On the way home, I made a last sweep through our local Borders. I went through the bookshelves and magazine racks and wondered what exactly will be the extent of our access to print media when none of this is around any more. Is the publishing industry (no matter how vibrant or moribund) about to run out of outlets?
The Illinois Library Association has just sent out an 'Action Alert' with the title, "Contact your representative to oppose filtering legislation".
Although I agree with all the 'talking points' it suggests, this one really strikes a nerve:
You'd think these people had better things to spend their money on:
Facebook and Google size up takeover of Twitter: report(Reuters) - Google Inc and Facebook Inc, plus others, have held low level takeover talks with Twitter that give the Internet sensation a value as high as $10 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Sites like Twitter come in and out of fashion all the time. $10 billion bucks? Can you say, 'MySpace'?
So let's say the iPad Fairy™ comes down and gives everyone at your school a free iPad. Miracle, right?
Well, apparently not at Stanford's School of Medicine. As an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education explains:
But when Stanford's School of Medicine lent iPads to all new students last August, a curious thing happened: Many didn't like using them in class.... In most classes, half the students had stopped using their iPads only a few weeks into the term.
How's this possible? Didn't they hear their own Assoc. Dean Charles Prober describe them as "extremely tech-savvy" in a press release from the School earlier in the year:
Because the population of new students is extremely tech-savvy, it makes sense to teach them through the use of the electronic devices they're familiar with, Prober said, adding, "We can either say, 'That's silly. They have to learn the old-fashioned way.' Or we embrace where they are."
Yup, 'embrace where they are'! That's the spirit!
Only they didn't. And you're entitled to ask where exactly 'they' -- in this case the extremely tech-savvy incoming class -- where exactly 'they' are.
Well, wouldn't you know, Stanford provides us with an answer! Every year the University conducts a survey of incoming students as to their computer use and in 2009, for example, they found that "90% have a Windows or Mac laptop".
So basically an overwhelming majority of students already have a computing device. It's called a laptop.
Of course the notion that a laptop might be more useful to students than an iPad, even in this day and age, never seems to dawn on the administrators. Instead they seem to be afflicted with a serious case of 'techno-infatuation disorder' or 'TID' for short. This is where the desire to be seen buying the latest tech gizmo overrides any consideration of whether the intended audience might actually want to use it.
Now if the administrators at Stanford's Medical School truly believed their students were 'extremely tech savvy', they might have left the decision of what to bring into the classroom up to the students themselves. But again, we're talking techno-infatuation disorder here and considerations such as what our users might actually want fade in comparison to what we might want for them.
Some shots on the way to work today.
Wonderful! Look what Amazon's recommending to me. Not only do they think I'm a vegan but an overweight vegan at that. I'm devastated.
