Students need iPads like dehydrated people need seawater: it might seem like a good idea, but the devices are likely to create more problems than they solve. But that’s not going to stop Apple from giving away more than $100 million worth of its products to students in 29 states in an effort to “make a difference for students and communities” as part of President Obama’s ConnectED Initiative.
I have noticed that everybody wants to do something nice and helpful for students but nobody is in a hurry to ask them what they want to be done for them. So I decided to do something as radical and shocking as actually asking students a question about their needs.
The administration’s plan to ban textbook and give every student a tablet was greeted with eye-rolls and frustrated sighs.
“Why doesn’t anybody just give us books, real books?” one student asked. “That would actually be helpful.”
“So true!” another student said. “Having one more screen to stare at is not a pleasing prospect.”
In a fairly large room, I detected no excitement whatsoever at the prospect of substituting books with e-readers.
For some reason, everybody seems to believe that students can’t make decisions that will benefit them but it isn’t true. Maybe it makes sense to run these costly “reform” ideas by the supposed beneficiaries and see what they think.
P.S. Feel free to read the linked article but I warn you that, after the initial great sentence, everything else in it is utter garbage.
Clarissa's Blog 
My sophomore year, the physics department required the freshman physics majors to purchase the ebook, rather than the actual physical copy of the book. It’s cheaper and less cumbersome. However, most of the students I talked to in those classes said they had a lot more trouble because they couldn’t take notes or couldn’t pay attention to it like they could their print textbooks. I can see recommending tablets and e-textbooks as an option, but banning them completely is ridiculous.
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Oops. That last line should have read “banning print textbooks,” not “banning them.”
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Of course, no one bothers to ask the students what they want. I’ve been reading a lot of teaching pedagogy for this university course I’m taking about how to teach college students, and it is really quite impressive how much I constantly am thinking “well this all sounds well and good, but what do the students think about this?” – I think we forget what it is like to be students almost as soon as we’re no longer in those shoes, and who better to ask about what they need than current students?
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“Of course, no one bothers to ask the students what they want. I’ve been reading a lot of teaching pedagogy for this university course I’m taking about how to teach college students, and it is really quite impressive how much I constantly am thinking “well this all sounds well and good, but what do the students think about this?””
– Please, please do not lose that skill. It is easy to lose it because the environment is conducive to seeing students as furniture but let’s not allow that to happen to us.
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I keep trying. I was a student not too long ago, so I keep thinking about that.
I love my e-reader to bits, but only for novels and narratives. Textbooks aren’t read in a linear fashion – you flip back and forth, look things up while holding various pages to double check things. E-readers just don’t do that well.
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I actually like to take a short class in something I know I will struggle with (watercolour painting, pottery, a foreign language) every 2-3 years to make sure I really remember what it’s like to be a student, to feel lost and frustrated – and busy, and wanting to do well but having to fit study or practice in around other things. Helps a lot – I often think it would be really good for all academics to be allowed some funding to pay the fee to take a class as professional development training – it helps me MUCH more than to sit in training sessions on pedagogy taught by pedagogy experts!
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That’s a beautiful idea. There is a bunch of courses I’d be happy to take at our university.
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That really is a great idea. I’m currently taking a class on teaching pedagogy and have been really *not* impressed… the “experts” really do forget what its like to be a student…
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Apple has been using students as a captive audience for its products literally since the Apple II days. “$100 million worth of its products” buys, I’m sure, multiple hundreds of millions in brand familiarity, which probably counts for more than brand loyalty when platform switching is a source of inertia. Besides, the devices themselves are behavior trackers and market research tools; Trojan horses as gifts go.
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It is beyond wrong and unfair for universities to push students into this. My question is why am I the only faculty member who is angered by this??
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Perhaps the administration gets a generous gift or a commission from Apple. The other faculty members may hope to get their own tablets :). Students tend to tell what they think will make the teacher happy. An anonym survey would be useful.
“Having one more screen to stare at is not a pleasing prospect.”
That’s why an ebook reader that uses electric paper would be more useful. That won’t hurt students’ eyes if they stare at it for long hours. But who cares about students’ eyes? The crisis marketing of Apple and the wallet of the administration staff is more important.
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Even an electronic ink ereader is problematic. Students say it helps them to be able to leaf through a book. And I feel the same way.
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so again: electrONic paper
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I love e-ink ereaders to bits, but the refresh rate is really slow, which makes leafing through impossible.
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Apple is just shouting because their house is slowly burning down. They will be the new Nokia in max. 5 years. The elitist Jobs would have never allowed to throw his prestige product at college students for free in mass. After this (and the other fiascos) how will the poor premium segment feel themselves special by owning Apple products? They won’t. They will find a new brand. And the average person will choose the same-quality product of the competitors for a much lower price. Apple will be lame for the rich, and overpriced for the masses.
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Is that another part of the Windows 8 agenda of making people dependent on digital devices which don’t really serve any particular purpose?
They’re clearly trying to turn computers into toys (rather than tools) so the next target is paper books which by all accounts are far more effective for learning for most people.
Soon a college graduate (educated by electronic toys) will be no more employable than an illiterate peasant …. and that’s just the way the powers that be want it.
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“Soon a college graduate (educated by electronic toys) will be no more employable than an illiterate peasant”
Yes. Already today if you hire a recent graduate you have to train them from zero, and they expect you to provide them with different perks, organize them parties and other leisure time activities every other week, give them flexible hours, career planning, and of course support, support, support for everything. The school system and the nanny state expect the employer to act as a parent of a small child.
I think giving students tablets and ebooks is only the beginning. It seems in the future they will be taught (at least partially) by educational video games. Sometimes I take online courses to keep up with my web development skills and recently I found a course about how to develop educational video games for students (there’s a short video about the goal of the course, it’s worth to watch it: https://www.coursera.org/course/videogameslearning). It was a little bit shocking to imagine the knowledge level of someone who was educated by video games.
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“The school system and the nanny state expect the employer to act as a parent of a small child”
Because small children are unable to organize themselves into a force of resistance….
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Well, good job letting it get this far, then. 😀
As for computer games…
Here is a spreadsheet simulator/social engineering game, Democracy 3, the main gameplay aspect of which is manipulating governmental policies in an interconnected web. Got more from it than I did from Econ 101, though, to be honest, with our professor, that didn’t take much.
http://www.positech.co.uk/democracy3/
Here is a World War 2 military strategy game, Hearts of Iron 3, which is about how military, diplomacy and geography interact in preparation for as well as during a world conflict (Yes, you can play as either side of the Spanish civil war).
http://www.heartsofirongame.com/
Here is a Slower Speed of Light, a MIT developed game that is about translating the theory of special relativity into perceptible effects tied to player movements.
http://gamelab.mit.edu/research/openrelativity/
Here is a Kerbal Space Program, a game with a somewhat simplified (compared to reality) rocketry and aerodynamics physics engine that is about building airplanes and spaceships, then having the functional ones get somewhere and see the unsuccessful ones explode.
https://kerbalspaceprogram.com/
Here is a video of a 12 year old making a working printer in Minecraft.
Here is Depression Quest, a ‘day in the life of’ bit of fiction that uses simple mechanics to show how certain actions are present in the mind of but not attainable by a depressed person.
http://www.depressionquest.com/
Here is a Kiss, a game about exploring a kiss.
http://www.logolalia.com/hypertexts/a-kiss.html#
You’ve excluded yourself from some quite wonderful things for the fleeting pleasure of feeling superior to the young.
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Playing games gives people only a superficial knowledge. It’s not me who feel superior, but the hyper-pampered new generation who wants everything to be spoonfed to them. After someone fed them with the pre-prepared food in a supercomfortable, riskfree environment, and wiped their asses, they will demand to be treated as mature, responsible people. By the way I’m also young, and don’t have problems with other young people who weren’t raised in the overprotective, dumbed-down, modern way, or were smart enough to overcome it. I don’t look down on young people but on those who raised them this way. I also don’t have problems with video games as a recreational activity, but using them as a teaching method in schools? Because reading books or critically analyze sources is too hard? I don’t think it’s a good idea. It will lead to a world where college degree will mean nothing, and even those who would like to get real knowledge will be limited to obtain it.
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The digital devices that creep me out aren’t the ones “which don’t really serve any particular purpose.” If anything, those (the “general purpose computers”) are the ones I halfway trust (especially if they’re old). It’s the dedicated devices, the ones designed for a particular purpose, that creep me out. I want devices to be either user-programmable or non-programmable. Anything else is inevitably the worst of both worlds.
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