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!"

Comments

"Giving"?

[msobkow]

Don't you mean "Adding to tuition costs"?

Re:"Giving"?

[Sancho]

80% attachment is extremely high for services at a college, at least where I'm from. Students here pay for a gym whether or not they use it (about 35% do), they pay for the student center (don't have numbers on this, but I'd guess that most students don't set foot in it more than once or twice a semester). They pay for organizations that they never join and sometimes never gain any benefit from whatsoever. They pay for upkeep on buildings they never enter. They pay for "free printing" that they probably never use to the fullest (and that they'd likely have gotten cheaper going to Kinko's.) They pay for phone service at outrageously marked up prices, for lab computers they never use because they all have laptops, and for parking lots when fully 25% live on campus and another 15% commute by bicycle or walking.

People pay a lot for things that they didn't want. The same can be said for taxes in any country with any social services to speak of. 80% is great, and frankly a no-brainer except that you have to wonder how many of that 80% just thought it was cool to get an iPad.

Re:"Giving"?

[bhat]

Trinity College is a private institution and receives no government funding. But in the case of the trial, the students were indeed given the iPads, but they returned them at the end of the program, and they paid nothing extra in their fees.

(I may work for Trinity College, but I don't speak for them.)

Re:"Giving"?

[bhat]

Actually, TFA badly summarises the original report, which was written for an internal audience, and therefore made assumptions about the understanding of Trinity's course structures.
The trial was for a small group of international students, the Foundation Studies "August Entry 2010" intake. Staff involved in Foundation Studies (and not staff in the rest of the College) will get iPads in 2011. And starting with the "August Entry 2011" intake, all Foundation Studies students (who are international students) will get iPads. There's no government funding involved in any of this.
There's been no discussion of the mandated use of iPads in the Residential College or Theological School, which are the other two main educational units of Trinity College.

Re:"Giving"?

[mewshi_nya]

And, frankly, trickle-down has been proven wrong over and over.

The rich, if less is taken in the form of taxes, are *not* going to use it to create jobs. They are more than likely going to put it into savings/investments, whereas taking less from a middle-class family means that a higher proportion of the money "saved" will be put back into the immediate economy.

Wow... Yet more Apple bashing.

[aussersterne]

"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.

Re:LOL, "savings and investment"

[denzacar]

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.