Monthly Archives: April 2010

How Learning is Changing

Distance-learning, Education reform,

Will Richardson, over at weblogge-ed.com, says that the notion of school is changing, and I’d like to believe him. He quotes the New Media Consortium’s K-12 Horizon Report, and in particular highlights these two points:

There is increasing interest in just-in-time, alternate, or non-formal avenues of education, such as online learning, mentoring, and independent study. More and more, the notion of the school as the seat of educational practice is changing as learners avail themselves of learning opportunities from other sources. There is a tremendous opportunity for schools to work hand-in-hand with alternate sources, to examine traditional approaches, and to reevaluate the content and experiences they are able to offer.

The way we think of learning environments is changing. Traditionally, a learning environment has been a physical space, but the idea of what constitutes a learning environment is changing. The “spaces” where students learn are becoming more community-driven, interdisciplinary, and supported by technologies that engage virtual communication and collaboration. This changing concept of the learning environment has clear implications for schools.

These kinds of comments, particularly from a report sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, have to be taken with a grain of salt, but I think it’s safe to say that my own experiences affirm them. Bobby Samuels, one of my top AP Physics students, revealed last week the secret to his success on tests: “I just go over the PowerPoint slides that you post on the website. That helps a lot.” Other students appreciate the availability of homework solutions to assist them with some of the “just in time” learning that Mr. Richardson mentions above.

And most recently, I’ve been posting full source code for assignments in the computer programming elective that I’m teaching this year. That doesn’t appear to have been quite as successful an enterprise; you can chalk that up to second-semester senioritis among the 12th graders in there, or the fact that this is the first time I’ve taught the course. (I’ll take the blame this year, and we’ll see how it goes next time.)

The most significant example of distance learning, for me, remains the LearnAPphysics.com website that I run, which as of this writing has over 1630 subscribers from around the world. It doesn’t have the full-fledged status of a “learning community” that Will probably wants—it’s a one-way delivery of practice problems rather than a truly interactive process—but it’s a clear example of how students are reaching out to develop their own strategies, and finding their own tools to guide their learning.

The range of people using that site runs the gamut, from high school students in the States who are reviewing for a test the next day, to this 66-year old gentleman from India, a principal of an elementary school there who has become interested in pursuing his own study of physics.

I don’t see bricks-and-mortar education going away any time soon—for all our Googling and Wikipedia, we still seem pretty attached to the idea of “school as place.” But that may be starting to change…

Nose, Face, Spite. Fast-twitching.

Apple, Linux

Nose, Face, Spite. Fast-twitching.

2010-04-10

by Richard White

The curse of the fast-twitch response neural response (and I’m perfectly aware that I’m mixing a muscle property with brain activity in that metaphor, but go with me on this), is that emotions can blaze along as quickly as thinking does. I like to think that I’m relatively quick in grasping the fundamentals of a problem, or seeing through a tangle of talking points to a logical conclusion, but I occasionally find myself at the mercy of sudden and strong emotional responses to situations.

Ask teacher/fellow-geek Aaron about the little jaw twitch I get right before I freak out. He’s seen me in enough stressful situations to know the warning signs.

I’m not twitching right now, but I was a little troubled last night to read this bit of news from the well-connected John Gruber:

A few months ago, I heard suggestions that Apple had tentative plans to release a developer beta of Mac OS X 10.7 at WWDC this June. That is no longer the case. Mac OS X 10.7 development continues, but with a reduced team and an unknown schedule. It’s my educated guess that there will be no 10.7 news at WWDC this year, and probably none until WWDC 2011.

Apple’s company-wide focus has since been focused intensely on one thing: iPhone OS 4.1 The number one priority at Apple is to grow mobile market share faster than Android. Anything that is not directly competitive with Android is on the back burner.

Okay. That’s not good.

My deal with Apple is simply this: deliver products that are better than the competition by a factor of two or three, products that make me happily spend top dollar for their outstanding quality and Apple’s superior customer support. Do that, and I’m your fan-boy. Ever since I switched to Apple from the PC world almost 20 years ago, they have delivered on that promise.

And for the moment, I guess they still are, although the iPad isn’t part of that promise for me. Nor the iPod, nor the iPhone. For me, Apple’s superiority has been its hardware and its software, all built around the rock solid OS X, running on top of the Darwin flavor of UNIX. It’s been a great ride, and I owe so much of my own technological workflow to those, and the third-party apps built for that ecosystem.

If Gruber’s intuition is true, though, any significant growth or evolution in that ecosystem has been stunted, as all hands on Cupertino’s deck rush toward the various mobile platforms—iPhone and iPad. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t devote significant attention to that front: I’m an Apple stockholder, and while the rest of the world is struggling to emerge from that “economic downturn”, AAPL is doing just fine, thank you. When I wear my investor hat, I’m a happy man.

But put on my technology hat and I start to get a little worried. Development on the new operating system, as mentioned above, has apparently slowed or stopped completely. And the top-of-the-line laptops haven’t come out with a significant refresh in years. I used to be an an 18-month hardware upgrade cycle, based both on the release cycle from Apple and the amount of stress I put on my machine, carrying it back and forth to school, to classes, to office, to home… The machine I’m composing this post on is almost three years old. It’s serviceable, but… Apple’s development has slowed in this area as well. Let’s see, three years ago… that was just about the time that the iPhone came out.

Apple is currently struggling to serve two masters: the geeks and the public. Not all of the geeks are real happy right now, and some of them occasionally make noises about jumping ship in favor of other, more open, worlds: Google’s Android-based phone systems, Linux (including my personal favorite, the excellent LinuxMint), etc. Sometimes, they come swimming back to Apple, in a classic case of “I’m sorry… you were right… turns out that the grass isn’t as green over there as I thought it was…”

Regardless of what happens, it’s going to be fascinating to watch.

I’ve been told as an investor that I need to be smart, and not think with my heart. For years I’ve invested in Apple more as a result of my strong belief in their products rather than any deep financial analysis. I suppose it’s a bit ironic that, with their stock at an all-time high, I find myself believing in them a little less than I did before.

At least until the new MacBook Pros come out.

Me, next week, when that happens: “Oooooh! Shiny!!! I love Apple!!!”

Ah, the curse of the fast-twitch neuron.

iPad: What’s it to you?

Apple, Workflow

iPad: What’s It to You?

2010-04-09

by Richard White

I’ve had my iPad for just about 5 days now, which means I’ve started to figure out a little bit about what it means to me.

The biggest question most people have, before they’ve used it anyway, is: “What is this? Is it just a big iPod Touch?” I think one of the really cool things about this new device—and I think it’s fair to call it “new”; like most Apple products, it’s not technically a new device, but Apple has gone and made this thing so well that it IS new, for all intents and purposes—is that it can be different things for different people.

  • It’s a big iPod Touch
    It plays games and movies like nobody’s business. Two days ago, I made the mistake of leaving it out on my desk at school. When I returned an hour later and started it up, the game “Plants and Zombies” started up, with a “Welcome back, Matthew” opening screen. “Uh, I hope you don’t mind, Mr. White—I didn’t want to mess up your game, so I made my own game account on their,” explained Matthew, a little embarrassed.
  • It’s a small computer / netbook killer
    Netbooks, for some people, have been the ideal device for light-duty computing: answering email, surfing the web, working on cloud-based documents, or doing some light word processing. The iPad does at least the first three really, really well. And it’s a super-sexy chick magnet, so… that’s worth the price of admission right there.

  • It’s a book reading Kindle Killer
    It’s true, the plastic, gray-scale Kindle is doomed. The iPad’s ability to display epub-format books beats the competition all up and down the block. Colors are crisp, the page turn motion is realistic (if that kind of thing is important to you), and their bookshelf metaphor (ripped off from Delicious Monster’s amazing Delicious Library) is stunning. It beats the heck out of sitting in bed reading the dishwater-gray Kindle with a freaking reading light clipped to the screen.
  • It’s a Media Consumption Device
    Music, books, and especially movies are SO good on this. How good? Last night I sat on the couch with my girlfriend and her son watching “WarGames” on this machine, streaming over the wireless via Netflix. The giant wall-mounted flat screen hooked up to DirectTV? Yeah, it didn’t even get turned on…
  • It’s the Next Big Thing
    Awesome 10-hour battery life, a cool running processor, blazing fast graphics, bright screen, razor-sharp touch interface… It all screams “I am the future!” At least if you’re into consuming media.

I’m not that guy, though—I’m not the media consumption guy. I don’t typically play games on my computer, except for the World of Warcraft years… but there’s no app for that on the iPad. I don’t usually watch movies on my computer. I do record movies on my camera and edit them on my laptop… but you can’t do that on the iPad. I surf a little on the web, but I also create content for the web… and you can’t easily do that on the iPad. I edit Word documents, and you can’t do that in any serious way on the iPad. I do computer-based presentations (PowerPoint/Keynote) for my students… and the iPad has only limited functionality in that area.

I talk a lot about workflow, so what I’m saying is this: I like the iPad in a lot of ways, but it’s not as useful to me for my own workflow.

Not yet. I’m willing to wait a bit.

In the meantime, I’m not the only guy who’s trying to figure out if this is “my thing.”

iPad

Apple, Workflow, ,

iPad

2010-04-08

by Richard White

So… yeah. I bought an iPad.

I pre-ordered, and got in line at 6am to hang out with some other really nice people, including Carlos, the youth minister to gang-bangers, and Abraham Peters, who graciously took a picture of all of us standing in line, and the German guy from London, who happened to find himself in the States at the right time and managed to buy a reservation from some guy on Craigslist.

I bought two iPads, actually: one for myself, because I’m an Ed Tech guy, and I have a feeling this is going to be a Very Big Deal. And one for my Dad, because this thing is so made for him.

Picture my Dad, hunched over in the cold, drafty office, reading the online New York Times every morning on an ancient computer screen. Eventually he gets up, rubs his lower back, and heads off into the kitchen where he’ll make some breakfast, sit down at the table, and settle in to read the local newsrag, a pitiful thing that barely qualifies as journalism.

The iPad was made for my Dad. Now, he’s eating his eggs and reading the New York Times online on the blazing bright LED screen, flipping through articles, and emailing me the ones that he especially likes. It’s business as usual… only infinitely better.

We sat on the couch and watched an episode of “Glee” together—he’d never seen it before, and absolutely loved it. We set up Netflix streaming for him. We looked at the books in the online bookstore. At the rate we were going, I’ll be surprised if he ever gets on the computer again, unless it’s to sync his most recent photos to the iPad. Then he’ll unplug, them pack up the little tablet, and take it to my Mom to give her a slide show on the thing.

As for me and my iPad? I’m not as much of a convert. You can read the excellent comments of David Pogue, or John Gruber, or Andy Ihnatko, or this excellent article at Ars Technica, and they say more or less what I say: it’s fast. It’s beautiful. It represents, for many people, the future of computing, where our devices are powerful, and simple, and seamlessly integrated into our lives to the point that we have a hard time remembering what life was like without them. I don’t doubt that that’s going to happen. In fact, I hope it happens—I have a little money invested in Apple, and my son is starting college next year.

But as of this writing, it doesn’t seem to be my thing. It’s a great machine for consuming content, there’s no denying; YouTube never looked so good. But for content creators like myself, or anyone who needs a little more control over their computer—anyone who wants to drive a stickshift—the iPad’s automatic transmission is probably going to be a frustrating experience.

  • Want to read a PDF document? You’ll have to email it to yourself, or use a third-party app to get it onto the iPhone’s hermetically-sealed file system.
  • Want to edit a Word document? You’ll have to buy the $9.99 neutered version of iWork’s Pages, open up the document in that, edit it, then “Save As…” a Word document, plug in your iPad to your main computer, use iTunes to Export a copy of the document, and then fix any fonts, formatting, or layout that got changed in the process.
  • Want to backup your files? Well, you sort of back them up every time you sync, although you can’t actually restore an individual file. You can make a copy of a file from the iPad (for a limited number of applications) by exporting, but you’ll have to go through and do that on a file by file basis. There’s no facility for backing up the entire machine and restoring individual files.

I don’t want to complain too loudly; any device manufacturer on the planet would KILL to have a product like this in their stable. And I totally get that this is going to be a hit.

Facebook’s a hit, too, though. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s something that fits my lifestyle, or my workflow.

The typing I do, the websites that I design, the video editing I do, the podcasts I record, the DVDs I rip, the music I record and mix, the presentations I deliver, the programming I do… none of those exist in the world of the iPad in any meaningful way.

And yet…

It’s a very import development, technologically, and I’m looking forward to seeing where we go from here.

It’s an exciting time to be a technologist.