[LINK] Apple iPads for Victorian School Students

[Jan Whitaker]

At 08:03 AM 3/06/2010, Stilgherrian wrote:
>I can't help but wondering whether ubiquitous video and audio will 
>mean a return to oral communication for many things, and whether 
>being able to type becomes an archaic mode of text input when text 
>is required, thanks to voice recognition.

VR maybe, but the issue with vid and audio is that
1. they are real time to consume, while print/text can be scanned MUCH quicker
2. you can FF/backup text to whatever you want and deal with it in 
chunks much more easily, but vid and audio is clumsy to do that
3. text can be annotated, underlined, added to much more easily than vid/aud
4. text production can be done with much less equipment, thought vid 
and aud are built into laptops nowadays as standard. Not on iPad, 
though. They are primarily a consumer device, not a creator device


>Yes, yes, I know this is all unlikely to unfold in the 3-year 
>lifespan of the computers / netbooks / iPads currently being handed 
>out, but we're also educating kids for their future lives and maybe 
>stepping back for a bigger-picture look is appropriate.

It's not an either/or, it's a yes/and proposition

>All that said, a keyboard is $10, and I've had two journalists at 
>media conferences tell me that -- against their original 
>expectations -- the iPad's on-screen keyboard has turned out to be 
>quite usable for text input. Both were using it to take notes and 
>file stories from said media conference.

My writing friends are enjoying the ipad. I was surprised how 
enthusiastic they are about it given the text entry options, but they 
seem to be managing fine.

Jan



Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or 
sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer

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