Group items tagged

A former Apple interface designer critiques Microsoft's 'Productivity Future Vision (2011)' video that has been spreading on the web (and a couple of you have shared here on Diigo).  The Apple guru's biggest gripe? Microsoft portrays a future dominated by single finger interaction with touch-enabled devices. But we are already seeing more elaborate Human-Computer interaction involving more of  our bodies and communication modes-- full body (Kinect, Microsoft), and voice & hearing (Siri, Apple). Mr. Victor says that Microsoft's vision wasn't as revolutionary as it seems.

I agree with the author on Microsoft's lack of vision about future technologies (which I also ranted about on facebook). At the same time, we have to note that Microsoft currently has devices that enable 'full body' communication and Apple does not. And their latest wonder 'Siri' was acquired, not developed internally. I respect Apple for their innovations but we haven't seen any 'vision' from Apple yet and I am curious to know what they might be thinking.

Interesting article about a new wrinkle in the ongoing patent war between Samsung and Apple -> using Qualcomm's licensing to Apple as a shield for patent protection from Samsung.  

"The question is, will Apple do with the iPhone what it did with the Mac? Will it leap out to a technological lead and then find a way to clutch defeat from the jaws of victory? Or has Apple learned from its previous experience and figured out a way to turn its superior design and wonderful technology into market domination?"

In this feature, Apple profiles HOW their products are used in a variety of educational settings. It's one of the least 'promotion-based' sites I've seen from Apple in awhile... Typically, I'm cynical when a company "profiles" its own products; however, this one is done fairly well. This site could be a helpful model when attempting to demonstrate functional use of a product, highlighting the ends, not the means...

Thanks for sharing this link! I know that there are some schools which have bought iPads and then didn't know what they were going to do with them. This community obviously had a clear idea of how to use them, what problems they were going to solve and how to assess their outcomes. Nice!

Will Ping influence the Apple-Facebook Friction?

Tablets' potential for learning, as seen by apple. Thoughts?

I personally see a lot of potential for the use of tablets in education, but I find it interesting that Apple is heavily promoting the ipad for educational uses on its web site, but doesn't offer the educational discount for the iPad.

Check out these old videos from the '80s in which Apple predicts the future of education. First thought is that the technologies they show in these videos seem quite pedestrian in today's world. Second thought is that they got it right- many of these things that they show in these videos have come to fruition. Very cool look back.

Check out how Apple partnered with textbook publishers to revolutionize the education space with this new model. Just announced today!

"The event is expected to focus on iTunes U and electronic textbooks/' iTunes U has been offering free educational videos and recorded lectures for years. I wonder what they'll unveil on Thursday the 19th re: e-textbooks

Nice contrast - one company believes in design and the other in data.

I'm intrigued by the writer's argument that a focus on data (Google) helps make the existing technologies more effective and powerful, while the focus on design (Apple) helps create new technologies and bring about revolutions in technology usage. It seems to me that we must have both existing to reap maximum benefit, but it's not clear whether the two ideologies together will be as effective as they are apart.

This paper presents the first experimental evidence on the effects of live versus internet media of instruction. Students in a large introductory microeconomics course at a major research university were randomly assigned to live lectures versus watching these same lectures in an internet setting, where all other factors (e.g., instruction, supplemental materials) were the same. Counter to the conclusions drawn by a recent U.S. Department of Education meta-analysis of non-experimental analyses of internet instruction in higher education, we find modest evidence that live-only instruction dominates internet instruction. These results are particularly strong for Hispanic students, male students, and lower-achieving students. We also provide suggestions for future experimentation in other settings.

The authors are very misleading in their claim that this study is the first on live versus internet. There is a huge literature on this topic stretching back decades. The claims about the generalizability of the study are also very suspect.

Chris, I think the authors are claiming it is the first experimental trial where participants were randomly assigned to a treatment or control condition. They contrast their study with the DOE meta-analysis, which I don't think includes experimental studies--at least as experiments are defined within econometrics. My problem with the study is that they are aren't really comparing live vs. internet so much as live vs. recorded video. They are very careful to not take advantage of any of the potential affordances of internet mediated instruction, except broadcasting a lecture, to preserve the "purity" of their experiment. Of course, that's not a terribly interesting experiment. The more interesting experiments, which they deride as "not apples-to-apples," is to compare a traditional lecture format with an online course that takes full advantage of the affordances of the internet. These studies would confound the carefully balanced design of an apples-to-apples comparison, but no serious education technologist thinks we should just record all the lectures and post them...

In response to Chris's last side this morning about a mobile "6th sense", I wanted to bring up Apple's "knowledge navigator" vision of an intelligent "personal agent from the late 1980's.  Tuesday morning, it's highly anticipated that Apple will introduce an "Assistant" derived from it's 2010 purchase of Siri Personal Assistant Software.  Some form of Chris '6th sense" agent may become reality tomorrow morning!

"Apple is widely celebrated for making devices as easy to use as they are elegantly designed. What customers probably don't know is that some of these features aren't exactly new-they evolved from software Apple created to help disabled people use PCs. "

After School officias from Little Falls, Minn., visited Apple HQ, they decided to spend $1.2m on 1700 iPads. Late Mr. Jobs in an interview with Wired mangazine said, "what's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology." "Mr. Jobs blamed teachers' unions for the decline in education." Walter Issacson, the biographer of Steve Jobs, writes Bill Gates and Steve Jobs "agreed that computers had, so far, made surprisingly little impact on schools - far less than on other realms of society such as media and medicine and law."

The last point this article makes is an interesting one: clearly the gaming folks were at the table when the iPhone 5 was designed but what about the education people? What would it look like if the new version of iOS had a learning management system embedded within the OS?

"Apple said electronic high school textbooks from its initial publishing partners, including Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, would cost $15 or less. That is much cheaper than print textbooks, some of which can cost over $100". woo hoo!

I can explain the business model to you if you'd like that shows how the $15 price point is feasible in what turns out to be an almost $40 million dollar textbook investment! Just let me know!

I would be definitely interested :-)

Commentary on NYT article by Matt Richtel critical of Apple's "wooing" the ed industry.

Possibility of gesture-interface technology on forthcoming ipads. 

Amazon announced its Whispercast technology to provide centralized control over content distribution, social media, password protection, and document sharing.