Barry Dahl dot com

Fast Company publishes an article that is getting retweeted and re-facebooked all over the net. The title is “Apple’s iPad Officially Passes the Higher Education test [Exclusive]”

“Officially” appears to mean that the iPad scored high marks overall in a student pilot project at Reed College in Portland, OR. Let’s see – students were given an iPad to use for the course and then could buy it at 50% off at the end of the course. That sounds like an unbiased sample, now doesn’t it? The glorious iPad received it’s high marks in spite of the following:

The virtual keyboard is a pain for composing anything beyond short notes. The nonexistent file system makes finding important documents difficult and sharing across applications nearly impossible. Finally, managing a large number of readings in PDF format becomes a major time-suck. Syncing PDFs via iTunes was found to be “needlessly complicated,” emailing marked-up versions back to oneself was “prohibitively time-consuming,” and even the cloud-based storage, Dropbox, “failed to work seamlessly with PDF reading/annotating applications.”

Apparently, it’s just so cool that they don”t care about what it can’t do. And 50% off the cost of buying your own is enough to make any college student a bit giddy.

Filed under: Computing, Higher Ed |