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.
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