What Dan made me wonder/realize is that by using iPads for educational purposes schools, both higher ed and secondary/primary ed, would be opening themselves up to censorship by Apple. In other words as I tweeted this morning:

Consider, that Apple’s track record here is not all that great. The way currently the App Store is administered, applications have to receive approval from Apple to be listed. Now supposedly this was initially done for quality assurance purposes (to make sure apps won’t crash your device) and in limited cases to insure that apps don’t duplicate existing core apps (listening to music, email) or interfere with AT&Ts money interest. But as the app store developed Apple extended their approval process into the role of censorship. From Apple’s Program License Agreement:

“Applications may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.”

So, Apple might block anything that in their reasonable judgement they think is “obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.” This as far as I am concerned is a dangerous situation, Apple as moral censor. Now certainly it is within their legal rights to do so, but the question is whether or not it is a good idea for us to enter this contract (and by us I mean both users and developers).

Most famously this restriction affected developers of “pornographic content” with Wobble being one of the more hyped, removed, reinstated apps. This also means that the range of iPhone sex apps must have stick figures rather than more illustrative pictures. So, say for instance you are teaching a course on human sexuality, or a sex education course, is Apple going to restrict what you can and can’t do with the iPad content wise?

Okay you might be thinking this is a liminal case, teaching sex in schools is always a touchy subject and Apple will be necessarily treading on shaky ground here. I think most people probably feel no threat from Apple as long as they limit their censorship to “pornographic content,” but as their policy indicates it extends further than that. There is political content that Apple not only would be willing to censor, but has already censored. (Worried yet?) The at this point most famous case of political censorship by Apple is of Mark Fiore, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his political cartoons. His app was censored by Apple. Now upon him winning the Pulitzer his app has subsequently been made available, but a situation where someone has to win a major award to overcome Apple’s censorship doesn’t exactly strike me as conducive to intellectual discourse.

Now consider the possible futures. Will Apple censor political apps that one might want to use in your classroom? What happens when Apple goes international with the iPad in education movement? Will the German laws restricting what can and can’t be said about Nazism limit what content Apple makes available? What about in China? Currently this is not an issue because the devices we use are independent from the content (or at least with respect to most computers), the company doesn’t get a say in how I use their device.

This initially might not seem like a big concern, for as many people pointed out on Twitter today, Apple is not going to censor documents that one accesses on the iPad, Apple only restricts what applications you can run on their devices. So presumably one could buy an ebook reader app for the iPad and run any Textbook that is published in ePub through the reader, Apple will have no say in the matter.

But as Dan’s Tweet points out this is a concern. For in the first place many books are published as apps so they will not get a work around. Especially with regard to textbooks which are likely to be published as apps requiring updates every year, following the software leasing model, rather than purchase a song model (textbook industries will love this as it yields greater revenue). Or as many of the educational materials people use will be “rich textbooks” not just ebooks, but packaged content with videos, quizzes, and “interactive content” so just publishing to .epub or .pdf won’t constitute a work around. Imagine the scenario where you want to include this M.I.A. video in your course content about police state violence, and racial profiling. (YouTube already removed this video, so it is not to far fetched too imagine Apple would deem it too violent.)

But take this even a step further, beyond “bookish” content, there is a range of material that I would want to make available to my class which Apple might chose to ban (and I am not even talking about the illegal stuff here). Consider, I have (and probably will continue to) teach Super Columbine Massacre RPG! Clearly this is content someone might find “obscene” or “defamatory” how do I know what Apple’s judgement on this is going to be? Is this really a decision I want to turn over to Apple? Indeed by allowing a locked down device into the classroom, especially if one makes it the center piece of a technology in the classroom movement this is precisely what will happen. Apple will have control over what type of content students can place on these devices.

I realize, as many pointed out on Twitter, that this is a decision many school boards already make, censoring course material, believe me I live in Texas, I get it. But there is something substantially different about a community deciding what is and is not appropriate for its students, and a corporation making these decisions. And, for higher ed, where we are not subject to the same school board politics, this would certainly be accepting a larger set of restrictions than we are used to. Again having one corporation serve as a media hub for both software, hardware, and now content, strikes me as a future we ought to resist.

(I need a “Just Say No to iPad in Education” banner.)

My initial thought: I would pay $1000 for one of these tomorrow, but only if they unlocked the damn thing. This (I am typing on it now, more on this later) is perhaps the most frustrating computer experience I have ever had. Frustrating not because the iPad is difficult to use, it is anything but. Rather, it is frustrating because it is such an artificially unnecessarily crippled device. Or as I have said to those who have seen me carrying one around, “It’s like being given a Ferrari, only to discover that is has been equipped with a VW bug engine.” The iPad looks nice, and shows what is possible, but only shows, never really delivers. Like I posited earlier this is an appliance not a computer, but if this was open, operating a full OS . . .

In this respect I think David Pogue’s schizophrenic review, one I sort of initially thought was a little cheeky, to clever by half, is pretty much dead on. If you buy one wanting a computer you will be disappointed, but if you buy one wanting a device for consuming all your digital content, it is well worth the price tag. Consider it is a video game platform, an ebook reader, and a way to surf the web. Quite a bargain in some respect. (But, and I stress this is strictly a consumption based device right now, you really have to fight it to use it to create and compose.)

On being an ebook reader:
Initially I thought that the iPad with it’s backlit screen could not compete with the Kindle or Sony eReader and eink, but after using the iPad I think the difference is not all that large. I have read for several hours at a stretch on the iPad and it doesn’t produce the eye strain I am used to associating with screen reading (Instapaper was one of my favorite uses of the iPad). To be sure, eink is still better, but the difference is nowhere near as large as I expected. Add to that the much easier (theoretically) ability to annotate your reading, and I could for see a future where I carry a slate style computer around to do most of my reading, especially journal articles and student papers. Furthermore the ability to do creative things, think beyond the book, embed video, dynamically update, nonlinear presentation, makes it promosing. I downloaded one “instructional app” a Stastics program that is textbook, plus quizzes etc, and it definitely points to a future for class content distribution that is much better than the current model. Plus I could carry around all my student papers, syllabi, important documents in one small form object. I do this already on the iPhone via Dropbox (minus the student paper part) but having it on a larger screen would make them far more useable. With an iPad I could truly go paperless.

Interface:
This is where the iPad really shines. Multi-touch screen interface changes the way you interact with a computer. Sitting down at a computer with a mouse and a keyboard just seems primitive now. The web surfing experience is so vastly superior. It’s honestly difficult to describe, the zoom in zoom out, slide objects around tactile nature of viewing. The iPad begins to change not only he way you interact with he web, but what can be done in terms of design and presentation. The best way to describe this is think Minority Report (note to Apple Minority Report serves as a proof of prior art so don’t be assholes and try and patent all of his). Very few applications have taken advantage of this yet, but the ones that harness the power of multi-touch really are a different sort of experience. I have been using iThought for mindmapping lately and there is a huge difference between clicking on a branch and moving it (as in with Nova Mind or other desktop based applications) and actually grabbing/touching the branch and moving it to where you want. The future is in touch screen interfaces, and I can’t wait for more of them.

Keyboard
The keyboard is not bad, I can use it for most of my typing. I am still slower than on a laptop with a full keyboard, but getting better, and I am sure I could retrain myself given another month or so. I also think that a case which would prop it up a bit or using the external keyboard could help. Certainly the keyboard would not limit me from using this as my primary computer, especially if I kept a full size keyboard at work for long composition, but I did write this whole blog post on the iPad.

Battery life:
Battery life is wicked good. I can easily go a whole day without charging it, more like two days.

Data:
This is where the iPad really sucks. There is no desktop, no place to store all of your data. For example if you want to build a Keynote presentation (the Keynote app is horribly crippled by he way, many of the features I am used to are not there) this can be incredibly frustrating. So you are in Keynote and you want a picture for your slide. You have to exit Keynote, go over to Safari open it up find the photo you want, copy it (if you want more than one you have to save them to iPhoto, if it is jut one you can save it to the clipboard), close Safari, go to Keynote and import the picture from the clipboard or iPhoto. Now say you need to give credit for the photo, you have to close Keynote again open back up Safari copy the URL, close Safari, open Keynote back up and then paste the URL into your credits slide. Seriously frustrating. I know the next release of the OS promises to allow multi-tasking, but the real issue here is not having a desktop to which you can save all the images, video, text, etc, you want. Or an open design platform so somebody could design me a clipboard with a 50 item cache. Applications for the most part can’t talk to each other and can’t pass data back and forth. So you have to develop all of these work arounds to have access to files. Right now the best way i think is thru Dropbox, but your Keynote presentation can’t save to Dropbox it can only save locally. So, you have to email it to yourself, and then from your home computer upload it to Dropbox. See, ridiculous, frustrating.

Locked Out:
This above is really a problem because of the way the iPad is locked down, you can only have apps which Apple wants you to have (can we talk about the fact that Apple denied a cartoonist application because it might be offensive, do we really want one company building that kind of media influence). I get what Steven Johnson is saying, that the device can be seen as generative, that the app store provides a certain amount of stability and funding guarantee for developers. So that what we have seen is an incredible explosion of iPhone apps, which is likely to be reproduced on the iPad. The problem with Johnson’s argument is that an open system is not mutually exclusive with an app store. Apple could provide an app store for the iPad, one with safe approved apps, and still allow others to install apps they didn’t get from the app store. This is how the iTunes music works. You can by songs from Apple, from Amazon, or upload your own, all of which iTunes can handle. Apple as large media conglomerate, hardware and software distributor scares me. How many people would leave their Apple’s behind if Jobs went to a App Store model for laptops and desktops? Many of my favorite Mac apps are ones that probably would not have gotten approved.

What developers would build for the iPad will no doubt be amazing, and this for sometime will probably continue to drive popularity, but also developers might start to balk at Apples tight control. I really want to see what developers could do if they had root access to this thing, my guess it would be pretty f’in amazing.

What’s Next:
I wont be buying one. I am going to wait. Having said that, I think if I was a developer or teaching web design directly I would. Why? Because it really changes the way you can compute and having a device that provokes this type of thinking is useful, a device that points to the future. But I still stand by the fact that I wouldn’t want these for my students as their computing devices. I would hate to see what type of student would develop if this were their only or primary means of computing. Instead I am holding out hope that the the competitors will will quickly get an open one to market. As for me I am going to go learn android so when a slate running android gets to the market Ill be ready to use it as my primary device.

• NetNewsWire: Clearly I have an RSS addiction. This is the way I track what is going on in the field, in academia, and the world at large. While there are several RSS reader options, I prefer NetNewsWire. The ability to sync across multiple computers, plus read while offline, and save clippings (which also sync) are crucial for my work flow. I would like the ability to share items (i.e. GoogleReader) but the other features make NNW my choice.
• Twittelator: Again no secret but I use twitter for a range of academic and personal functions. There are many iPhone twitter apps, but this is my favorite (I actually purchased the pro version). Others I know use Twitterific, or Tweetsville, but the copy and past feature for retweeting got me hooked on this one early, and just haven’t found a reason to change.
• TextGuru: I tried several “mini-word processor” apps for the iPhone and this one ended up winning the prize. Not that I intend to compose a chapter or article on the iPhone or anything, but having a way to type or edit a document does come in handy. This one handles a wide range of formats, and most importantly allows input in landscape mode, which makes typing a whole heck of a lot easier. You can also transfer files wirelessly between your computer and the iPhone.
• Snatch: Simple and exactly what I wanted. When the iPhone apps first came out I was disappointed to learn that Remote only worked for iTunes and FrontRow (stupid). Seriously, all I wanted was a replacement for that stupid IR remote that meant I had to stand behind my computer when presenting. Snatch allows you to use the iPhone as remote control for the mouse/trackpad, or just a clicker. I also gave StageHand a shot, and it has the added feature of providing your presenting notes to you on the iPhone, but really all I wanted was a clicker.
• Wikiamo: Of course I want access to Wikipedia anywhere. Again, I tried out several applications, and while I wish Wikiamo had collapsable sections like iPedia+, it is simply much faster, and remembers past searches.
• OmniFocus: Expensive, but syncs with OmniFocus on my computer and provides location aware contexts. GTD FTW.
• Evernote: I haven’t fully leveraged the power of this app yet, but I still use it to record, take quick pictures, and generally preserve things in the short term that I might want to access later.
• Wordpress: Again not like I am going to be doing any long blogging from the iPhone, but since I use blogs to organize/run my classes, this app lets me update them from anywhere.
• SnapTell: This is one of those “magic” how does that possibly work apps. Take a picture of a book (DVDs and Video Games also work), the application accesses the internet, looks-up said book and tells you where it is for sale on the internet. Seriously, from just a picture it can “read” the title and look it up. I use this less for online shopping and more to take pictures of books I want to order later, check out from the library etc. Forget having to write down or type the title, just snap the picture.

What did I miss? Leave it in the comments.

A rather mundane question I have for you. . . have you encountered something that could help make the reading process easier for digital documents? Something akin to dragging a colored index card along a page quickly as you read? I am a very fast reader with paper, but find my eyes wandering when looking at a screen. . . . My admittedly uninspired work-around is creating a word document, restoring down the screen, and using the little blue header to pull down on top of the digital document as I read. . . but a better solution would be just a colored floating bar that you could pull from your desktop and use as you are reading.

Anyone know of something that would work? Mac and/or PC?

No, that is not a screen shot of Keynote, it is from an online slide creation tool called 280Slides. The interface though is so similar to Keynote that one might accuse them of just ripping off Keynote, stripping it down and turning it into a web application. Indeed in reading thru the few blog posts it seems that the developers have a Mac bend. Given my preference for Keynote over PowerPoint (“Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely“) one might guess that I like the interface of 280Slides. Like Keynote it is designed more towards a visual presentation and less towards putting text on slides.

280Slides is relatively easy to use, and comes with the advantage of other web applications, i.e. working from any computer, accessing your presentation from any browser, not worrying about file compatibility, etc. And, while I might prefer 280Slides to something like Google Presentation, this still finishes a distant second to SlideRocket (which I reviewed here).

Unfortunately LaTeX is rather complicated for the uninitiated. Fortunately though Arjun Muralidharan at The Productive Student has written a post about how he uses LaTeX as a Word Processor. As Arjun points out there are many advantages to using something like LaTeX, where content is separate from form, allowing you to concentrate on the text, leaving the format for an afterthought. Equally as important, is the way that LaTeX allows easy import of bibliographic data.

So, if you are interested in this type of word processing check out Arjun’s point, and perhaps this free users manual.

• I frequently make the argument that blogs are one of the most useful “tech tools” in education. In fact I now run a class blog for each of my classes, which becomes the primary means thru which students can access course information (cutting out WebCT and Blackboard all together). Even more importantly though in several of my classes I require students to blog as part of the coursework. So, I am always looking for ways to make the blog composing/maintaining process easier and smoother. Lifehacker’s recent post on the Top 10 Blogging Tools is worth a read, even for the most experienced bloggers. As usual, reading the comments to a Lifehacker post can be just as productive as reading the actual post (this is where I learned about Windows Life Writer which looks impressive for PC folks). Most of the tips here are for those who use Firefox and/or blog from their web browser, so not the most useful for those who use MarsEdit or Ecto, but well worth the read for those who don’t want to spend money on software for blogging.
• Powerset which has been in private Beta, recently went public. (Read the CNET article here). Powerset is one of the first stabs at creating a semantic web search (i.e. using natural English). You can watch the video demo to see how this works. Right now it only works as an interface for Wikipedia, but for me this is what makes it really interesting. One of the shortcomings of Wikipedia has been the interface, layout, and search function, Powerset improves all of this.
• Following up on last weeks post about online presentation software, Omnisio has also launched. Omnisio solves one of the problems with making your presentation available online. Before you had to either sink your audio to the slides, and not show yourself talking, or show the video of your presentation at the expense of not always being able to see the slides. No longer. Omnisio allows you to synchronize the video with the slides and show both.
• A reader sent me a link to jygy a mobile social networking site. Despite my interest in twitter mobile computing is not really my thing, so I have not really checked it out, but it does let you create texting “micro apps” which might be useful for teachers mobilizing the mobile space.
• The above not withstanding I do own an iPhone, which I might add is totally worth it, changed my life. As of now I have not yet jailbroken it (in other words I can’t install applications on it). For me though, the “killer app” so far has been anywhere access to Wikipedia (instant knowledge). I was using Wapedia for this, but have recently switched to Comoki which rather than splitting the information into several pages (like Wapedia) presents it in a collapsable outline (see below).

P.S.: I ended up with some more Evernote Beta invites, let me know if you still want one (leave a comment, or email me).