LiveCode Player for 5.5

[Pete]

I'm not a teacher, nor involved in education in any way so take what I have
to say with a pinch of salt.

A recent analysis over here in California found that it was around 4 times
as expensive for a classroom to use iPads and electronic versions of text
books as it was to continue using hard copy text books.  The costs were
measured over a 6 year period to take account of new editions of the text
books and the life span of an iPad and I believe the analysis was done for
high school level classes.

I'd be prepared to accept the extra cost if it was accompanied by a greater
than 4-fold improvement in educational quality but there seems to be
precious little evidence that the use of iPads produces any increase in
educational quality.  This is all related to general education classes, not
computer science classes.

Of course, you can find studies to prove/disprove just about anything you
want these days.  For those interested, you might want to read the book
"Wrong" by David H. Freedman.  A fascinating account of why an alarmingly
high number of studies carried out by experts come to completely wrong
conclusions.

Pete

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Bob Earp <rjearp at hotmail.com> wrote:

> I say that we will see a change in current attitudes as I am encouraged by
> Apple's new education support with iBooks2, iBooks Author, and iTunesU.
>  Just the fact of offering text books at a fraction of their hard copy
> price will quickly sway teachers into encouraging downloads, not to mention
> keeping the books current and all of the other goodies.  And academia using
> the tools in iTunesU will put pressure on IT people to deliver an
> infrastructure that support such.




-- 
Pete
Molly's Revenge <http://www.mollysrevenge.com>