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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.
“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
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 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...
And what do you think happens when people save money (they don't put it under their mattresses)? It goes in the bank.
No it doesn't. Not "rich money" anyway (which is the kind that "gets saved" in this case).
Poor(er) people keep their savings in the bank. Rich "invest" in tax shelters.
And since "money has no nationality" it often goes outside the economy that you were trying to boost.
Poor money can't afford to get itself spent on real-estate projects in Dubai.
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.
Quite easily actually...
The tax cuts of 1981 and 1986 were followed by significant, though not huge, upswings in the economy.
However, as William Gale of the Brookings Institution has pointed out, "The simple fact is that business and household saving did not rise in the 1980s...." There was increased investment due to "an inflow of foreign capital. But by the mid- 1980s, net investment had receded to its earlier levels."
Economic growth in the 1980s was real, but it came from the normal upswing of the business cycle, made more forceful by huge deficits that bolstered economy-wide purchasing power (or "aggregate demand"). Moreover, the growth of those years provided a lot of feed for the horses but didn't do much for the sparrows. After-tax corporate profits rose by close to 60% between 1980 and 1989, while average hourly earnings in 1989 were slightly below their 1980 level and 10% below their 1973 peak. (All this is after adjustment for inflation.)
Throughout the decade, income distribution worsened: In 1980, the top 5% of households were obtaining 3.7 times as much total income as the bottom 20%, but by 1989 this elite group was receiving five times as much as that (much larger) bottom group. So much for any "trickle down" from the tax changes of the 1980s.
Also, considering that people often conflate it with supply-side economics - it should be noted that SSE also mostly fails to fulfill its promises.
Cause, when you take this in account, and have an open mind to this, you come to this conclusion.
In 2003, the Wall Street Journal declared the debate over supply-side economics to have ended "with a whimper" after extensive modeling performed by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) failed to support the most extreme claims of supply-side policies.[2] ...
This research undermines the claim that tax cuts can completely compensate for the initial loss of revenue due to the cut, but does acknowledge that resulting growth from the tax cut does replace some of the lost revenue, and the CBO has come under fire for using low estimates.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens