I’m interested in learning which incorporates producing information (not just consuming it) and which makes effective use of Web 2.0 tools to publish, not just to read. Given the iPad currently appears to have pretty much the same features as an oversized iPod Touch, the software limitations are likely to parallel those of the iPod. These include:

• The only multitasking available seems to be that music can be played in the background while you use other apps. So moving content from one app to another is clumsy. Given the size of the iPod, this is not such a big deal. But if I purchased the much bigger iPad, I’d expect it to be more suitable for productive work such as editing web-based content.
• Many web-based systems use WYSIWYG editors for creating and editing content. These are not available using the current iPod OS, so editing is restricted to plain text – unless you can use markup. This affects all kinds of web-based systems used in education: Moodle, PBWorks, Blackboard, Mediawiki, etc. In a wiki you can use wiki markup to get around this, otherwise you’ll need to use HTML. Either way, this will be seen as a big step backward by many educators and learners!

There are many apps which allow the user to access content as consumer but few apps which allow authoring. One that I really like is the Wordpress blogging app which allows me to create and edit posts and pages and manage comments. Like Wordpress, it’s simple, straightforward and effective. But notice from the screenshot above (on an iPod Touch) that the editor shows only source code (HTML). Now I work in that mode most of the time anyway, but I know many of the teachers I work with would see the loss of the WYSIWYG editor as a return to the dark ages!

Since the iPad is not yet available, my comments are merely predictions based on the current technology. I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect the first iPads will not solve these problems. My advice to teachers: if you are using Web 2.0 tools or an LMS such as Moodle, you may not find a shiny new iPad is a suitable platform for creating and editing content. Unless of course you are prepared to learn some markup!

On the Mac, the standard Apple Mail software bundled with OS 10.6 seems to have changed little… it still has the same irritating bugs and limited features it had in 10.4. And iCal still has many limitations – it’s really quite a basic application. These Mac OS desktop applications feel like add-ons and don’t appear to have had much in the way of development effort for several years now.

And if you own an iPod Touch or iPhone with the latest OS, you can’t even sync your tasks with iCal. To be able to do this effectively, you’ll have to buy an app such as Appigo’s ToDo – luckily like most apps it’s pretty cheap. It provides much better features for managing your ToDo list than iCal does. But since it’s not allowed to talk to iCal directly when syncing, it has to sync separately. It does this over wireless with its own desktop application running on your Mac, which itself syncs with iCal. Not a big problem, but it’s all a bit clumsy.

If the much-heralded Apple tablet does appear next week as the rumours suggest, it’s likely to be attractive to users who want it for work as well as play. But unless the software bundled with it is much improved on what’s available now, they’re likely to find its usefulness is limited.

Most of the book is not challenging to someone committed to constructivist teaching and learning. But in one short section he claims that changing approaches to teaching and learning have changed our brains. Doidge states that in earlier times education included lots of drill, memorising pages and long poems off by heart. He claims that this led to certain areas of the brain being ’strengthened through exercise’, then goes on to claim that this allowed lawmakers and debaters to speak for extended periods of time from memorised speeches.

Now that rote learning and memorisation has little place in education, Doidge claims we no longer develop the skills needed for such feats. He then makes the witty observation that ‘many of the most learned among us… prefer the omnipresent PowerPoint presentation – the ultimate compensation for a weak premotor cortex’. This is perhaps the most memorable criticism of Powerpoint I’ve come across!

While I’d hate to see return to rote learning, Doidge’s comment did get me thinking about learning approaches with a new perspective. One conclusion which scares me somewhat is that as learning designers we have a big responsibility: not only do we make decisions about how learners learn and how they spend their time, we may even be affecting the structure of their brains. This raises some interesting ethical issues, especially in relation to negotiating learning approaches with adult learners. Perhaps more open teaching is one approach to dealing with the ethical issues.

References

Doidge, N. The Brain that Changes Itself. Viking, New York, 2007.

Left, P. Open Teaching. Accessed 5 December 2009 from http://www.verso.co.nz/mw/index.php?title=Stories/3

Neurotiker. Medial view of a halved human brain, labeled in Latin. Accessed 5 December 2009 from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gehirn,_medial_-_beschriftet_lat.svg

The article then goes on to state the contrary viewpoint and ends by claiming that there is evidence that high-speed broadband would deliver benefits such as :

• hospitalisation of older people could be reduced by 40-70 per cent
• smart grids could save 30 per cent of energy
• e-education would deliver far more productive 1:1 education services
• smart cities, smart transport and smart infrastructure would greatly contribute to the environment and society at large.

These seem like gross generalisations and are, I suspect, not based on any rigorous evidence. Working as I do in education, the 3rd bullet point seems to me like over-optimistic hype: I don’t believe that it’s a lack of bandwidth that prevents 1:1 services from being widely available in our education system. Sure, a ‘fat pipe’ would mean one-to-one tutoring would be able to use a full range of high-quality media. But would that necessarily be more ‘productive’? Writers such as Garrison and Anderson have argued that asynchronous text-based interaction is more effective when higher-order learning is an imperative.

If bandwidth was such a key factor in improving the effectiveness of education, I’d expect the lecturers I work with every week to be clamouring for it. Many of them are already doing great things with embedded media and synchronous communication. Where the technology is holding them back, it’s more likely to be a lack of reliability and training. If speed was the key factor, they’d all be working with KAREN. In fact, the great majority of them have never heard of this high-speed network.

I’m all for high-speed broadband being widely available to educators here in New Zealand, and I look forward to the day when I can use new tools in new ways because lack of speed is no longer an issue. In the meantime, we need to beware of hype which tries to persuade decision makers that high-speed broadband is the ‘missing piece of the jigsaw’: education will only become more effective when a whole raft of problems are resolved. Indeed, we could make profound and positive changes without changing the technical infrastructure. It’s about a lot more than mere speed.

References

Garrison, DR & Anderson, T (2003). E-learning in the 21st Century. Routledge Falmer, London.

Unknown author. About KAREN. Accessed 3 November 22009 from http://www.karen.net.nz/about/

Unknown author. Survey questions ultra-fast broadband gains. Accessed 3 November 2009 from http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10607054

Photo: Optical fibre by BigRiz

In Seesmic Desktop or a browser it appears correctly:

But in Tweetdeck all Greek words are replaced with a ‘pi’ symbol (∏) like this:

Trying to diagnose the problem, I found when using Tweetdeck to compose an update that Greek characters are not recognised at all. That is, you can’t type anything on the keyboard when in Greek text entry mode: this is most unusual for a Mac application. It’s not a problem with AIR as Seesmic desktop seems to handle Greek characters perfectly well.

Whether this is a problem with all non-English characters sets I don’t know: this needs some further investigation. But anyone wanting to use Twitter for language teaching and learning will need to check whether it works with Tweetdeck. If you use the Twitter API to send automated updates, check that these are readable in Tweetdeck. And check that students can use Tweetdeck to post updates. I’ll be posting a note on my rimata homepage advising users that the ‘verb of the day’ may not be accessible using Tweetdeck on the Mac.