student iPads

We're having some conversations concerning whether or not we should trial iPads for students. Lots of interesting issues come up. If we do trial some sort of tablet will it be just the iPad or will we trial Android devices as well/instead? What are the advantages of a tablet over a netbook/laptop (if any)? Are there things a tablet can do that can't be done by other devices? Would an iTouch work just as well as an iPad for what we might possibly have in mind for students?

These are difficult questions to answer, not least because we're not students. In general if you approach students and ask them if they would like to trial an iPad the answer is a resoundingYES. iPads are cool. But do we really want students tweeting in lectures, or surfing the web or watching films on devices we have provided them with? Or are we being unfair to students, who by and large are interested in learning and attend lectures because they find them valuable rather than because they have to?

The really hard question to answer is what do we want students to use an iPad for? iPads are devices for consuming content, which is largely provided through iTunes. Can we serve educational content on the device in a way that enhances the experience of education?

I am doing a trial of serving educational content through FlipBoard, a very popular (and free) app that brings together facebook and twitter feeds with other RSS feeds and serves them in a magazine style layout. It's a very polished and sexy app and definitely takes advantage of many of the iPad's features. I am posting content for a distance education course to a another blog I have (histologyireland.blogspot.com), and serving an RSS feed from that blog to twitter. I then connect Flipboard to the twitter account, and flipboard presents the scraped content in a nice attractive format (screenshot below).

How the Twitter feed appears in FlipBoard

Tapping on an article opens the scraped content the complete article appears in a browser window below. Links, multimedia content etc in the blog post work in the browser window so everything on the original blog can be accessed from within FlipBoard.

The scraped article with original in browser window below

It works really well and looks really nice. FlipBoard partners with some newspapers and magazines to serve nicely laid out magazine style articles this way, and apparently they will be making the software to lay out content in magazine style available for free (skipping the need to post content to a blog). 

Does presenting content in a more engaging way improve it's educational value? Does serving content on a phased regular basis improve the sense of engagement compared to providing a single big pdf at the start of a course? Serving content this way will obviously pace learning but is it too slow and inefficient for the quick learner? I'd love to know the answers to these questions but for now only one student on the course has an iPad and I don't even know if they are using FlipBoard!