The iPad is bad for education. Well, that’s not really true. The iPad itself is revolutionary in so much as it redefines the desktop computing paradigm that’s been around since Apple unveiled the Macintosh some 26 years ago. It’s not so much that the iPad is bad for education as much as it’s about the fact that it’s a distraction. It’s distracting to educators and policy makers because it’s shiny and new and available via purchase order.
Educational technologists are, at the end of the day, technologists. Technologists are geeks. Geeks like toys. The inner geek sees something like the iPad and begins shooting off endorphins like fireworks on the Fourth of July. The inner geek says “We got to bring this into the classroom. We just have to. This device is going to change the way we go about education.”
The iPad certainly has the potential to change the way we teach and learn in these here United States of America, but it probably won’t—and that has nothing to do with device itself. The problem is that many devices have come before the iPad that had the ability to revolutionize education—and they didn’t. Not because they weren’t revolutionary, but because we weren’t revolutionary.
We’re at the point where the tools to change education has been around for years. Another shiny, new device is not going to be the key to unlocking a model of education that reflects the demands of the twenty-first century. The tools are available, now we’ve got to sit down and do the grunt work—the work we keep putting off every time a new toy gets announced. It involves policy change. It involves innovation. Most of all, it involves a whole lot of hard work.
It doesn’t even involve a whole lot of imagination. Twenty-first century learning is just twentieth century learning with better tools. John Dewey and friends came up with a usable framework decades ago. Yet, for some reason, we’re still worried about how well we can measure an educational system straight out of the industrial revolution.
The iPad is not going to revolutionize an educational system based on the Industrial Revolution because it can’t. It’s no cotton gin.
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There are more than a few college students out there who disagree with you: http://blog.ischoolinitiative.com/
I think the iPad might actually reverse a revolution in teaching if it really takes hold of school IT departments. Others besides myself have said this, but the iPad appears to be for media consumers rather than media creators. Some teachers have just started learning how to get their students to create content for the web (see my note here http://www.edutopia.org/1-to-1-laptop-programs-edchat-chris-ludwig). Now we are faced with the choice of whether we want to hand our students a really cool, shiny new device or let them work with the good ol’ laptop that in many ways is far more capable of generating content. So yes, the iPad may lead to a revolution, but only if we let it.
I think you should have led with your sentence:
“The problem is that many devices have come before the iPad that had the ability to revolutionize education—and they didn’t. Not because they weren’t revolutionary, but because we weren’t revolutionary.”
The device will lead to content creation as more apps are developed for it. It could be a full-blown OS X tablet in a few product generations. Apple and developers will figure out how to take advantage of new interface options.
The education system needs to figure out how to get this implementation right with proper funding, professional development and modeling, and real administrative accountability.
Your point about inertia and educators are well taken; however, your suggestion that we use 21st century tools to teach as we have in the 20th century sadly ignores the fact that with these new tools we can begin to move away from behaviorism and towards constructivism. This is the essence of the possible transformation.
George, I’m definitely not suggesting that we use technology to power a behaviorist model of education. Instead, I’m much more interested in a more progressive pedagogy where students are encouraged and empowered to create. Some of the basic tenets of that have been around for a long time—although they were never practiced on any large-scale level. You are right, however, when you say that twenty-first century learning is remarkably different that its ancestors and it definitely an oversimplification to say that it’s just twentieth century learning with better tools.
Matthew, I think you’re absolutely right about the first sentence. I’d offer you an editorial gig, but it doesn’t pay
very wellat all. I totally agree with you. It’s like the iPhone, which didn’t hit it’s stride until third-party developers began making applications for it. As Chris said, its more of a media consumption device than a media creation device. I think that will change as developers begin to cut their teeth into the API. I think that some really cool stuff will be possible as we begin to wrap our heads around using touch instead of the mouse and keyboard. The Brushes application that Apple demonstrated at the press event is a great example of what I’m talking about.