After some initial scepticism by the market watchers, it would seem that iPad fever is in full swing at the moment, with all the attendant noise, PR and a headlong rush by the Taiwanese to produce clones to join the party. For my own part, it was the latter that made me sit up and take notice. From what I’ve read, iPad style tablets based on Google Android operating system will be hitting the streets shortly in the $100-200 range, roughly translating to a £100-200 price tag, or something similar to the cost of an iPod Touch.
This made me think. Despite common perceptions, innovation never happens in smooth progressions, it happens in step changes, followed by periods of calm and I sense we’re about to see just such a shift in the way we educate our children. Here’s a few reasons why:
One: the emergence of clever, education focused applications. I’ve blogged before about the heaps of cool start-ups focusing on education and the US VC’s that have been backing them with money.
Two: the device. Up until now, the target platform has been the PC/Mac, but there’s a couple of reasons why a tablet is a much better idea in the classroom. It weighs less; with all the books and PE kit they have to carry, adding a laptop would be the straw that breaks your children’s back. Its more appealing. Its less unwieldly. Who’s got space on the average desk for text books (they won’t be going away soon), exercise books, pens and a laptop. It plays music.
Three: money. You wouldn’t risk your child taking a £600 iPad, Macbook or laptop to school in their rucksack, no matter how cool they thought it was. But plenty of kids take their iPod Touch. So why not a £120 Android based tablet?
Three: a generational change in attitudes. From the dawn of time to the days until my days at school, education hadn’t changed much. My children think that’s because I was educated at the dawn of time, but the reality is that a couple of millenia didn’t really change much. But as the Horizon Report shows, the current “Facebook Generation’ don’t really understand why they have to travel back in time whenever they enter the classroom. They’re hungry to use the cool stuff inside the classroom as well.
We’ve been engaged in a lively debate this morning about our site Beanbag Learning. As the site has grown rapidly over the last year or so to become one of the biggest online tutor directories in the UK, it has attracted its fair share of competitors looking to lure away tutors or use Beanbag Learning as a recruiting tool for their own sites. The natural reaction is to consider such free riding as negative behaviour and warn them away, but is there another viewpoint? Within reason, don’t tutors want their skills to be as widely advertised as possible and don’t potential customers want it to be as easy to find them as possible? In other words, would sharing make us good citizens? Should we take a creative commons approach and promote sharing of information with other sites? For sure, if we take that approach it needs to be done in a controlled way, so that tutors can ultimately decide if their information is shared, but there’s clearly a DEMAND for the information, so why should we stand in its way if we can do it so that tutors benefit, users benefit and we benefit.
I’ve just come back from a trip to China, talking in a mixture of business and pleasure in Beijing, Shanghai, Qingdao and Suzhou. It was my first trip to the country and what struck me was the single minded way in which they are pursuing the ‘betterment’ of their country. Leaving aside the political considerations for a moment, there seems to be a laser-like focus on improving things for the average man (and woman) in the street. One of the most striking aspects of this is the way that education is seen as a competitive weapon in the battle for economic success. Books such as ‘Built to Last’ have long championed the need to have the ‘best people on the bus’ in the pursuit of corporate success and China Inc. seems to have taken this to heart at a country level. Of course, they can’t choose who’s on the bus, but they can choose what skills they have and you can almost feel the frenzied acquisition of knowledge. Its been said before, but its worth repeating, countries as well as companies that ignore the education of their people and staff do so at their peril. Its a competitive world out there and todays heroes can too often become tomorrow’s zeroes. Education is set to become one the great global markets in the years to come and the challenge for both governments and corporations will be to deliver it in an increasingly low and pervasive fashion.
As part of our ongoing assault on the barriers between ‘people who know’ and ‘people who want/need to know’, we’ve been working on an update to that hoary old chestnut: the Q&A site. Part of our approach is to create something that’s truly conversational. After all, if you’ve got a question that needs an answer, how many times does a single, straight answer give you what you looking for? Too often, there’s a bit of clarification etc involved, more like Q&A&Q&A…
So we’ve been taking a good look at Q&A 2.0, or more like Q&A 2.1, and I’m really please to see that’s it’s a lively area of development on the web at the moment, with our friends at Aardvark, Hunch doing some really interesting things. As is so often the case, simple problems are sometimes the hardest to solve and we’ve been really grafting hard to produce something that’s as simple to use and robust as possible. Usability is everything. We’re more than interested to talk and share with anyone in the field, so feel free to get in touch. As usual, our starting point is education, tutors and tutoring, but we don’t expect it to end there.