Is a Super-Sized iPad the Future of Education? 234
theodp writes "Perhaps people are reading too much into Apple CEO Tim Cook's 'Big Plans' for 2014, but hopes are high that the New Year will bring a biggie-sized iPad. Over at Forbes, Anthony Wing Kosner asks, Will The Large Screen iPad Pro Be Apple's First In A Line Of Desktop Touch Devices?. 'Rumors of a large [12.9"] iPad are many and constant,' notes ComputerWorld's Mike Elgan, 'but they make sense only if the tablet is a desktop for schools.' Elgan adds, 'Lots of schools are buying iPads for kids to use. But iPads don't make a lot of sense for education. For starters, their screens are too small for the kinds of interactive textbooks and apps that Apple wants the education market to create. They're also too small for collaborative work. iPads run mobile browsers, rather than full browsers, so kids can't use the full range of HTML5 sites.' Saying that 'Microsoft has fumbled the [post-PC] transition badly,' Elgan argues that 'the battle for the future of education is likely to be between whatever Google turns the Chromebook into against whatever Apple turns the iPad into.'"
Need a stylus for math class (Score:5, Insightful)
Tablets for school make a lot less sense if you cannot write equations or draw detailed diagrams with them. A fingertip is simply too blunt an instrument to be used for writing equations or drawing - for that you need a stylus. I would dearly have loved to have a tablet for note taking when I was in school but not if I had to do it with my fingers. A keyboard is fine for taking notes if you are in something like an english class and a finger based touch interface is fine for navigation and reading. But to take notes in math class (or any class that uses equations or drawings) you absolutely have to have a stylus. I'm not sure how they are going to reconcile this problem in the current generation of tablets. They simply were not designed with a stylus in mind.
Note that not having a stylus isn't entirely a bad thing. Software developers have a terrible habit of mistaking a stylus for a mouse. A stylus should not be used for navigation. The sole purpose of stylus should be for drawing (diagrams, equations etc) which requires detail greater than can easily be achieved with a mouse or fingertip. While a stylus can be used for navigation, it does a pretty poor job of it.
The future of education (Score:5, Insightful)
The future of education is human teachers teaching human kids.
Please stop using prospective educational uses to justify technolust. There’s no harm in wanting better gadgets, but there is harm in fixing things that aren’t broken.
The best thinkers in history were educated by people. I see absolutely no reason to replace competent, compassionate humans with impersonal and inflexible machines.
I fear a monoculture (Score:5, Insightful)
whatever that monoculture is based on, especially in education. Pupils will just end up learning how to drive one device, become familiar with its applications (and implicitly whatever file formats and wire protocols underpin it) and conclude that everthing else is broken. They will then demand/expect future employers to use the same kit. We don't want the next 25 years to be dominated by Apple in the way that the last 25 years were dominated by Microsoft.
I even would not want a school system that had a monoculture based on some Linux distro, it is good for kids to have to understand what they are doing rather than just knowing which buttons to press - blindly. OK: Linux is not as bad since file formats & protocols are open and thus different products can compete.
Title is moronic. (Score:5, Insightful)
-20 , Title is moronic.
Why should any product (commercial or otherwise) be the future of education ?
The future of education isn't on buzzwords/marketing items/products with a limited shelf life.
It's on philosophies, methods and concepts.
We already have a standard math notation (Score:4, Insightful)
I find text-only entry to be very comfortable.
That makes you very unusual. While I applaud your flexibility on the matter, it is not nearly so easy a matter to get the entire global population on a new mathematical notation. Frankly I have zero interest in using a different notation when doing so provides me no additional value. Putting a stylus on to a tablet is a MUCH easier solution for note taking than trying to retrain everyone on some new notation. Those who have a specialized need for different notation (such as yourself) are not hindered in any way by providing technology to utilize the standard notation.
Mathematica even has photoshop-style palettes if you wish to choose familiar notations.
VERY awkward for note taking which needs to happen quickly. You need a notation that can be done with a pencil and paper and which does not change.
Don’t confuse mathematics with mathematics notation. The latter is totally arbitrary and can easily be replaced
I'm not confusing them a bit. We have a standard mathematical notation already which works just fine. Yes it is arbitrary and no it cannot be "easily" replaced. You are seriously proposing that we suddenly have everyone throw out the math notation we have been using for centuries just because it doesn't easily work on a keyboard? The economic cost alone makes this a prohibitively bad idea. Do you have any concept of the amount of retraining that would be required? Providing a stylus and some decent note taking software is a MUCH cheaper and simpler and better solution than trying to retrain everyone to some new keyboard friendly notation. Look up what Richard Feynman had to say about changing notations when he tried to invent one.
Re:iDesk (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:iDesk (Score:4, Insightful)
Expensive tech aside, this is an example of monopoly even worse than MSFT's. Schools should have a say only over the course content, and that can be in form of a generic app designed to run on any device, even on a $25 Android tablet.
That would really be doable, particularly if the course content is all in HTML5. Then any device with an HTML5 capable browser could access the content. If the content doesn't need to be interactive then straight HTML or PDF would suffice.
Of course, with such an open approach, it is hard for any one company to monopolize the system, which is probably why it won't be done.
tablets suck for education (Score:4, Insightful)
Part of educating is creating, messing up, creating some more. Tinkering. Ipads(and all tablets really) SUCK at creation. They are content consumption devices. They are nothing more than smart TVs in your hand. Stop giving them to kids!
Can I code on a tablet? No thank you. Can I pick one up in shop class and do the math to figure out the angle of a roof beam? No thank you. Can I sketch out a new idea? Maaaaaybe? Can I easily take notes on it? No thank you. Can I use it to take pictures of all the steps in a chemistry or physics experiment? Yes! Can I use it to record all the temperatures from said experiment? No thank you. Ok, yes, I can do all those things, but it takes FOREVER on a tablet.
Sad fact, to do meaningful work, tablets need KEYBOARDS!!!! To consume media, all I have to do is point and click. To CREATE(at any sane speed), a keyboard is necessary.
Get off my lawn!
No, tech alone will not save education (Score:5, Insightful)
I am always amazed how everyone seem to think that throwing money at the educational issues will somehow solve them. The biggest problem is not with the lack of funding in general especially in western countries (although there are exceptions).
The biggest problem lies much deeper than that in the fabric of society itself. Parents just want the state to take the problem of properly raising their children away from them. They send their children to public schools and expect that the children will be educated so they don't have to do it themselves.
Look at the standardized testing system. It is utter BS. The notion that all children across a country or even across borders have to be tested against (more or less) the same set of standards is just nonsense. It's a tool of the establishment to dumb them down and make everyone conforming and easier to control.
Add to this this kind of corporate agenda pushing like give children iPads. Sure Apple gets to make a good money on it and expand their market share and vendor lock-in while the taxpayers will subsidize the cost for little or no benefit for the children. Even if we agree that tablets are useful in education, why does it have to be iPads? A single brand of tablets? And arguably the priciest.
And what sorts of things can you use a tablet to enhance education? Provide cheap/free textbooks which won't wear out? Doesn't happen, because of copyright issues. You will have to sell a copy to all children. And every couple of years the textbooks get rewritten so that somebody makes more money on it. In the days when I was a kid, the school issued paperback textbooks which were re-used year after year until they were completely worn out.
You would think that with the digital textbooks all this is solved: no wear and tear, you can make many copies of it for absolutely no cost, can be upgraded whenever necessary for free. Guess what: it does not happen! Even worse, it probably costs more nowadays then back in the days. Just because of stupid copyright issues and the push for constant consumption for the benefit of a few large corporate entities.
--/rant--
Anyway, Happy New Year to all of you, fellow Slashdotters!