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12 Comments
I can’t help but be impressed with the ipad, but i’m also curious of others’ perspectives on its use in an academic setting. Any thoughts out there???
I’m fairly underwhelmed, although I should really see the screen before I render final judgment. In my opinion, there is not terribly much it odes beyond the iPhone or the iPod Touch except for offer iBooks. And I personally prefer to not read books on a screen. The backlighting isn’t ideal for my experience.
I’m also wondering about how I would go about protecting that screen. Books are great devices for being flexible and able to beat up a bit without losing much of their operational value. This is the same problem with the Kindle, of course. So maybe I’m just whining now.
An aside, I too have a hard time reading on my laptop or desktop for long periods of time. Having never used an E-book, are they less harsh on the eyes than a regular PC?
With the addition of the full keyboard, I don’t see why this (or a soon-to-come) upgrade can’t fully replace most laptops. Sure, there’s no flash but that won’t affect too many user’s computer experience. That being said, if Apple really plans for this to take over the netbook market share, they’ll need to fix the Flash absence.
Except the entire reason I bought a netbook was because I could get 250GB of storage space in a device that cost less than $300. Meaning, I wanted it to hold everything I own while being cheap enough that I won’t feel bad if it’s lost or stolen. And I am a Mac person. The biggest is only going to be 64GB? That won’t even hold all of my music, TV shows, and movies, which I like to have when I travel. Maybe one of the upgrades will do it.
In an academic setting? What would you want done with it?
Holding textbooks would be a natural, but I’ve not seen anything about enabling the type of marginal notes that the Kindle allows, and a lot of my students don’t actually like to read on the computer. It strikes me as inappropriate for “every student must have an iPhone/iPod touch” initiatives at the college level—too idiosyncratic to standardize on. Whether it can replace laptops is going to need to be a personal choice (it wouldn’t be replacing mine, except for the occasional weekend), so not really something professors can count on being able to build on.
Looking at the Princeton Kindle initiative, I think that used pilot classes. In that sort of setting, it could be very cool to also offer a Course App that included syllabus, blogging, discussion board, or something–but is that worth developing for one or two classes? Esp since you could just load Blackboard/Moodle/Etc on it.
I think elementary school teachers are excited about it, as more affordable than laptops, and it’s a natural to target with school specific apps—although, will Apple will give Ed discounts? In a setting that’s relatively ordered anyhow, I see lots of potential—at the college level, not so much.
Not exactly about the iPad, but part of why I think launching exciting tech initiatives is an uphill battle:
I asked PH on twitter, a while back, if I could create an .ics file of major due dates for my students to import into their calendars, save them a little bit of trouble (PH sent me a complex link re creating a CSV google can read). Turned out this is REALLY easy in iCal—create a new calendar, enter dates, export it. Delete the calendar if I don’t need the dates.
Two of my 12 freshmen tried it out.* My seniors were not even interested. These are all generally middle/upper middle-class students, largely laptop owners, but they just aren’t technologized like that.
*for one, it worked perfectly in iCal, for another, it glitched out—also in iCal. Go figure. I had polled these students, by the way: say 5 mac users, 5 windows, 2 both.
An actual question. When a site does not have a printable version of its content, how can you get a printable copy of the entire page’s contents? See, this is a page I want for my research:
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2010/01/14/rape-victims-vs-prison-rape-victims/
When I hit print, I get down to the second photograph, but I do not get anything else of the main article. When I convert to PDF (which is a form of printing, I know), I get the same thing. When I use Readability to convert the page, I can get a printout of the entire article, but I do not get any of the comments. How can I get a printout or PDF of the entire page?
I know people would ask why I’d want one, and I use printouts for two reasons. One, as I mentioned in my review of Organizing for the Creative Person, I like to have my materials spread out in front of me and viewable all at once as opposed to individual files. Two, if I’m going to quote something in an article, I need to have copies of everything I quote. I’ve got an article coming out in March where I quote numerous interviews with an author, and half of them have disappeared since I wrote the article. I needed the printouts/PDFs to show the journal’s editors that I was quoting things correctly. But something in the CSS or whatever means only getting a page of content when I print.
I just checked with the Firefox extension Screen Grab, and it seemed to work fine on that page (OS X Print to PDF failed, yep). No clue how it might print out, though—no page breaks. It’s a png that zooms to readability.
For a research backup, something like LittleSnapper, which keeps screenshots in a library/database, might be easier. (But I had to get ScreenGrab because I was trying to screenshot Twitter, and LittleSnapper wouldn’t go past the page breaks even though I loaded multiple pages into one screen)
Okay, I’ll try that out. Thanks! I thought of just using Grab to take individual screenshots, but that seems so tedious.
I hope this is the open thread comment area — bit of confusion.
I have recently become the director of my college’s Center for Teaching Excellence. We are a small college where the faculty work very hard. It has been my perception that in recent years the CTE puts on lots of programs to help faculty become better teachers. Unfortunately, the response usually seems to be along the lines of “That looks really interesting, and if I had the time, I might try it out.” As such the CTE accomplishes little. I would like to change that. Based on these comments, I am considering devoting much of the next year at the CTE to issues of faculty efficiency. Although I won’t be able to squeeze any release time, or anything substantial out of the college, it would be nice if I could help the faculty get a little more time through more efficient practices in areas like class prep, grading, and so forth. So, I would really like it if ProfHacker could address these kinds of issues or perhaps point me to some resources. I am brand new at this and really don’t know what I am doing yet.
Bill, thanks for the post. (And this is the place for open thread comments.
) What you have suggested is something that I’ve thought long and hard about, and such issues are on my plate of upcoming posts. In the meantime, have you checked out POD (Professional and Organizational Network)? POD is a network of faculty development professionals. There’s a great listserv, conferences, speakers, publications…. tons of things that could be helpful to you. [http://www.podnetwork.org/]. We will be having some posts soon that could help you, too. Keep commenting!
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