iPads and the business of reading

I am a news nut and so have been waiting eagerly for the arrival of the great ipad newspaper apps that make news worth paying for. The experience has been interesting.

In the beginning there was the New York Times with its standard web site. (All of the images are from an iPad.) A very good newspaper site. It looks a bit like a traditional newspaper, but each story has just a headline and a few sentences to provide an introduction. Lots of stories on one screen, and lots of small images and some video.

I like the way the home screen has a large number of stories on it, and there are also section headings, so you can scroll down the long home page and browse, or you can go to sections.
Then came the long anticipated iPad app and I find it boring, sterile and without much life at all. there are only a few images and an awful lot of text. There is a section menu that can be opened and the same material is there as on the original web site.

This is the front page of the Top Stories section, like a front page, but I find it dead. Maybe they are going to launch an attractive and interactive app early next year when they ask readers to start paying.

The Sydney Morning Herald has taken a very different approach, pending Fairfax's launch of its 'proper' iPad app. They charge 65 c a day for this version, and it is simply a page by page view of the print edition. It has been overwhelmingly condemned by the reviewers because it is not a real iPad app, with different layout, links and nifty navigation. I love it, and read it from front to middle every morning.

The iPad view is sufficient to read the headlines and some of the text, and to get a clear sense of what the main stories are, and how the editor has placed them regarding prominence. You get the result of a hundred years of experience in laying out a newspaper, and slightly less experience as a reader. To read a story in detail, simply pinch out on the page and you zoom in to normal size text. [right] The images look great. The experience is very similar to reading the paper version, but a little more convenient.

My next experience is of the Economist magazine which is an A4 size news magazine which looks very similar on the iPad. This has been my most satisfying experience of reading on the iPad. The view is very similar to the paper product but with the advantage of better navigation, illumination and clarity, and it is reproduced on one's iPhone almost as well. A major bonus is that the whole magazine is available in audio, so the reader can jump from reading to listening at the press of a button. This is particularly useful for iPhone users. It has proved surprisingly useful because it you read or listen depending on what you are doing. I prefer to read because i concentrate better, but if doing a menial chore, I can just keep 'reading'.

The cost difference is striking. An annual subscription to The Economist is $345 for 52 editions, but the iPad version is only $135, and it arrives three days earlier.













I don't think there is any doubt that eReaders are going to be as common as mobile phones in the near future. In fact, many of them will BE mobiles. But it is clearly going to be a difficult learning experience for publishers and readers to work out what format and presentation type suits them. The biggest surprise for me has been to discover the attractiveness of switching so easily from print to audio in one product. And I am a regular podcast listener, but it had not occurred to me that it is so appealing to switch back and forth. I expect there will be lots of surprises for all of us.

Wired for distraction

There is a very good feature article in the New York Times title Wired for Distraction that reasonably - without hysteria, outlines problems some students are experiencing in balancing their online lives. It describes how some students are almost obsessed with maintaining frequent contacts with friends via Twitter and Facebook or games to the point that they cannot focus on other tasks that are not so immediately fulfilling. Unlike many popular press articles on this topic, they point out that this only affects a minority of young people, but is nevertheless a significant issue. For those involved with secondary students in particular, it is a good read.

The answer, it seems, is that teachers (and parents) need to help students find balance and manage their priorities. Surprise! Who would have thunk it?

Google Apps in education: widespread, simple, powerful, cheap

Some indications of the take-up of Google Apps and other cloud computing services in education.

• "10 million Apps users in education" Oct 2010 [source]
• "New York City, today [1/11/10] announced that it's moving to "Google Apps for Education," providing cloud-based email and collaboration tools to the entire university community. This announcement comes just weeks after New York State created an initiative to bring Google Apps for Education to their K-12 schools. With students and faculty across New York now using Google Apps, it looks like the Empire State has fully embraced the cloud." [Source]
• In Australia, a struggle is underway for university cloud computing between Microsoft's Live@edu and Gmail. Many universities have switched, with Live@edu ahead at this stage. Gmail has 1.5 million student users in NSW DET schools. [source]
  

Universities and schools are finding that the predictions in the Horizon Report that 2010 - 11 is the time when 'cloud' computing will have a major impact, is being borne out. One factor is cost. Another is that the cloud systems come with lots of very appealing ancillary tools, like the ability to collaboratively edit files from any location.

The occasional voices of paranoia that used to be heard are being overtaken by a more realistic perspective. The fear that the FBI can monitor email under the US Patriot Act is one of these. Why schools should fear this is not clear to me. Australian intelligence agencies have similar powers, as they do over intercepting mail or tapping phones. Universities which deal with serious issues of intellectual property and research have apparently been satisfied that their data is appropriately secure. Why a police agency would target student online projects or the staff meeting minutes escapes me.

Real threats to student and staff security are much closer to home. The most real threats are much more mundane: careless forwarding of private information, insecure passwords, contacting strangers and bullying.

Why schools don't need ICT

This is the title of a provocative, brief and, I think, sound argument here by Ian Yorston about the failure of ICT to improve learning. He says we are smothering the digital revolution with rules.

In his own words:

"If you had to spend a million pounds, you'd really hope to have something to show for it."

"schools have finished up at the wrong end of the ICT revolution."

"...no money has been saved whatsoever...."

"Nor have we seen any obvious gains in productivity."

"The real curiosity is that, even when the newest, fastest, coolest computers have been purchased, heads promptly sit down to draw up policy statements that effectively cripple the machines before they have even been booted up."

"Now that we have finally built the Library of Alexandria — now that, thanks to Google, our students really do have access to all the world's knowledge in a curated and useful context, why would we want to limit their access?"

"We block Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. We denigrate Wikipedia and HowStuffWorks. We ban mobile phones and digicams. We even make our students write by hand."

"Schools don't need ICT. It's coming through our doors every day. We just need to adopt and adapt a little bit.

I think he is being a little ironic in his use of the word 'little' in the last sentence.

Computers in mathematics teaching = more math thinking

There is a very good TED talk (17min) below by Conrad Wolfram who makes a very powerful argument about how Maths teaching can be enhanced with the aid of computers. But it is very sad to read the initial comments on the TED site from the quite smart people who use TED. Most of didn't hear much of what he said. If you view the video you find that

Wolfram was at pains to say that Maths is about thinking mathematically, and its declining status in schools and broad aversion by many people is because the calculating (computation) part of Maths dominates what happens in schools and the other aspects are neglected. He says more attention should be spent engaging students with the three other aspects listed here. But the critics of changing the way things are done in the classroom often do not value the end point of learning. They think it is important for students to put in the hard work of learning how to calculate, remember, perform base level skills in the expectation that one day they will get a chance to apply these skills on real world problems.

For those interested in just one example of how this can work in practice, the Alice programming language is a wonderful tool to use from mid primary to advanced programming levels.

One-to-one backup salvation

A number of schools that are providing Apple notebooks for individual students are using automatic backups to make radical changes to how they manage one-to-one computing.

The students are provided with a backup hard drive that stays at home. They are required to use the Time Machine software to automatically backup the entire computer on a regular basis - possibly daily. Time Machine saves everything - settings, files, profiles etc. The Time Machine name comes from the fact that the hard drive saves each backup in series until it runs out of space. So a typical student may have 5 or 10 or more backups according to date. So if a computer is having problems, is lost or damaged, it (or a replacement) can be connected to Time Machine and restore to the latest or whichever backup version is desired. (If the problem appears to be caused by some new software, for example, go back to the backup prior to the software being installed). Everything is re-installed, so the only cost to the student is the hour or so that the restoration takes. There are backup systems available for PCs, so this is not just an Apple opportunity. The major issue here for a school is not technical but attitudinal.

The implications are very significant.

Maintenance: technical support demands can be reduced. Rather than tech staff needing to spend long hours trying to detect a claimed fault in a computer, the student can simply be advised to restore the problem computer from the backup. The storage and backup responsibilities of the school are greatly reduced.

Student Responsibility: The system places the student firmly in control of their own computer, just as they are currently responsible for their own paper based aids. This is highly desirable if students are to become responsible student and adult computer users. An important implication of this system is that students must have administration rights to their computer. Some schools find this threatening. Others, who have tried it, do not, because they prefer to deal with misbehaving students individually rather than constrain and limit what all students can to. A major benefit of this open approach is that a significant number of students will explore new software and potential of their computer, and pass this knowledge back to the school for the benefit of all. Parents who understand the procedures and responsibilities are generally very supportive.

The savings in unnecessary school computer administration are very significant.

ICT planning: real goals from a cloudy vision

Everyone agrees that school implementation of ICT into the curriculum is very complicated. And every one talks about goals and strategic planning. But there are dangerous distractions for school leaders taking their attention off what really matters. I think what matters is kids learning, and that we should focus most of our attention on this. But look at what gets in the way.
Here are the four strands that the Digital Education Revolution (DER) set out as the basis for school strategic planning.
Schools are reporting to DEEWR on their achievement of these four strands. However, there are many such lists of goals. Most ar similar, but they approach the task from different perspectives.
Here is another set of national goals for integration of ICT, alongside the DER four strands.

I have drawn lines to connect elements that seem to match. Clearly, the Making Change Happen set of goals is broader, and is focused more on student learning and outcomes.

But lists can be quite deceptive and cloud our vision because they imply that listed items are of similar importance. They rarely are. A more precise list of the elements would look like this:
But this is my judgment of their relative position. The original document does not tell the reader this information. But there is only a limited indication in this list of the relative importance of the 3 main items.

Pity the poor school administrator who is looking for a quick overview of what to focus on when planning school ICT development. No one needs to tell school principals that ICT infrastructure is costly, complex and urgent. Unless one has a clear view of direction, the urgent will tend to displace the important.