Wednesday, July 18, 2012

What's with iPads?

Every few years there's a new consumer technology product that makes a wave in the public consciousness. Some of them make a huge difference to faculty and students; some of them don't. How to tell the difference?

I've never seen any tool that by its very existence changed the nature of teaching. It's not true of slates and chalk, it's not true of ballpoint pens or pencils, it's not true of television, and it's not true of iPads. What I have seen is that some tools change the way people live and interact.

If a tool changes the way people live and interact, then I always ask: why aren't they teaching and learning while they're doing what they want to do with that tool? Or, to flip it the other way: how can we teachers hijack that tool to use it for teaching and learning purposes, since the tool is obviously very popular with our students?

Every technology innovation has innate capabilities that distinguish it from what came before. Some of the changes are very small; some are huge. In every case, those innate capabilities are what the customers want to exploit, whether or not educators feel that they should. It's always good to ask: can we exploit those capabilities for the purposes of education?

Laptops let people have access to computers and communication networks anywhere; people didn't have to be tied to desks any more. Phones put the same level of access in a pocket. And iPads are something in the middle, with large bright screens and connectivity and something most laptops don't have: a touchscreen.

How are iPads changing the way people live and interact? They are awesome media consumption devices. Reading the newspaper, watching video, listening to music, reading email, surfing the web - the iPad does all these things really well. The form factor is such that they are easy to use almost anywhere (though for small hands or hands with arthritis, they're a bit heavy to hold up; the new folding cover addresses that somewhat).

iPads are also undeniably status symbols. Apple products have become markers of status and good design; you pay for the Apple brand both because it's a better quality product and because it looks cool. There are plenty of tablets out there running competing operating systems, most often Android. I've tried these myself and have yet to see one that behaves as smoothly, as "intuitively", as the iPad itself.

(I always put "intuitively" in quotation marks, because most technology products train humans far more effectively than humans train them, and really it's a question not of human intuition but of how quick and easy is it for the device to train us in how to use it. The iPad is very good at this.)

The status symbol thing hurts iPads, at least in higher ed, as much as it helps; some students still feel self-conscious when they take an iPad out in class, and since most students still don't have one, their use attracts attention. This may fade as more students get tablets, if they do, and more students start bringing them to class, if they do.

So, it looks hot and it lets people consume media, all types of media, anywhere, anytime.

What the iPad doesn't do particularly well is let its user create things. I would like to be able to type text, take pictures, take videos, make audio recordings, and share those things with other people. The iPad isn't great at this. Its interface is not geared toward making and sharing files. Even the existence of files on it is largely protected from the user, and you need to add a tool like Dropbox to it if you want to easily share files to or from the device.

I've been using an iPad for years now, not because I love it, but because I want to understand it, and because it has serious fans in our faculty and students. I still haven't settled on when is exactly the right occasion to take it and not a netbook, or a Kindle, or a phone. So I'm not an evangelist.

For me the iPad would never get used if it weren't for two things: Dropbox, and my capacitive stylus. The former lets me use it to read documents I've saved in Dropbox, so there is instant synchronization across my home and work computers, and the iPad gives me access to those documents in meetings. The capacitive stylus (along with Penultimate - three things?) lets me handwrite notes in meetings and immediately send them to myself, others, or Dropbox - a handy feature for someone like me who always struggles with paper and prefers to have everything electronic, and always available, at all times.

So how is the iPad good for teaching?

As an e-book it's interesting but not revolutionary. It's not a major change to be able to add animation or video to books; laptops have long been able to do this, and one can do it on any website. But combined with the form factor, it may be an incremental change that nonetheless makes a big difference in the classroom. It is a device that is as small and easy to carry as a book that facilitates full color video and animation, and we know those tools help students understand and retain new concepts and new information. In classrooms where this activity needs a boost, iPads may be an extremely valuable tool. They are expensive items, more expensive than I would like them to be if they were going to be widely adopted, but they do do this well.

Critical thinking skills, however, are developed through students' processing information and synthesizing it into new forms. When students write papers, make videos, even create art collages, they take what they know and put it into their own "words" and share it with others, and in this way they learn and understand and retain that understanding.

I find an iPad to be a poor creation device for my own concepts and the media in which I want to convey them. I can't easily write a paper on it, much less make a video or an audio piece. Since my own teaching focuses more on critical thinking skills, the iPad is not that inviting to me. But if I were teaching in a field where retention of new information and understanding definitional concepts were necessary, the iPad might be great. I could write or adopt a textbook where videos illustrated mitosis and linked to definitions throughout the text, and students could all easily use it in class or anywhere, without having to open up a laptop. Games can also be written that reinforce concepts (though the lack of Flash support holds back education here, as we have long been Flash-oriented for games), and any repetitive tool like flashcards can have all the benefits of being connected to the network but also enhanced with multimedia.

So, skills- and information-based learning, enhanced by iPads; critical thinking and synthesizing skills, not so much.

I'm not saying that's a reason to eschew them. They are what they are. But it's important to remember they were never designed to take the place of computers or phones. They are a new consumer item category, even quite different from their closest cousins, the e-readers. I personally love to read on a Kindle, but find it awkward to do so on an iPad, which is so much larger and has a screen that isn't daylight-friendly. But I read a fair bit on my iPad, while I'm also checking email, checking the web, and doing other consumption tasks, because it syncs with Dropbox and because it lets me really surf the web in full color and full media like a laptop, but is easy to carry and has a touchscreen like a phone.

I love reading my email, for instance, on my iPad. It's a brilliant one- or two-touch disposal method for each message: file, or delete. No mousing. But when I have to stop and respond to an email, now it's a pretty arduous typing process. Could I get an external keyboard? Sure; but at that point, why not switch to a computer with a keyboard?

Bottom line: should the average teacher be interested in iPads for teaching purposes? If better information retention on a particular topic is your goal, maybe. Does every student have one and is teaching going to look antiquated if it doesn't involve them? Not yet, and maybe not for a while. They are ancillary devices to computers and always will be. On the other hand, they're easier to carry and may very well seriously boost the electronic textbook market. If we reach a point where 99% of our students have them, and we can close that gap with an iPad requirement which, like a laptop requirement, ensures that even international and first-generation college students have the device, then they could make it easy for faculty to share video or animations, poll the students on their thoughts or do problem-solving, and do touch-based creation, even with math or non-Roman character alphabets that are often hard for new students to tackle with keyboards.

Should the average teacher be interested in iPads for their own use? Maybe. I know faculty who have used iPads to revolutionize their own attendance-taking (perhaps a small issue, but if it's not small for you, you know how big it can be!), accessing their own files more easily, and keeping up with the communications of a class or with committee work. If it works for you, it works for you. Hopefully I've described what it can or can't do well enough to let you decide about whether or not to buy this device for yourself if you haven't already.

Are there particular teachers who really must be interested in iPads? For computer science the mobile OS has become a whole interesting new topic; the ability to use the touchscreen anywhere has resulted in some great new art applications that are interesting to some; and the new videoconferencing capabilities in the latest models are neat (though no different from what many phones offer) and might provide a nice channel for communication for distance learning teachers who want to do one-on-one meetings. The next big revolution may be the ability to annotate a paper, including with handwritten notes as well as audio or video from you, and returning it to the student; they're very close with this, though I think they're not there yet. If this is a feature you're dying for, I'd suggest checking out the iPad apps that move in this direction.

Otherwise, for the average teacher, I would say it's far more important to understand phone culture than to understand iPads per se. If you don't have a smartphone or if you don't use your phone as anything but a phone, you don't understand how it's revolutionized the life of the average college student from what it was even five years ago, and you probably need to. Always-there communication networks are a very big difference and they can really be exploited in interesting ways for education: to facilitate group learning, to extend the walls of the classroom or flip it, to really change the day-to-day operation of the class. In almost every instance that I can think of, an iPad will work for these things - but so will a phone or a laptop, and in every case you'll want the features of the laptop to let students really create work (developing those crucial critical thinking skills) or you'll want the I-always-have-it-with-me capability of the phone. Both laptops and phones have far more penetration into the market, as well, and teachers would have far fewer problems adopting them than trying to do an exercise with their students that depends on everyone having an iPad. Pools of iPads are being tried at many schools but these are expensive (both to acquire and in terms of staff time to maintain), and it looks to me like what laptops looked like before everyone had one.

You're right to think that this will probably change, though, and no one knows how quickly. "More quickly than laptop ownership changed" is probably a safe guess.

Our average student now has around three wireless devices - and this happened very quickly, in less than eighteen months. iPods, iPads, handheld games, fixed game boxes, and e-readers are all adding to the mix of devices our students buy and use every day - in addition, if I have to say it, to their phone and their laptop. The way our students use technology affects their lives and is important to educators if we want to reach them where they are and where they will be for the rest of their lives. Understanding the iPad itself isn't as critical as understanding this always-on, always-connected lifestyle - and if possible injecting some process of learning into that lifestyle.

Share your ideas - Faculty Computing highlights innovators we know about in the online gallery of innovators, but we also host an iPad user group - contact me (judith.tabron at the usual hofstra.edu) if you want me to put you in touch with that group, and come share your ideas! This is an area where faculty are learning from other faculty (or from their students!) as much as, if not more than, they are learning from IT people. Help us spread the knowledge!

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