Office on iPad?

I know this seems like a really stupid question, but does anyone think Microsoft would ever make iPad apps of the individual Office tools? At first I thought there’d be no way — Microsoft has a competing mobile OS, why would they want to enable that? Then I remembered they also have a competing desktop OS and they deliver to that. With Apple releasing iWork apps for $10.00 each for the iPad I wonder if Microsoft will be inspired to create somewhat lighter weight versions of Word, PPT, and Excel? Perhaps one of the motivations Apple had for doing the iPad versions of iWork was to press Microsoft into playing?

The really funny thing for me is that I don’t care. I stopped using Office for anything of any sort a long time ago. If you send me a Word doc it is instantly converted to a Google Doc — and I know that’ll continue to work on the iPad. I just wonder if Microsoft will be willing to let money just sit out there in the cloud? Sorry, I was just thinking out loud.

Imagine shamelessly stolen from Apple.

Adding it Up

Gadgets potentially replaced by iPad:

• Digital Picture Frame: $150.00
• iPod Touch: $200.00
• Portable Movie Player: $100.00
• Kindle DX: $490.00
• MacBook: $1,000.00 (assuming a home computer)

That’s almost $2,000.00 worth of stuff that could be replaced — essentially 4 iPads, one for every member of my family. I struggled with throwing the MacBook in that list as it is a full fledged computer, but I was thinking about who in my house would be happy with a MacBook and the only one two I came up with are my 8 year old daughter and 3 year old son. Watching the way each of them use Macs leads me to believe that either would be very satisfied with an iPad (until they hit a site that required Flash). Even without the MacBook, the fact of the matter is that this thing may end being seen everywhere at only $500.00.

Consumers

I just thought I’d take a minute to remind everyone that Apple is a consumer electronics company. They, unlike lots, do really good things for education (see the ADE initiative, iTunes U, Apple Learning Interchange, and others) but first and foremost they are selling products to people. Lots of us in the higher ed space are looking at the iPad lamenting the stuff that didn’t make it … but at the end of the day it is a really nice product in the consumer space that will evolve.

It might be a hit at my house and if it is, it will cost us a heck of a lot less than a laptop for each of the kids. The only thing that would keep it from being something I’d heavily promote is that at the moment it lacks any sort of real digital content creation tools — and that may be one of its biggest short comings out of the box. We know from our own surveys and national data that kids are creating lots of shareable digital media. How does the iPad fit into that World? I am hoping Apple will do the same thing with some of the iLife apps as it has with iWork — port them to iPad. Imagine an iPad with iMovie or Garageband on it … it would be an amazing UI opportunity. The current inability to do native (read as the Apple way) content creation on the iPad is an oversight.

Having iWork on the device makes it something I can easily take on trips and potentially present from … I say “potentially” because most of my Keynote stacks are heavily laden with digital video. I am guessing Keynote on the iPad can manage all that stuff. That integration alone makes it a great business tool for me. I use Safari, Keynote, Gmail, and Google Docs for more than 90% of my work so the iPad fits my profile. Looking at it, the horizon is unlimited because of the App Store. How long will it be until people start building apps that really take advantage of the form factor and meet business needs?

I am guessing that the iPad will fit into most peoples’ lives. Will everyone in my house have an iPad? I am guessing that is what Apple is hoping for … I didn’t see anything that said the iPad can have multiple accounts running on it. From what I can see is that the iPad and its owner have a 1:1 relationship. A Macbook can be shared, while it looks like the iPhone in that it is a single user device.

No matter, we’ll be testing it. I feel like there are enough interesting aspects of this thing that we need to understand it and its potential relationship to teaching and learning.

Thought on History … and Repeating Itself

From McLuhan (The Medium is the Massage, 128) … “The main cause for disappointment in and for criticism of television is the failure on the part of its critics view it as a totally new technology which demands different sensory responses. These critics insist on regarding television as merely a degraded form of print technology.”

consider that in the context of where we are now and do a little editing …

“The main cause for disappointment in and for criticism of is the failure on the part of its critics view it as a totally new technology which demands different sensory responses. These critics insist on regarding as merely a degraded form of [television].”

Do you find this as out of control as I do?

Educating for the Future, Not the Past | DMLcentral

he point of this historical perspective is to remind us that the last decade has seen transformations of a kind notable even from the long perspective of the record of human history.  Our Information Age has been the most extensive and rapid in human history, structurally altering traditional economic and political arrangements on a global level and, at the same time, restructuring communication, interaction, publication, and authorship in all currently available media.  Is it any wonder that many of us are wondering what will happen next—or asking how best to prepare ourselves for what comes next?

via dmlcentral.net

I haven't been posting here much as I have been spending my time over at the course site for the class Scott McDonald and I are teaching, but this is right in our collective wheelhouse that I really wanted to share it.

Moving

I have been writing at TypePad for several months now and have decided to point this DNS entry to it … that means I will be taking this site down in the next couple of weeks. Find my new space at http://colecamplese.typepad.com … at the end of the week colecamplese.com will point to the new TP space.
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Depression Sets In

The forcast for the next two weeks is nothing short of depressing. I’m taking bets on if we can make it through to Spring.

Getting Disruptive

My colleague Scott McDonald and I are getting set to embark on the second running of our Disruptive Technologies for Teaching and Learning course this Spring. We attack this thing as a grand experiment, not really knowing what to expect fully but with hopes of high level activity. We know some things will work and some things will not, but at the core of our design philosophy we feel OK with that. We spent a couple of hours yesterday putting some more touches on what we hope will be an open and engaging learning opportunity. What is emerging is what we hope to be a very powerful mix of academic rigor and applied technology investigations.

So far we have solid numbers in this graduate only course and know we’ll find ways to push our students into unfamiliar and uncomfortable waters. Scott and I have big questions heading into this new semester — primarily what technologies will move the students into the same kind of round the clock learning community we saw emerge last time? We feel like we are better prepared to collect data from the get go and see how we can be more systematic about sharing the things we learn. The course is timely as Scott and I recently completed an article that focuses on the key trends and drivers we see as disrupting current classroom practice. The article should be available in the next month or so, but we will be using it as a kicking off point for the course this Spring.

For those of you who are interested I will be posting thoughts about the course here during the semester and you can also watch as the course will evolve in the open at the course site. We are taking a cue from another one of our PSU colleagues (and TLT Faculty Fellow) ,Dr. Christopher Long, who has been talking about the course site not as a blog per se, but as an ongoing text that is contributed to by all the members of the course. Our goal is to keep our course site going semester over semester so that current students can build on the work of the past. Another grand experiment I suppose!