSS approaches to tablet computing will overtake Apple, and with it will come renewed interest in the various free textbook initiatives.
Given the strange way you capitalised dodo one has to wonder how much you actually learnt at school.
If it was really about textbooks why wouldn't they use a nook or a kindle for half the cost? Assuming the university gets government funding, somebody should look into what can be cut, since they obviously have more money than they know what to do with.
Much cheaper - at scale I daresay you could get it below 100 USD given that it's price is already heading down. For reading purposes, the epaper display is simply unbeatable. On the other hand if you wanted to use it for various other (note taking, spreadsheets,etc.) purposes, then why not an Android tablet ? Australia has the Millenius Android tablet for about 200 USD. The specific advantage of this approach is that, if the school wants to develop custom apps (which in high likelihood it will), it is much cheaper and less cumbersome (app store policies) than the Apple SDK.
Are you kidding? I would have said yes even if I had to pay a subsidised cost for it, assuming textbooks are available on it - which I have to assume is the primary reason they are giving them to science students.
My copy of Warren is well over a thousand pages and is a pain in the arse to carry around with me, and the index is pretty poor for a texbook (1%, and poorly written) - having an electronic version of it, along with electronic versions of Atkins, and a couple of other inorganic texts I use all the time would be totally worth it for me for the size and weight issues as well as being able to quickly search through it.
This would be a totally different story if this was about giving out free Xooms or Nooks running Android, and you know it. But because it;s Apple, suddenly it's a bad thing. Consider for one second that *just maybe* there are benefits for university students in having a bunch of textbooks with negligable mass that are easier to search through than their paper equivalents.
Perhaps for balance they should offer Xooms alongside iPads, and just have the students pay the increased cost, just so this sits better with slashdot.
Would be a better headline. Not just the $500 or wahtever these things cost, but also the overhead to support them, the overhead to pay a hefty bonus to whoever thought this was a good idea (regardless of it it works well or not), etc.
If Melbourne College were giving the Motorola Xoom instead of an Apple product, would there be as many butthurt comments here?
Probably yes because many of the same issues apply. The Xoom is as expensive as an iPad and suffers from a capacitive screen. Neither is suitable for an environment where students are likely to be taking notes on their tablets (which are precariously perched on narrow lecture desks) and in many cases simply don't have the money to buy a tablet in addition to a notebook computer.
No uni in their right minds should be locking themselves into a solution like this. There is nothing wrong with anticipating tablets, but mandating a specific tablet is nuts. At the very least content should be web based so it is device agnostic and doesn't need to be refactored when the next fad du jour turns up and any course material which is sold online should do so from a service which is not tied to one device either.
There is a long history of these "school decides to standardize all pupils on $TECH_TOY because it is The Future of Education(tm)" stories. They generally starkly underperform expectations.
I have to wonder why ANY school would insist kids carry fragile, highly stealable and expensive e-toys. Kids by definition will break them, lose them, get beaten up for them, or simply mess around with them when they should be listening in class.
There are far more suitable tools for class, starting with a simple notebook & pen, but also cheaper netbooks including the OLPC. If tablets are the future, they'd have to be ruggedized, allow notetaking and a damned sight cheaper than the likes of the iPad to be viable.
I don't know if a touch screen should be matte ever.
I like that I can wipe the finger grease off my android without any liquids. Can you imagine the nasty black buildup a matte touch screen would gather?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Your argument would make more sense if taxes were flat. In the US, someone who makes 250k is going to pay more like 50% taxes, someone who makes $25k is going to pay -10% or so (yes negative).
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
> As another student who was given one to trial...
Sadly it didn't seem to help your education. You were actually given one to try on trial.
Trial is a noun. You can't "do" a noun.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trial#Verb
It makes an extremely convenient threat to keep the tech department in line...
"Hey you, yeah, you with the blackberry and the bad attitude: I want enterprise-level uptime for public-sector prices or I'm going to roll out a one-laptop-per-pupil program whose success depends on 100% uptime. Oh, and because they are shiny and I hate you, we are going with the unibody macbooks whose keyboards are secured by 56 tiny little screws. You know how much kids like tearing keys off school keyboards, don't you?"
Moreover, I think your estimates are a bit low. Given the number of macs I see on campus every day, there are plenty of people with money to burn.
Moreover, I think your estimates are a bit low. Given the number of macs I see on campus every day, there are plenty of students who have parents with money to burn.
FTFY
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
"Money from the government is free! Yay!"
It is if you get out more than you paid in.
This can't hold in general; if someone is getting more than what they paid in, someone wlse is getting less. There might be an argument for allowing this in the case of healthcare and the like, but I think you start to stretch your moral currency thin if you try to argue the same for free iPads...
You forgot about deficit spending. Governments in many countries spend more than they take in, selling the debt to overseas suckers with more money than sense.
That means that in any particular country, it is possible for all taxpayers to receive government benefits in excess of their tax.
Putting moderation advice in your
Lately it seems like we have people in business and education who want to use the latest and greatest technology and they'll typically find a way to justify it. Notice that I said want, not need.
I've seen too many organizations purchase these tablet devices (regardless of brand), send the boxes to I.T. and say "find a way to make these work". Then when I.T. says "Ok, what do you want to use it for?" we'll get an answer like "everything" or "I don't know, we just bought them because it's the latest shinny thing". Sure, tablets are convenient for a handful of activities like viewing documents, checking messages, viewing some websites, but that's about it right now. Creating content on these things is very cumbersome compared to a device with a real hardware keyboard. Data entry and composition are difficult, plus there are many applications on the desktop/notebook that just aren't available on tablets yet.
It seems to me that organizations should have a need for the devices before they purchase them. Tablets have great potential, but to require them for education or expect it to be a useful business tool and replace existing technology that does work seems to be shortsighted.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
"Too shiny in fact. Is it really just me who can't see anything but reflected lights on iPod screens?"
It seems like only yesterday people were complaining about the "low contrast matte" screens that Macs used to sport. For some people it does not matter what Apple does, they will always have an emotional reaction against it.
How is not being able to see the fucking screen properly an "emotional reaction"?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
It's been a good 10 years, but I don't remember having to lug around text books in college. I'm pretty sure we took notes in class and kept the books at home.
Also, I own (and love) my iPad, but it's hard to pay attention to ANYTHING when you have one because right in your hands you have the internet and 1,000s of apps at your disposal. I can't read something for 5 minutes before switching to something else. I can't imagine how little I'd get done if I had one of these in class.
Download free e-books, lectures, and tutorials at bookgoldmine.com
Exactly, until they start introducing taxes of greater than one hundred per cent above a certain level, the more you earn, the better off you are, even when you have got past the stage of being able to do anything with that extra money.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Your argument would make more sense if taxes were flat. In the US, someone who makes 250k is going to pay more like 50% taxes, someone who makes $25k is going to pay -10% or so (yes negative).
So what, the person on 250K is still taking home 125K as against 27.5K (assuming you do actually have negative taxes in the US).
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
...they have universities in Australia.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Is anti-apple zealotry to the point of outright refuting facts and supplanting them with fantasy?
Isn't it the case that the iPad YouTube app gives access to only a subset of YouTube? It seems to be the subset of videos that are most popular, true, but it seems to me that there are times I can find an unpopular video on YouTube that I can't find on my iPad. Checking online, though, it appears I should just be going to m.youtube.com on my iPad anyway instead of using the app -- good to know.
More like credit to burn, and that's no reason to assume a forced purchase/course fee is acceptable or appropriate. Also, GP's earlier point that people already pay for many things they don't want doesn't make clear why people should be forced to pay for yet another thing they don't necessarily want. A lot of people still prefer the good old fashioned tactile book. Why isn't an optional program appropriate?
So what? So it's OK to steal $125,000 as long as they have more?
It's some weird logic that makes it OK to take from someone because they own a lot.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
assuming textbooks are available on it
Why would you assume that? And even were it the case, why an ipad? it's far from the most convenient ebook reader, and a terrible note-taker, so a laptop would still be superior.
This is marketing, trying to get interest in the school generated. It's been done many times before, "giving away" macbooks, ipods, etc to new students. Apple heavily subsidizes educational purchases, so it's just usually apple products.
I'd assume that because I have seen it used as an ebook reader for lovely colour content like textbooks and it works very well.
Like it said, my copy of Warren (the big, standard organic chem text) is gigantic, but excellent, and yet is crippled by a poor index and large mass (it's 1500 pages). An electronic version on tablet (it need not necessarily be an iPad, but it does need to be a better screen than a Kindle) just reprinted as it is would be wonderful. It would be even better if it could take advantage of the other features of the medium (animations) and the ability to annotate the pages as you wanted, and things like in-page calculations or varying of reaction conditions/other calculations, and that's just one of my textbooks that I use almost daily, but only at my desk because it weighs several pounds. Add the other three or so books I use on a regular basis and it's starting to look like an awesome little powerhouse to carry around with me for reference wherever I fancy sitting down to do some work. A laptop would be terrible replacement for a textbook (also, do you not think that it would have already taken off with abandon in the previous decade of laptops if they made excellent textbook replacements?) This is a trial designed to see if the iPad (or other tablet) works in this context. It might be next to hopeless, or it might be useful but not worth the cost (but hey, at least they didn;t have to fork out for Xooms), or it might work really well. That's the point. To dismiss it as a gimmick is very shortsighted. Apple's discount for education purchases is between 8 and 15% depending on the product you buy.
No one on slashdot would be complaining if this was announced with free Xooms - it would be lauded as forward thinking and the benefits an interactive medium could bring to a normally static medium as technology improves. But no, because the iPad is mentioned, it must somehow be twisted into something "evil" or "gimmicky". Just leaf back through any "$some-organisation uses $some-technology to do $something" stories. Where it's Linux, or open source it's "a good idea" - where it's Apple, or Microsoft or anyone else it's "a gimmick and clearly some evil scheme to force people to buy iPods/Office/iPads".
Can you really not see the benefit of an electronic version of a textbook on a tablet with an excellent screen and the ability to display video, animations and do maths? Just for a second put down the Apple hate, or assume other tablets might be used (the iPad is the cheapest and most well supported option at the moment) and consider that there just might be a reason why this scheme is being piloted.
That is a different story about a completely different thing.
Why don't you stupid fuckers just read the article and the comments by people associated with the project?
it's the best manifestation of Linux that's ever likely to exist, and a viable alternative to iOS—no small feat—though I'm not sure it measures up yet socially (apps count, user interface polish, and so on).
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
"How is not being able to see the fucking screen properly an "emotional reaction"?"
I rest my case.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Negative taxes is a load of twunt anyway, based on the idea that if you're poor enough, you don't pay income tax and you get benefits. Income tax is typically the only tax that scales with income, hence the name. Lots of other taxes are unavoidable for people on low incomes, eg sales tax on non-discretionary items.
Ohhh, taxes is stealing. All taxes is stealing. Of course. There there. Best fuck off to Somalia or some other country where you can enjoy a life without the burden of taxation.