When the iPod touch first came out, I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Oh great, an iPhone without the phone.” The iPhone, at the time, was a phone that had a full-featured web browser (I’m only now realizing what an accomplishment this was) with a few Mac OS X Dashboard widgets thrown in for good measure.
I’m not suggesting that the iPhone wasn’t a game changer even back then. What I am arguing is that the iPhone of June 2007 doesn’t hold a candle to the iPhone of today. This of course has little to do with the minor hardware upgrades and everything to do with the evolution of the iPhone OS from 1.0 to 3.0. The original iPhone was a great phone; the current iPhone is much more than a phone.
Last Friday, John Gruber wrote:
In the early part of this decade, Apple’s turnaround under Steve Jobs was based on the concept of the Mac as a “digital hub” — a device to which you connect and manage satellite devices like iPods and cameras.
He also included in the footnotes:
Here’s a YouTube clip of Steve Jobs introducing Apple’s “digital hub” strategy in his January 2001 Macworld Expo keynote. It’s sort of mind-blowing — both in terms of the prescience of the strategy itself and just how long ago it seems. There was no such thing as an iPod yet, Mac OS X 10.0 was still two months away from shipping, and, talking about digital cameras, Jobs mentions that they then accounted for 15 percent of the camera market but would “soon” account for 50 percent.
The iPhone isn’t a deviation from the digital hub philosophy, it’s the natural extension of it. On my iPhone, I record audio, edit video, crop and filter photographs, communicate with peers and colleagues, collaborates on documents, find my way through downtown Manhattan, track my travel and speed, read The New Yorker, and a whole lot more. I can do this all from the palm of my hand. Sometimes, it’s hard to imagine life before the iPhone—a first world problem, for sure.
Oh, I can also make phone calls. That’s where I see the iPod touch coming in. In general, there is a shift in the way we think about mobile devices. We see them more as small, portable computers and less as small, portable telephones. And a quick nota bene before we go any farther: I’m not insistent that it is necessarily the iPod touch that will be the end all and be all of mobile computing. It could just as easily be a Google Android-based device or even something we haven’t seen yet. I’m only nominating the iPod touch because it’s the only one that exists as of this writing.
I disagree with many of the proponents of using cell phones in the classroom. I don’t think that they should be banned at all, but I don’t think we should be buying two-year contracts with mobile carriers just to get subsidized equipment. That’s short-term thinking. Also, not all mobile devices are created equal. Designing instruction around this vague idea of a mobile device is too abstract given that everything from a Motorola StarTac to a Motorola DROID qualify as mobile devices. I’m all for using mobile devices in the classroom, but let’s not kid ourselves and say that all mobile devices are created equal.
My biggest gripe with the iPod touch right now is its lack of a camera; a problem which I believe will be rectified in the first half of 2010. When that happens, we’re going to see the full potential of this inexpensive, powerful, and versatile multimedia device. This is especially true because, generally speaking, wireless internet is ubiquitous is many schools. You can buy five iPod touches for every laptop and when paired with the right cloud technology, you can eliminate the need for many non-essential tools (e.g. SMART Senteo remotes).
The biggest question to ask yourself when considering the instructional practicality of a mobile device is “Can I create with this device?” I’ll argue that there are relatively few devices out there right now that meet this benchmark. The second question that I’d like you to ask yourself is “What can a netbook do that an iPod touch can’t?”
We’ll talk more about this later.
Disclaimer: I posted this about a week ago on what’s now my reading list. So, if it looks familiar, it is. Please accept my apology.
Photo by Wesley Fryer
