I have James Bridle to thank for recently reminding me of Piotr Czerski's The Web Kids. I used a portion of that piece in my presentation at the Covent Garden Apple Store last week:
We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment.
We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we were to tell our bildnungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke up online.
The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us.
Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.
I know what you think I'm going to say next: that these are the children we are teaching today. That we need to change our teaching approach to cater for this shift.
Wrong. The people Czserski describes are not today's pupils but the parents of today's pupils. Those who were teenagers coming of age when the consumer Internet arrived in the mid-90s are today's thirtysomethings whose five-year-olds are enrolling in your schools right now.
The transition to teaching 'digital children' is long since past. In a sense, they're our missed generation. The children whose first baby photos were digital are about to enter university.
We have five to seven years - maybe ten - until Czserski's Web Kids are the majority of parents. This is a trend that will never reverse itself, so we had better figure out how to meet these parents' aspirations for their children. These parents who grew up fast and online; who adopted laptops and mobile phones, then smartphones and who are now embracing iPad and Kindle.
Computers aren't an afterthought for these post-digital Web Parents. They're not even a thought – they just are.
For instance, consider these facts: (a) Reading is a major part of my job; (b) I annotate quite heavily the books I read for work; (c) I buy a lot of those books from Amazon in Kindle format. A while back I left my Kindle on an airplane, and the airline couldn’t retrieve it; but when I bought a replacement I downloaded all the books I had read and there my annotations were, unchanged. In fact, I didn’t even have to buy a replacement: I could have used the Kindle app for my Mac, or for the iPhone or iPad, or I could have read the books online, and in any of those environments my annotations would be present and identical. (On the web I can even copy and paste the passages I have highlighted and my own notes.)
Jacobs makes a very important point that ebooks are often far better tools for daily use. When Apple introduced Multi-touch books in iBooks 2, they made a big point about the ease of fast navigation in the textbook - something that is crushingly awful on a hardware Kindle.
At the same time, iBooks doesn't have a "back" button so navigating around a book via hyperlinks is fraught with the danger of losing your place (Clarification: this is true for multi-touch books but not for ePub books).
I spoke at a conference near Cardiff recently and in Q&A, I got The Question. I love getting the question.
What's the question? This:
What's wrong with Android?
I realised, giving my answer, that I've never written down my objections to Android. Before we get into this, let's understand that I'm primarily talking about "what's wrong with Android from the perspective of someone planning a long-term 1:1 deployment in a school". You can argue that these points don't matter in the grand scheme of things but these are the things that I choose to care about in my deployments. I ask these questions of every platform.
As I see it, there are several things currently wrong with Android from a deployment perspective.
Fragmentation
I'm not specifically talking about device fragmentation here. I'm talking about fragmentation of the basic operating system as deployed in the field.
Recently there have been several useful visualisations and articles posted about how quickly new versions of Android and iOS are taken up by the respective installed bases of each platform.
The basic problem is this: Google continues to evolve the core Android OS but they can't get that out to the majority of consumers in a timely fashion. I'm not talking here about user-facing features such as the latest design of the Calendar app or the visual tweaks to the home screen.
I'm talking about APIs. This really matters. I'll talk later about some specific places where it matters a lot, but it matters generally because the the APIs define the power available to third-party developers.
The Android platform is currently stuck in second gear because Google, their OEMs and the carriers can't, won't or simply have no incentive to get the installed base past the Android 2.x API set. There are better and more powerful APIs in Android 4, and there will be better ones again in the future, but developers can't take advantage of them because almost nobody is running the latest OS.
For example, Google recently shipped Chrome for Android which, by all accounts, is a pretty great mobile web browser. Unfortunately, it requires Android 4 and around 1% of the installed base is currently running that release.
This means that iOS apps are not only better than Android apps today, they're getting better faster than Android apps because Apple is deploying and the installed base is rapidly upgrading to much more powerful APIs on the devices in consumers' hands.
Backup and Restore
To all intents and purposes, Android has no backup system. That's not completely true, as there are APIs for backing up to the cloud. The API documentation is riddled with caveats:
The backup transport is the client-side component of Android's backup framework, which is customizable by the device manufacturer and service provider.
So it's no longer a question of "does Android support backup?". It's now a question of "does the customised version of Android installed on the Motorola Xoom support backup when I buy it through Carrier X?". You have to verify this on a per-device basis and you know how one of the strengths of Android is the wide array of devices you can buy? Enjoy!
Data backup is not guaranteed to be available on all Android-powered devices.
and:
Because the cloud storage and transport service can differ from device to device, Android makes no guarantees about the security of your data while using backup
To my mind this, alone, is a dealbreaker for Android in education. In a world in which the mobile device you deploy is going to be a serious computer that pupils will use to generate work for exam-level assessment, you had better have a way to back up and restore their data.
Lifecycle Support
The world of mobile devices is moving fast. We're on a one year upgrade cycle for devices and their operating systems. In any school situation, a technology roll-out program is a muti-year operation.
With iOS, you get updates direct from the source. Apple ships updates to any device for the period in which they're being supported. At the moment, this is usually three years or more for iOS devices: the iPhone 3GS from 2009, the 3rd generation iPod touch from 2009 and all iPads can currently run iOS 5.
The story so far on Android is quite different. Michael DeGusta's well-known visualisation of Android phone updates paints a sorry picture. That post doesn't address Android tablets but I judge platforms on their track record, not on vague promises that next time will be different.
This matters for several reasons. Firstly, if I'm going to be signing a two- or three-year lease for hundreds of devices, I need to have some idea of how well these devices will be supported over the lifetime of the lease. Imagine if we were still stuck with iOS 3.2 on our iPads today.
The second reason this matters is security. Lets talk about that.
Security
There are problems with security on Android. Roughly speaking, they fall into the categories of security exploits and malware. Every platform has security exploits - heck, the very basis of iOS jailbreaking is finding security holes to exploit - but the incidence of malware is not evenly spread.
One of the claimed strengths of the Android platform is the ability to download software from anywhere and install it on your device. No gatekeeper! No walled garden! That's a perfectly valid thing to aspire to.
I take the claimed importance of this at face value: if you want it, I assume you're planning to actually use it. If you're going to download and install apps from all over the web, you had better be sure that the base OS is bang up to date with security patches. That's simply not what you get with Android.
This is one of those places where Google's inability to move the installed base to new OS releases is actively harmful.
Applications
In 2011, I spoke at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. That was the coming-out party for all the Android tablets that year. What I realised at that event was this: anyone can make a tablet of moderate quality. They can put a browser on it, a decent mail client and a calendar. Most tablets can get a port of those apps whose business model depends on them being everywhere: Kindle, Evernote, Netflix, Facebook and so on.
My question was then, and remains this: where are the apps to challenge iMovie, GarageBand, Keynote, OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, Soulver, Flipboard, iThoughts, Noteshelf, Collabracam, The Elements, Brushes and ArtRage?
I'm not saying those apps cannot be built on Android but I am saying they aren't being built on Android right now.
Our experience over the past 18 months of teaching with iPad is that it's about way more than just surfing the web and sending email. The web is vital, of course, but we've seen the most benefit when using these powerful content creation apps.
I used the Mac in the days when nobody used the Mac. I don't believe and I'm not arguing that absolute quantity of apps is the sole determinant of a platform's value. The Mac often only had one or two apps in a certain category but it almost always had a good app in that category.
I just don't see the same quality, range, depth or ambition in the Android marketplaces that I see in the App Store.
VAR Interference
In education, many schools work through resellers rather than retail channels. Something I'm seeing more and more of is the "educational tablet". This is usually some kind of Chinese OEM hardware running an obsolete version of Android with a custom UI on top. I have a real problem with these products.
My entire experience with software written by educational suppliers is that they rarely keep up with the pace of the underlying vendor. Then, when something breaks, there's the inevitable finger-pointing between the reseller and the manufacturer.
When a new version of Android comes out, you're going to have to wait for your reseller to port their changes the new version of Android. This is the same problem that Android phone users have with Motorola, HTC and other OEMs - except that educational resellers are often far less well-funded and capable than major handset manufacturers.
In Conclusion
So that's where my problems with Android lie. When I decided to start this program, there were no Android tablets to consider apart from the Dell Streak 5. The Streak 5 shipped with Android 1.6, got an update to 2.2 at the end of 2010 and was discontinued in August 2011. By contrast the iPad 1 shipped with iOS 3.2, got an update to iOS 4 in November 2010 and then iOS 5 in October 2011. It's still supported for security and functionality updates in the iOS 5.x line. Even if iOS 6 doesn't support the iPad 1, that won't be out until late 2012. That's a good 2 years of complete support, security updates and substantial feature enhancements.
Right now, the Android platform looks stalled in the marketplace at Android 2.x. Android 2, coupled with vague promises of future upgrades seems to 'good enough' for most carriers and OEM manufacturers. Even Sony just launched their Experia S phone with Android 2.3 and a promise to upgrade to Android 4 in Q2 2012 (we've heard that one before).
You're either buying into a platform or you're buying gadgets. The fundamental disconnect between the apprently solid Android engineering that's happening at Google and the actual packaging and deployment that's happening to end-users is turning into a real problem. To my mind, it's a dealbreaker for schools or anyone thinking beyond their next carrier subsidy.
There was a time when iTunes U was just a section of the iTunes store where you could download audio and videos. Since Apple's recent education event, that's all changed. iTunes U is still a part of the iTunes Store but there's now a dedicated iTunes U app for iOS devices.
The other major change to iTunes U was a policy change. iTunes U was previously only available to universities. At the January education event Eddy Cue stated that "starting today K-12 schools can sign up" to iTunes U. We didn't get pre-announcement access but I signed up as soon as I could and Cedars has been accepted to iTunes U.
I've been obliquely but enthusiastically tweeting about iTunes U since its launch. Here's why.
What iTunes U Provides
Most people understand iTunes U as a part of the iTunes Store where you can download academic content for free. That content was usually an ordered playlist of videos or audio files. Some courses also offered PDF versions of slide decks, reading lists or other notes. That was pretty much it.
If you wanted to use these materials, you just downloaded them to your computer or iOS device and listened to or viewed them.
What Apple announced at the recent education event was a new iOS app dedicated to iTunes U content. The app looks a lot like iBooks except the shelves are Harvard-mahogany instead of Ikea-birch.
The idea now is that you can create a complete course in iTunes U, not just a playlist.
What is an iTunes U Course?
There are two types of iTunes U Course. The first, and most familiar, is what's called a "self-paced" course. A self-paced course is a complete syllabus, along with materials and assignments that you can download and work through at your leisure.
For schools, though, the beauty is in the "in-session" course. This is how you use iTunes U to run your classroom. An in-session course is one that's currently running and you, as the teacher, add to it in real time.
An iTunes U course of either type can contain three things: Info, Posts and Materials. The app provides a fourth space for you: Notes. These four sections represent the structure of the iTunes U app. Each gets its own tab.
I want to talk about each of these in turn, but slightly out of order.
Course Info
Course info is basically a number of styled text pages containing information about the course. There are three pages created by default:
Course Overview - General information about the course, contents, dates and so on.
Course Instructor - Biographical information about the teacher who created the course.
Course Outline - a syllabus list.
There's no restriction on these pages and you can add others. Some examples of others you might include:
Information about specific equipment required in class
Lab safety rules
Plans for class-related trips
Dates and places of exams
Basically, anything that's germane to the course can be put into an info page.
Materials
In the original incarnation of iTunes U, all we had was a list of course 'materials' - where materials was defined as audio, video and PDFs. In the new iTunes U the definition of materials is substantially expanded and the integration of these materials with the course is far deeper.
There are basically three kinds of material you can add to your course:
A link into an Apple storefront: iTunes Store, iBooks Store, iOS App Store
A file you upload from your computer
A link to something on the web
There's a lot of power in that first item. You can link to almost anything that Apple vends through a store front:
iOS Apps
iBooks
Movies
Audiobooks
Individual items in a podcast feed
Individual songs in an album
Individual items in another iTunes U course
There are some objects in the stores you cannot link to:
Albums in iTunes
Podcast feeds in iTunes
Other iTunes U courses
When you link to something in the store, iTunes U will fill in the metadata for you. When a student subscribes to your course, there are controls right in the iTunes U app to buy or download the store items.
You can also upload files from your computer. The files will be hosted on Apple's servers and made available to download by students. This is pretty important because what this means is that you don't have to rewrite all your materials in iBooks Author or publish them on an Apple store in order to adopt iTunes U. Just take your PDFs, images, videos, whatever and put them in your materials list.
Finally, you can link to anything on the web. Along with the URL itself, you can attach some metadata to the link:
Name
Author/Speaker
Description
"Explicit" flag
iTunes U will do a nice job of pulling in metadata from the iTunes Store for links into the stores but it doesn't do anything for URLs. It would be hard to do that in the general case but perhaps a little more could be done for the big sites like Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and Wikipedia.
When you subscribe to an iTunes U course, the app does not download the course materials automatically. In the app, the student can tap a "download" button to cache the materials on the device. If space becomes tight, it's always possible to delete the material and re-download it later. This is particularly useful if you have a situation where students might not have internet access at home.
If you have plentiful internet access and storage on the device, you can enable an auto-download setting. This will make the iTunes U app download any materials that are subsequently added to the course over time.
Notes
The third tab in the iTunes U app is called Notes. There are two kinds of notes:
Course Notes
Book Notes
A Course Note is simply a text note that you enter in iTunes U. It is a bit of a shame that you can't attach an image from Photos to a note but perhaps that will come.
A Book Note is a highlighted or annotated section of an iBook that is associated with the course through the materials list. The idea goes like this:
Say you subscribe to a course and download the course textbook. As you're reading in iBooks, you highlight and annotate the important parts of the book. Back in iTunes U, the Notes tab is accumulating all of these notes and annotations in one place for review.
You can't highlight the text of a book from within iTunes U but the annotation sync between iTunes U and iBooks goes both ways. If you annotate a highlight in iBooks, that annotation appears in iTunes U. If you highlight a section in iBooks, that highlight appears in iTunes U. If you then add a note to that highlight in iTunes U, it appears next to the highlight in iBooks.
It's worth noting that you don't have to publish a book to the world through the iBooks store to get this integration. It also works for ePub and iBooks files that you upload and deliver as a downloadable course material item.
Posts
I come to Posts last because Posts are the beating heart of iTunes U that integrate the materials and drive the course. A post is a styled-text message with a subject that can be attached to any part of the course outline.
Posts can also have an assignment attached. An assignment is an additional piece of explanatory text with an optional deadline and one or more course material items attached.
When the teacher posts a message to the course it automatically appears in the Posts section of the course in every student's iTunes U app. More than that, though, it will send a push notification to every device subscribed to the course.
Each post has a read/unread status and the iTunes U app provides a unified inbox for posts. The inbox has two views: all posts, sorted by date received, or assignments only - sorted by due date.
So how might you use Posts in class? Well the most obvious use case is to send out a message to the students. Since we started the iPad project, I've been looking for a simple way to push-notify pupils about things. iTunes U provides it.
Secondly, you can use it to set homework assignments. We currently use email to do this but we've found that some students struggle to adequately process their email to extract actionable information. With iTunes U, all of the actionable items arising from homework appear directly in a list called "Assignments", sorted by most-immediately-due. Huge win.
Some quick ideas for course materials:
Test paper in PDF with embedded forms that can be completed on the iPad
A partly-completed artwork for pupils to build on and submit via email
Links to study materials on the web
A template for a moodboard or digital collage that pupils have to complete on or afer a school trip
A framework OmniGraphSketcher document for pupils to identify parts of and complete
Any kind of course notes document in some readable format
I can further imagine teachers subscribing to the other courses that the children in their classes are taking. They'll be able to see what other teachers are planning and the materials that are being used. They'll be able to see other teachers' homework due dates and maybe even get ideas for cross-curricular links or project work that could tie-in with other classes.
Finally, we are often asked by parents to notify them when their children are set any homework at all so that they can ensure it gets done. With the best will in the world, it can be hard enough to administer homework to all your pupils without having to administer it to their parents as well.
One major use case I can see for iTunes U is simply having the parents subscribe to the courses their children are involved in. They'll see all the goings-on in the course; they'll be push-notified of any additional information and they'll have a pocketable list of all their child's assignments. Schools pay very good money for systems like this and iTunes U provides it for free.
Syncing and Deployment Implications
iTunes U syncs through iCloud. Subscribe to a course on your iPhone, it's subscribed on your iPad. Annotate a book on your iPad, the notes appear in iTunes U on your phone. There are a couple of deployment considerations arising from this.
Primarily, this is another nail in the coffin of the "shared Apple ID" deployment model that we've been using up until now. If you have multiple pupils and devices all using the same Apple ID, you're going to get sync issues all over the place. Pupils' notes will intermingle, their read/unread statuses will get mixed up. It will be a hot mess.
This is one of many reasons why we're moving to individual Apple IDs next year. I'll write more on that in due course.
Beyond that, though, there are no other major infrastructure or deployment issues around adopting iTunes U. You administer the course through a website and access it through iTunes U on iOS.
Subscribing, Security and Privacy
How does a pupil subscribe to a course? For self-paced courses, they navigate to the school's iTunes U page and click the Subscribe button. For in-session courses that won't be listed on iTunes, the course administrator can copy a URL from the course management portal and share that with students.
Opening the URL on an iOS device will launch iTunes U and prompt the user to subscribe to the course. There is no other authentication. It's important to realise that what you're creating on iTunes U is not a "private course". It's an "unlisted course". It doesn't appear in iTunes search but, if someone acquires the URL, they will be able to subscribe to the course.
Nowhere in iTunes U does there exist a "list of subscribers" to a course. This means that the teacher must treat the contents of the iTunes U course as if it were being posted on the public internet. After all, it is being posted on the public internet - it's just that unlisted iTunes U courses are part of the deep web, not the surface web.
It will be important for teachers to keep aware of this fact and avoid posting personal information through iTunes U. For example, one might be tempted to post digitally-marked test papers back through iTunes U. That's not a suitable approach and it's why iTunes U is not a replacement for a real school-wide email system.
Rebuilding on Top of iTunes U
In Scotland, we're in the middle of curriculum transition. Secondary teachers are preparing to start teaching all-new National 4 and 5 courses. Knowing that these new courses were coming, we have not spent time rebuilding the old courses and materials for the iPad-enabled world. Starting now, though, we're going to base everything we do in Secondary on iTunes U.
There are two sides to digital workflow in school. There's the information distribution and communication side and there's the submission, grading and feedback side.
It's important to understand that iTunes U only attacks the first part: information distribution and communication. It is not a test-taking, file submission and grading system. Neither does it track student progress through a course.
Here's how we currently handle information distribution: email. It's almost all through email. Files as attachments, course announcements and all kinds of other information go out to the kids by email. For the most part, this works. We all know the down-sides of email very well but it is at least free, fast and reliable. For files that are larger than email can handle, we're using shared folders through Dropbox. The pupils use a combination of Course Notes, Calendar and Notes to manage their assignments.
We're going to replace all of this with iTunes U.
iTunes U will allow us to unify:
Class announcements
Homework setting (and homework diary)
Access to digital course materials
Other class information
…into one app that everyone can use.
I stand by my earlier analysis that iBooks Author and iTunes U were the two most important parts of Apple's recent education announcement. With iBooks Author, we now have a very simple way to make high-quality electronic texts for use in the classroom. It will be to course materials what Keynote was to presentations.
iTunes U is a massively powerful tool for running a classroom full of iOS devices. It's extremely simple to use for teachers and the overhead of adoption is as close to zero as you can get: install iTunes U, upload some materials and post class messages and assignments as you go along.
Friday, June 1, 2012 at 1:07PM 