…but not in the way you think it might.
There’s been a bunch of chatter about how Apple’s iPad might “transform” education. Here’s a couple posts to that effect:
- “Six Ways the iPad will Transform Education” (edutopia)
- “Three Game Changing Tools That Will Transform Education” (Fast Company)
- “Will the Apple iPad Transform Schools?” (Harvard Education Publishing Group)
THEY’RE ALL MISSING THE POINT.
An article in THE Journal, Measuring the iPad’s Potential for Education discusses iPad’s potential as a new publishing and development platform. The fact that it has it’s own software development kit will help to make it impactful in education, creating a new platform for educational apps to come to the market.
cc: flickr.com/photos/neuralchaos
BUT, the *real* change, in my opinion, is that (to use Steve Job’s words), the iPad is a “post-PC device”. By design, it extracts/elevates itself from the world of personal computing into *something different*. It changes the game in terms of how users (students) interact with it, how they access content and communicate with each other. You do not need to know how to use a computer in order to use an iPad, and that’s the point. Love it or hate it, it’s revolutionary. It’s changing the way that people use computers. It’s changing the way people learn.
This can be quite liberating. If an instructor or student doesn’t have to worry about how their device works (provided that it does work), maybe we can get on with what’s really important – teaching and learning.
