A bite of the Apple

Had an interesting day at the rather grandly titled Apple EU Leadership Summit. It’s organised by Apple for an audience of European HE ‘thought leaders’ (now there’s a wonderful title) and timed to precede the BETT exhibition of educational technologies – this timing meant that it was very well attended by people from outside the UK. We were all given an iPad for the day, loaded with educational apps (many aimed at pre-schoolers so very interesting for me as mum to a 3 year old!)

In the first session we heard from various senior Apple people about how uptake of their products by students and institutions is growing – especially in the US (at Duke University 92% of students own – or plan to buy – an Apple laptop).  We saw how adoption rates for new technologies are soaring – it took just 9 months to sell 10 million iPads, compared with 19 years for the colour TV. Not surprisingly there was much focus on the wonders of the iPad and its  educational apps.

We heard from Theodore Gray from Wolfram – creators of Mathematica, of the superb WolframAlpha ‘computational knowledge engine’), and subsequently of the wonderful Elements iPad app, and the soon-to-be-launched Solar System app (shameless plug – many of the graphics were created by my good friends from Planetary Visions (a company originating from UCL).  I had a weird and utterly distracting experience in this session as the chap sitting next to me (Neil Powell) was sketching the speaker on his iPad using the Sketchbook app!

Martin Bean – VC of the OU – made us all laugh by referring to the deployment across the auditorium of ‘weapons of mass distraction’;  I had been switching between the summit agenda/networking app, Twitter, email, playing with the apps on the iPad, and trying to take meaningful notes – multitasking on a truly stupid scale. Bean was great, as always, showing some wonderful examples of the OU’s online courses.  He talked of the challenge that we all seem to think of as new since the ‘information age’ of transforming information into meaningful knowledge, and pointed out that twas always thus, quoting from Vannevar Bush in 1945 and Denis Diderot in 1755.  Information overload was also a theme for Bill Rankin’s (Abilene Christian University) closing keynote – he pointed out that as educators we no longer need to deliver information; rather we – and our students – need to be able to assess information. Information is becoming out of date or even obsolete rapidly; it is the models and techniques for managing and assessing it which remain valid and essential.

The day also included a hands-on workshop exploring new iPad apps. Fun, but made me fret about the need for cross platform tools.  We are a long way from a time when all students will have an iPad  – or indeed any kind of smart tablet device.  So, no matter how great these apps are for learning they don’t represent a realistic opportunity for our students unless departments invest in large scale purchase (which seems unlikely in the current financial climate).  And even if UCL could afford to equip students in this way, some students may not want to use products from one particular vendor, especially if they don’t easily work with their existing tools of choice.  Even though I am an enthusiastic Apple user both at home and work, I consciously choose cloud-based tools like Evernote and Dropbox which work on all platforms where possible (for instance, much as I’d love to use Keynote for presentations I have to be able to share with colleagues who are PC users.)

Ah well, a good day overall, and found lots of great new apps for my 3 year old daughter!