Wednesday, February 24, 2010

My Kid’s an Honor Student at iPad University: Apple on the Rebound in Edu | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD

I HOPE that Apple doesn't get a lock on education. I can understand why they want to, just as Microsoft wants to get all kids trained up on Windows at an early age so that they can throw the "cost of re-training" into every ROI calculation involving technology.

Time for education to start teaching kids to be comfortable with a variety of technologies and get over the notion that once they learn that the menus are attached to each app window instead of at the top of the screen they can never cope with the alternative (or the other way around).

I can fairly easily switch from a Linux machine to an Apple machine to a Windows machine and I'm almost at retirement age. Ten year olds probably understand these concept far better than their instructors at this point.

As for formats, web sites like Feedbooks demonstrate that content can be stored in any editable full-features format and converted on-the-fly to whatever format the user needs. The notion that it HAS to be in Java or C# or some unique Apple scripting language for the vast majority of these materials (which are text, pictures, audio, video) is vendor propaganda.

Hopefully school administrators will see through it.

No comments:

Post a Comment