1:10 | The bar is high
The bar is pretty high — those devices are going to have to be far better at doing some key tasks, he says. Better than the laptop and better than the smart phone. It needs to do browsing, email photos, video, music, games and e-books, he says.
I picked this quotation by Jobs because the first feature he mentions is “browsing.” The fact that the iPad browses the internet places the open global commons of what is known into the iPad owner’s hands. (The image to the right is from Apple’s new iPad video.)
Jobs said in his presentation that iPad’s virtual bookshelf is “a great reader, a great online bookstore…we think the iPad is going to make a terrific e-book reader not just for popular books but textbooks as well.”
As I write this post, Jobs’ presentation continues: Now being highlighted is Pages, Apple’s wordprocessor with which iPad is equipped.
The flurries of hype around the new iPad announcement have included speculation that it would make laptops obsolete. Perhaps so. For students who own them, iPads will make their backpacks obsolete. Maybe they should keep a backpack to carry their lunch, but in iPad they will have a mobile to transport them to online knowledge, display reading material, and connect them with notes and reports that they write and file.
“ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN — With a curriculum that glorifies violence in the name of Islam and ignores basic history, science and math, Pakistan’s public education system has become a major barrier to U.S. efforts to defeat extremist groups here, U.S. and Pakistani officials say. . . .
“. . . according to education reform advocates here, any effort to improve the system faces the reality of intense institutional pressure to keep the schools exactly the way they are.”
How widespread is this intransigence toward changing schooling? This kind of stubbornness is not just found in Islamabad. Intense pressure to keep schools as they are ranges in different places and cultures from orthodoxy to tradition to profit issues by vested interests and control demands by unions and, most sadly, a panoply of corruption.
While we deal across the planet with the inertia and intransigence that promises to perpetuate failing schools for at least another generation or two of kids, why not let the kids trapped in these schools learn the basics with handschooling? To do that, we need to get a mobile that browses the internet to each kid, and focus more on sharpening the findability online of basic subjects. Every boy in the picture above could learn his algebra from a mobile friendly tutorial in Urdu, Punjabi – and one day the full range of local languages. My guess is that many Pakistanis of their generation are already doing some handschooling beyond their school walls — or when they have no school to attend.
Originally posted in GoldenSwamp.com
This awesome ad is actually for a device that can deliver knowledge — the kind of stuff like reading, writing, arithmetic, history, literature, and science that used to reach students through analog devices like libraries and textbooks. Like the most highly skilled Ninjas, mobile wireless connectivity cuts through all the old time obstacles to put what kids want to learn directly into their hands.
The strong echo continues in schools and across the world of what Jonathan Kozol indelibly named savage inequalities. The mobile window opens a global commons that is the same for each and oblivious to who is visiting it to learn.
In this New York Times photo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has in his hands the latest and greatest mobile manifestation.
I picked this quotation by Jobs because the first feature he mentions is “browsing.” The fact that the iPad browses the internet places the open global commons of what is known into the iPad owner’s hands. (The image to the right is from Apple’s new iPad video.)
