e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: iPad

  • Apple is Playing the Long Game with iBooks 2 and iTunesU App

    When Apple made the iBooks Author / iBooks2 / iTunesU app announcement on January 19th, there were many arguments for and against their implied educational market strategy. In the educational technology community, two of the most intense arguments why Apple’s move was faulty, or even harmful, came down to the cost and availability of iPads in education. The source of the problems was that Apple made their products wholly dependent on iPad usage.

    • The iPad costs ~$500 or more, making the cost benefits of $15 textbooks almost a moot point – with a higher cost of ownership than even traditional paper textbooks.
    • For real pedagogical benefits, all students in a course or program would need to have an iPad – since most students don’t have these tablets, the only way to solve would be one-to-one school purchases for students.

    There are other arguments to be made against Apple’s strategy, but I want to focus on these two inter-related problems.

    With the disclosure of two remarkable facts and one price break during the new iPad announcement, it is becoming apparent that Apple is playing the long game with their educational strategy, planning to address the problems of cost and availability over time rather than trying to win the argument with today’s numbers. Watch the trends, not the snapshot of today.

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  • The iPad and the iLabs

    There’s just so much to like about the LetterMPress project:

    To begin with, I found it on KickStarter, a great site for crowd funding art projects that I learned about thanks to my friends at smARThistory. (There’s still one day left to donate to their project!) There’s something very satisfying about direct micro-funding of local projects that you believe in. My wife and I have been giving micro-lending gift certificates to friends and family via Kiva for years, and we’re probably going to fund our first classroom project on Donors Choose very soon.

    Second, there’s the software. A direct manipulation interface that provides a high-fidelity simulation of the analog world is something that just sings on a touch-enabled device. Could you do something like this on a traditional computer using a mouse? Sure. But there’s something about touch, about transforming the screen into an object that you can manipulate with your own hands, that just seems new and fresh and powerful. In this case, it’s helping to keep alive an art that is in danger of being lost, and it’s doing so through a direct, physical interface with the art-making.

    But the best part is that the digital interface, including the individual type elements, will be connected to a physical letterpress facility where people can have their digital letterpress creations transformed into real, honest-to-goodness letterpress-created analog art. It’s about as close as you can come to giving everybody their own physical letterpress. The approach reminds me of MIT’s iLabs, where students can have remote access to real lab facilities that are difficult and/or expensive to reproduce every place where you might have students that want to learn using the labs. Of course, one of the shortcomings of virtual labs is that students don’t gain the hands-on skills that they need to have in order to work in a real-life lab. I wonder whether a high-fidelity simulation on a touch interface would make a difference in terms of those skill deficits. It may turn out that touch will be much more important and useful than 3D in terms of creating high-value educational simulations. This would be particularly true in cases where the touch-based simulation could actually drive physical, real-world equipment so students could see the actual reality mirroring the virtual one. One other nice wrinkle to the LetterMPress implementation of this approach is that the simulation is only loosely coupled to the physical equipment. Students can practice and experiment as much as they want with their digital tools and submit their designs for real-world processing only when they’re ready.

    So, to sum up, LetterMPress gives us the following:

    • A high-fidelity, real-feeling simulation of an environment in which learners and practitioners can play
    • The ability to run the simulation on rare and expensive physical equipment at a distance
    • Through a combination of Kick-starter and an innovative business model, a way for individuals interested in preserving the art to make an investment that matters

    Pretty cool.

    If you’re interested in participating, you can donate to the LetterMPress KickStarter project. A donation of $25 gets you a copy of the app when it’s finished and a T-shirt.

  • Why OER Advocates Should Be Happy About the iPad

    I got some comments on my Blackboard iPad post specifically regarding the push toward native—and therefore proprietary—apps and away from standards-based web apps. This concern is just one example of a constellation of complaints about how Apple is too closed. I understand those complaints and am not going to argue with them here. But whether you love Apple or hate them, whether you will buy an iPad or not, I think it’s clearly the case that the iPad’s success will increase adoption of Open Educational Resources.

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  • Blackboard's iPad App and its implications

    Ray Henderson has a post up about his sense of responsibility to customers regarding balancing innovation with mature products (careful refinements in features and support services to meet customer needs) versus innovation in new areas (bold thinking and experiments). It’s vintage Ray—thoughtful, balanced, and customer-focused. And while Ray is always the first person to admit that words and deeds do not amount to the same thing, I suspect that Blackboard customers are going to be pleased to hear the company’s leadership talking this way.

    Ray also unwrapped a demo video of Blackboard’s new iPad application:

    Honestly, this looks like a promising app. If I were a student or faculty member heavily using Blackboard and had an iPad, I would want it. I would go further and say that if I were a student or faculty member heavily using Blackboard and thinking about buying an iPad, I might find this app to be an additional motivator to buy one. One common weakness of LMSs is that they don’t always make multitasking easy. Blackboard’s iPad app appears to help in that area. Of course, we don’t know just how much functionality is covered, which is critical. But conceptually speaking, I find the execution to be appealing. The LMS may not be your bag, but if you have to use one heavily, then this may not be a bad way to go.

    Let’s tease out a few additional implications: