iBut

Yes, the iPad is here and it is pretty and it is a game changing device but only in some ways. I was impressed with the Course Notes app which goes a long way to fixing some of the common problems of disorganisation that bedevil students, but not all – apps like that on the iPad won’t be a magic bullet to make us all smarter – and they may just confirm some folks in their dumbness.

If you are, were or know a student whose notes are a disorganised pile of illegible A4 pads, then apps like this will certainly help – go on, watch the video, it’s pretty and shiny:

What apps like this give students is a decent notetaking tool on a device which, if it measures up, is portable, fast to start, has decent battery life and has a screen large enough to do real work on. These are all big pluses. Apps with online synchronisation and backup will reduce the amount of “lost” notes and paper drafts left in the library, coffee shop or on the bus.

But while this will make the process of being organised easier, it won’t teach people to be organised, or make them smarter. Knowing you have X paper due on day Y doesn’t mean you will break that task down into its requirements – reading, notetaking, planning, drafting and actually get it done. If you do, it will certainly be easier to stop me crossing campus and  bluetooth your draft to my iPad so I can give you feedback and email it back.  There are things here that the iPad doesn’t do – draft a paper in time, submit it for comments, and actually read and action on that feedback – that relies on iPeople.

Equally, the iPad doesn’t resolve the content v process debate which has, foolishly, torn education into two camps. Just because you can, as the Course Notes demo shows, hook up to Wikipedia and pull down the definition of Ph; or use an app like Elements to look up the properties of the elements, doesn’t mean you know diddly. There is some content which you must have in your brain, not your iPad f you are going to do your job right. Knowing how to find content, integrate  it into your cognitive maps and use it are all important processes, but for a great many professions, understanding the process of finding information is not enough – you need enough information in your head to be able to spot things that are wrong. The chemistry student who know how to look up the ph of Gold on the iPad will always be a dozen keystrokes behind the one who knows it, and there will be times when that makes a difference.

That said, the iPad and the new tablets which will follow it are better tools than those which we currently have to teach students effective autonomous learning skills. Tablets will probably make it easier to teach students how to make sense of the world around them, and provide better tools to help them to learn the content they need to know to function in their discipline.  But I still have students who write down everything I put up on my powerpoints, even though they know the powerpoints are available to them. We may have Star Trek style tools, but many of our students still approach college like medieval monks; and the iPad won’t fix that.


Posted

in

by

Comments

3 responses to “iBut”

  1. Colm Moore Avatar
    Colm Moore

    “Apps with online synchronisation and backup will reduce the amount of “lost” notes and paper drafts left in the library, coffee shop or on the bus.” – instead, the iPad will be left in the library, coffee shop or on the bus

  2. Joe Mansfield Avatar

    I’d been struggling to figure out any good uses that I could put an iPad too but this seems to fit my needs quite well. I may be well past my sell date as a student but since I’m teaching a lot of content that goes stale quite quickly so I have to sit in on coursesTTT sessions regularly. So I find I have to make lots of notes and waste a ton of time transcribing my illegible paper based scratchings later because I’m almost always taking notes in environments where the tap-tap-tappity-tap of a laptop keyboard is undesirable and I need the notes on a computer not on paper.

    As to the issue of students writing down things that are available to them for download – I do that regularly because the act of making the notes helps me remember both their content and structure.

    As far as the issue of content vs process – retained knowledge vs the ability to [rapidly] find the answer – I don’t think the argument is all that clear cut. For many fields (all of mine today at any rate) it’s rarely helpful to know all the details because nobody can be trusted to do everything from memory and everything is driven by heavily documented procedure. To make matters worse most hard data points are actually variable – the density of Gold may be more or less a fixed value but (for example) the price of it is variable and always has to be checked. In my field almost everything is variable to some degree and I’d never trust someone who didn’t check the current validity of a “hard fact” that they’d learned even a few months ago. That is not an argument in support of those who don’t bother to learn anything because they can always “look it up” but I think that general concepts of the interactions and scale of systems (from economies to chemical reactions to network architectures) are much more valuable learning objectives than the specific values of parameters. In those fields where the details are relatively static and memorized accuracy is vital (field stripping munitions perhaps) then clearly this doesn’t apply but I think those are in a minority. My IT bias may be clouding my judgement there though too. Still if I met some clown who was looking for a network engineering job and didn’t know what ICMP was or couldn’t explain what it is for then I wouldn’t be hiring. I’m curious as to how extreme the two camps are in formal education circles though.

    One thing does disappoint me about the iPad – I really want to see devices in this form factor that can work with penink input as well as finger based multi touch. There are many conceptual areas that I work in where I still have to revert to a pen and some surface (paperwhiteboard) in order to work through a design, sketch out an architecture or work through a formula. Even though there are good maths apps, great diagraming tools and the rest nothing beats a pen[cil] and paper for quickly converting many ideas into something real that can then be worked on in detail.

  3. Robert Cosgrave Avatar

    I think devices like this act to reduce cognitive friction. Electronic notetaking means less time wasted fumbling for notes. Always connected means no time wasted fumbling for WiFi to look something up. eBooks mean no time lost because the 2kilo textbook is out of the library, or at home. The Apple Magic takes away time lost waiting for the laptop to boot, and so on. Future devices, with cameras, gesture control, internal projecters, neural controls and so on will peel away additional layers of friction we never realised were there until they were gone.
    You are correct in your final point – we cannot easily reprogram ourselves. There is no app for that. Old habits of taking notes won’t be unlearned. You must wait a generation until a new cohort comes through who never took notes. By then, of course, Moores law will give the iPad 2023 as much processing power as the student toting it, and we will no longer need to trouble ourselves with cognitive friction at all.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

css.php