The other day I was listening to a high ranking technologist asking why 7-8 year old children were expected to learn times tables by rote. From what I hear most of his audience disagreed with him. His argument was that everyone carries technology now that allows them to do multiplication, so why should anyone bother to learn to do it in their head or on a piece of paper. He argued that only people who needed this skill should learn it later as young adults. Perhaps I am old fashioned, but my mobile phone nor the camera I habitually carry has the ability to multiply. However, with the majority of even 5-year old children now carrying mobiles, many of which are smartphones, one could see his point. Yet, he has utterly missed other significant elements about why it is so important to have these basic skills. Just because they can be done by a machine does not mean that they should.
I have worked in warehouses and was able to unload pallets of boxes quickly because I knew precisely how many boxes there were on a pallet. The number on pallets varied depending on the size of the box and the heaviness of the contents and if a box or two was missing. However, I would stand there as see a pallet with five boxes down each side and stacked five high and know that there were 125 on it. If the next pallet was stacked four high, it had 100 and so on. I knew that a stack with 5 x 5 x 5 boxes had more in it that one which was 4 x 5 x 6 boxes despite how it might appear on first impressions ('but it's stacked higher!'). Of course, there was not an infinite variety and you tended to get set quantities but my mental arithmetic was there to work out if anomalies came up. I could also work out on a piece of cardboard with a pen how much I would earn if I did overtime and how much tax I would pay on that. Yes, I could have pulled out a phone and typed in the numbers, but you try operating even a large mobile phone while wearing working gloves.
Anyone who is a parent of school aged children will know that multiplication has changed. When the boy who used to live in my house started primary school his mother and anyone else in earshot was told not to help him with multiplication because we would do it 'wrongly'. Parents were pointed to a government website to show them the right way. The method now used is 'repeated adding'. In other words if you want to work out 4 x 3, you add up 3+3+3+3. This might be fine when you are doing basic sums, but once you reach 12 times something let alone 20 times something, then you begin to see its drawbacks. The said boy is now in Year 8, i.e. 12+ and has to do the square root of decimal numbers. Try doing that with the 'repeated adding' approach! I had to teach him long multiplication because the teachers had left him without the mental equipment to do the sums. At this stage he is not supposed to use a calculator, but I imagine most children do. The thing is, mathematics is compulsory for children up to Year 11, i.e. 16, so if he does not have the tools to deal with the sums in this year, how is he going to do it over the next three?
Like the speaker, you might argue, well it is no problem, the boy simply types it into the calculator. However, you need to know what to put into the calculator. The square root of a decimal number is always larger than the number itself. However, if you have no idea of the multiplication of fractions or decimals, you are going to struggle to know what to put in. Such calculations need a lot of estimation so if you cannot get into the 'ballpark' of the answer, you are going to spend a long time with guessing. The child is a quarter of my age but saddled with the repeated adding approach I can constantly beat him in how quickly I can calculate. It should be the other way around. You need some grasp of the mathematical concepts behind the calculations you want to make otherwise you cannot be certain if you are entering the correct data. How do you know what numbers to put in for calculating the area of a circle, which you may have to do when, for example, siting a toilet or a dustbin, if you do know that the formula is πr2 (i.e. r x r; I cannot show a superscript for squared on this system).
I use mental arithmetic on a daily basis, even without thinking. Most often this is when I am driving. Yes, I could switch on the sat nav and have it tell me my journey time, but on the daily commute this seems pointless. Thus, constantly I am seeing my speed and working out how much time is left given the distance. I also work out if I have time to stop for petrol - how much that will reduce my average speed and my overall journey time. I might also consider an alternate route and how the extra distance has to balance against the speed I am doing on the current route - something too few people balance up hence speeding through 'rat runs' when they realise the 'short cuts' are not actually saving them time. Maybe I think about my driving too much, but among the millions of motorists I cannot be alone. I would feel pretty powerless if I did not have a grasp of time, distance and speed as I travelled along.
Thinking more broadly, the speaker may have lauded the internet for providing what everyone needs to know. That may be the case in his subject area, however it is not in mine. Despite common assumptions, the amount of information on the internet on many subjects is very limited and very repetitive. I have written on numerous occasions about the boundaries of the internet when it comes to historical knowledge. You can soon end up reading exactly the same information again and again, with nothing new being added, even if you have the ability to hop over to websites in other languages. Wikipedia's encouragement of using translations to flesh out entries, simply adds to that as it is the source of so much material that is used by other websites. You also run up quickly against bias whether political, racial or religious. I have spoken about how comment on Muslim universities in Europe has been purged and the Wikipedia entry on universities spends more time in ruling Muslim and Orthodox Christian institutions out of the definition than it does actually speaking about what a university is. Another example, everything on Mormons appears to have been edited by pro-Mormon writers, especially playing down the hostility to polygamy in the USA of the mid-19th century and especially the number of pioneers killed by Mormon forces. This happens so much, that actually it made me more suspicious of the Mormons than I would otherwise have been.
The internet is far from perfect. A lot of the information on it is erroneous and shaped by people with an agenda which has little to do with putting up objective facts. It is a hostile environment. I have spoken before how even reviews of a First World War poem attracted more ill-informed commentary that wrecked any chance of an interesting or informative discussion about it; drawing parallels to any other conflict was ruled out and it was even questioned whether it was a First World War poem given that it had been written after the war. The danger of errors creeping into computerised teaching systems was parodied as early as 1967 in the television series 'The Prisoner' which featured such a system called Speed Learn, but which included an error about historical dates. Too often the internet, primarily Wikipedia has become the 'right' answer even when it is actually wrong. It would be wrong to see the internet as decreasing human knowledge, that is not at all the case, but what it does accentuate is populist views and often particular groups' agendas, over broader discovery of knowledge. If a time comes when it cannot be countered by other sources, then there could be argued to be a decline in knowledge.
There are practical reasons why it is a mistake to promote an over-dependence on electronic devices. As you will have witnessed yourself, many people go to pieces when they have their mobile phone stolen or lost. They have no idea where they should be or what they should be doing; most importantly, especially for young people, they have no idea what they should be thinking. You will see everywhere 'phubbing', i.e. two or more people sitting or walking together and yet not talking, rather all their discussions are going on with other people not present via their phones. To deprive them of their phones is like snatching their souls away; literally you will see them with as much distress as if a favoured pet had been lost not a machine. Despite such dependence, in recent weeks it has been highlighted how short battery life is becoming for smartphones. With connectivity constantly on and so many apps running, the average life is a single working day, whereas a few years ago you could expect a phone to run for a week between charges. I imagine in time battery life will increase but at present the number of things you 'have to' be doing via your phone is increasing faster than the power storage necessary to permit that. How can you guarantee that the moment you need to do some multiplication your battery will not be dead?
The final reason why I would argue it is foolish to simply allow people to use machines to do their multiplications for them, is because the brain needs exercise. Constantly we are advised that to avoid the onset of Alzheimer's people need to keep working at mental challenges. As with the rest of the body, the brain can become 'flabby' if it is not exercised. To rely on a machine to do calculations which should be typically part of every day business, certainly if simply going shopping or how many potatoes each person in your family should get or whether you need to buy toilet roll before the weekend or will run out of petrol before you get to work or will get a better deal on one mobile phone tariff compared to another. Yes, we do have machines that can do times tables, but as with learning about personal hygiene, manners, eating well and exercise, these are things we need to instill into children otherwise they and society will suffer as a result.
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Tuesday, 4 November 2014
Saturday, 3 September 2011
iPadding Around
I am sure I am not the only person in a job, even in these hard recession times, who is told that there is a ‘budget which needs to be spent’. Many companies have an approach that a budget is allocated for a time period and if it is not spent by the department it has been given to then the money has to be returned. In addition, it is likely that the department will not receive as large a budget in the future, at a time when it may have far greater need of the money. Consequently as the deadline for having spent the budget approaches, departments find ways either to ‘carry over’ the money to a time when they have more need of it or do what my department is currently doing, i.e. spending it as fast as they can. Of course, you cannot simply spend money on anything that you want, because budgets are usually attached to some particular kind of cost. The most flexible are project budgets because almost anything can be seen as appropriate for carrying out a budget. However, others are wedded to things like furniture, entertaining or technology.
In my department we have a technology budget that has to be used so my boss decided she would equip a number of us with iPad 2s to see what we could use them for. Consequently I have been playing around with mine to see what I can do with it for a work purpose rather than entertainment. What I discovered may be useful for you. The first thing I discovered was that I could not even get it started within the company’s premises. This is because to register your I-Pad and get it running you have to log on to iTunes and download it to your iPad. The only problem with that is that my company specifically blocks iTunes from any of its computers. This meant I had to take it home and register it there.
You can connect a memory stick (a.k.a. a flash drive) to your iPad but in general it is very dependent on almost constant internet connection. It was fine at home because where I am living has a very good wireless signal that in fact goes with me quite a way up the street if I choose to forget to switch my iPad off. However, again once inside the company’s premises things got harder. The company has good IT support, though at this time of year its opening hours are not as long as at other times of the year when people are not taking summer holidays. First of all I tried following the online guidance without any joy. I then went to one IT helpdesk which was closed for the day. I ended up at another which does not specialise in connecting to the work wi-fi, but they saw it as a challenge. After 30 minutes of working with a knowledgeable IT colleague he was able to finally connect me to the wi-fi.
The iPad does not count as a laptop, it comes under the heading of a smart phone. In many ways that is accurate and worthwhile bearing in mind if trying to connect yours to someone’s system. Of course, if you have the money and a spare 3G sim card you can slot that it using Apple’s low-tech modified paperclip helpfully supplied with the iPad and then phone into the internet. For me, without those resources, I am dependent on what free (or paid for by someone else like my landlord or my company) wireless signals I can get into.
Now I was up and running. I have found some problems that others have done, such as every time I move it the screen tips. I know you can lock it in place, but that is not what I want to do, because some things are better done in landscape and some in portrait. It is just that it never seems to go in the direction I want it and I often end up with it upside down from how I am viewing it. It is ideal if you have small fingers, because often when I am trying to ‘click’ on to something (which is done by jabbing your finger on to it on an iPad; very much more forcefully than you see people doing on the advertisements) I would end up hitting something else and it constantly seemed to think that I wanted to bin whatever I was working on. If it was my own device and not the company’s I would stick a big arrow on it saying ‘this way up’. The ‘Home’ button is small and looks pretty like the camera at the other end. Consequently using the various camera functions, I ended up finding I was holding the iPad ‘upside down’ but only when I emailed the image to someone else.
Taking photos is pretty easy. However, getting the right exposure and lining up a camera which is as large as an exercise book to take pictures is quite a challenge. The images are not bad but with no way to focus in except by moving closer nor to adjust the exposure to light conditions, it can be harder than even using your mobile phone to take a picture. Some things are very easy. One is connecting to YouTube though locating the volume control when music starts blaring out is far harder. The image is pretty good as is the sound. If you want to play clips and stand around discussing them, as I did with colleagues about clips from some film noir movies from YouTube, you can do that very easily.
You soon find, however, that YouTube is pretty much the limit of the video resources you can get into. I tried accessing BBC I-Player and Channel 4OD without any success, just messages saying that what they were offering was not suited to the device I was using. Some of the problems appear to come from tensions between Apple and other companies, notably Adobe. This means that neither can you watch anything which needs Flash nor can you even read PDF files which is an obstacle in the average office.
Another thing I experimented with was using the iPad for tweeting. I am pretty sceptical of the purpose of tweeting and as a result of playing a lot of ‘Total War; Shogun 2’ ended up writing tweets in the style of medieval Japanese death poems (translated into English of course) constantly reflecting on the ephemeral nature of what I was writing and the fact that you toss it into the ether with no idea if anyone pays attention to it. As you will know, I have had similar thoughts around blogging.
The shortness of tweets means we tend to see that as ‘lighter’ and so unsurprisingly rather than the lead tablets I throw out here, they seemed more like messages scribbled on scraps of paper or even dead leaves. Interestingly, dying Japanese warriors seem to have had a similar view on their lives and their significance after their death, with lots of reference to dead leaves, falling blossom and melting snow. What happens to a tweet that no-one reads? Anyway, my scepticism of tweeting has not abated. However, having attended a conference recently at which the audience was regularly harangued for not sending sufficient tweets during the proceedings and me not actually having any device on me that would enable me to do it (nor a Twitter account in fact), it did seem that now I had the iPad, the tool of choice for tweeting during conferences, I should at least equip it with that functionality.
In many ways I was trying to use the I-Pad in the way I might other devices. One was to use it like a Kindle. Certainly you can download e-books on to it. I accessed some by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from the Guttenberg site. This was fine except for the functionality you get, i.e. the book appears like a very long scroll that you unroll with your finger. Much of the iPad functionality depends on you pulling things around with your finger. This can be a challenge with even a comparatively short novel, but might work well enough for short reports. The only benefit is that when you go away from the book and return, it brings you back to the point that you were at before.
Moving away from things you have opened is the toughest part of using the iPad and I found myself constantly hitting the Home button. However, this did not resolve the problem because if I clicked back on to the internet browser (Safari) or the iTunes or YouTube buttons, I would simply find myself back at the document/video/audio I was at previously. You can sometimes press a button to bring up all the panels you have opened and then close them from there. However, sometimes the functionality seems to disappear causing difficult situations. I had heard about iTunes U which is a variant of I-Tunes that universities put written, audio and audio-video content on to. I download a Basic Chinese course for free from the Open University which probably unsurprisingly is a big user of the site. This was great. However, once I ran the first lesson all I had on my screen was a large image of a dragon and no buttons to pause or stop or even quieten the rather loud declaration of ‘ni hao!’ booming out across the office. This issue of going away from things is not helped by the fact that the functionality seems to differ depending what kind of item you are looking at and at times seems dependent, as in the case of the Open University material, on choices made by the provider rather than you.
The fact of being 'locked into' something worsened as I used the iPad more. I found that the web browser became fixed on to Google Docs which I had been using. No matter what I pressed it would not go back from the page or go to any other website bar Google Docs, effectively rendering the search engine useless. Unlike with a PC or even a laptop, I am unable to reboot, as even if you switch it off entirely it always comes back to whatever you had it set on when you switched it off.
You might expect the iPad coming out of the iTunes context to be good with audio/video content, but using it in the workplace I was interested in what it could actually do that was not about entertainment. You can get on to a range of websites very easily, so checking out a company before you get there is straight forward. There are diary functions and maps available in a range of formats such as relief and street map, so you get the functions of a PDA and a bit of a sat nav in there too. At least the iPad can tell you where you are and unlike most sat navs does not assume you are in a car making it easier to navigate as a pedestrian, useful in London.
What I was interested in was whether I could effectively use the iPad as a laptop when I got to the meeting. There is a notebook function, but that did not seem appropriate for the kind of thing I might be doing. This is when I realised that it was fine for my company to give me an I-Pad but without a budget to buy supplementary packages, i.e. ‘apps’ then I was limited. Apple do produce a wordprocessor package for the iPad, Pages, but this costs $9.99, I was not able to find a UK price. Similarly, Keynote for the same price allows you to do presentations, though I am pretty averse to this, given the unhealthy dependency so many office workers and their audiences have on ‘slides’.
If you want things like spreadsheets and other office packages, then you need iWork which has Pages and Keynote in it plus Numbers which is the spreadsheet package. I have been told there is an iPad version for $80 but tend to only find the Macintosh version online. Someone noted to me the other day, that if we only ever go after free stuff why will companies ever both producing packages if there is no money in them. This is a good question. However, even if I had had a £100 budget then I would have bought some products from Apple. Given how tight my money is, I am not in a position or willing to subsidise my company. Any company that is thinking about equipping their workers with I-Pads should either buy all the necessary packages before they dish them out or give the workers a budget to buy the apps that they feel are most appropriate.
I then thought of using Open Office, the free rival to Microsoft products. Unfortunately, as you will see discussed on forums, because the operating system of the I-Pad is different from that of the Macs and is more ‘closed’, the Open Office people have not been able to develop a version for iPads. This may come in the future. So, what do you do if you have no budget, are as poor as I am and want to wordprocess on an iPad? The one solution I found was to use Google Docs. You can set up a Google email account, gmail, for free. Then you can access Google Docs. The documents you produce in Google Docs are incredibly primitive with no formatting. You can do carriage returns but little else. However, you can email them to yourself as .doc or .rtf or a range of other formats that allows you to work on them on a proper computer. This works fine for my note taking. I can type pretty fast so found it not much slower than handwriting the notes. The key problem is the predictive text approach that Google Docs uses. I found it changing many of my words, sometimes into very American terms. As these were notes, I abbreviated a lot but found ‘mkt’ for market for some reason became ‘MIT’ and ‘wkplace’ for workplace turn into ‘ail lace’ the first time (ail being the French word for garlic) and then ‘sip pace’ the second time. I will have to explore if I can disable this function.
Accessing email accounts is pretty easy off the iPad. Leaving a particular account proves much harder and I found that when I clicked to the email facility (you can go in through Safari or connect your favourite email account to the separate Email button) it kept returning to the email from my girlfriend that I had opened as the first one that morning. This could be embarrassing, but I battled to get away from this email. This issue of ‘dismissing’ things you have finished with is one of the most frustrating when using the iPad. The next issue is attaching things. I am used to creating a document or an image and then attaching it to an email. You do this a lot with an iPad as you need to get the item off that machine on to one where you can work on it more with formatting, etc. However, you find no matter what email account you use, and I went into a Hotmail one, a gmail one and an Outlook one (through web access not a client) that I could not attach anything. With the iPad you have to do it in reverse, i.e. go to the item whether an image or a document and click something like ‘Share’ or ‘email’ and then it goes back to the email account you are using and attaches the item. I suppose being so used to different ways makes it harder to adapt.
I find it funny that when Sir Clive Sinclair produced the home computers, the ZX80 and ZX81 unsurprisingly in 1980 and 1981, people criticised the touch keyboards that they used. By the time he produced the ZX Spectrum in 1982 he was compelled to include rubbery keys. Subsequently all home computers have had ‘fully travelling’ keyboards which move and clunk like typewriters used to. Now, however, with the iPad I find myself slapping my fingers across the screen hitting letters (and additional one with my cuff links; for these sort of devices wearing a teeshirt and not having flabby wrists is advised) as if I was back in 1980 or working a till at MacDonalds. Apple emphasises how easy it is to use such approaches and no-one seems to be complaining. Though the IT man who helped me connect to the wi-fi said he always used a Bluetooth keyboard instead, but in some ways I guess that reduces the portability and increases the danger of finding you have left either your keyboard or your I-Pad somewhere different from where you are with the other. The other thing is that the face of the iPad looks like the panel of an arcade game at a fun fair in the 1980s, covered with greasy finger marks. I am sure some enterprising crime writer is producing a story in which fingerprints and even DNA are taken from an abandoned or dropped iPad.
Anyway, this was what I discovered in the first four days of being assigned an iPad. I guess if you are in a company more set up for using them, especially connecting them to the company’s wi-fi and especially if you have an allocated budget to go with the device, then it will be easier. The lightness (1.4 Kg) and the decent battery life (10 hours) means that it is a portable device. My colleague sees the main function being to keep him entertained while travelling on the train and it is decent for this though he will probably need a sim card for it. For office work, the main thing it has replaced is my paper notepad that I used to take to meetings. If I can scrape together $9.99 then I may invest in Pages; but this month I was down to £32 with three weeks left until pay day. Years of fixed-term contracts, three mortgages and rising fuel prices mean I am dependent on left over sandwiches from meetings to make up my evening meal at present, so not really in a position to splash out on apps.
In my department we have a technology budget that has to be used so my boss decided she would equip a number of us with iPad 2s to see what we could use them for. Consequently I have been playing around with mine to see what I can do with it for a work purpose rather than entertainment. What I discovered may be useful for you. The first thing I discovered was that I could not even get it started within the company’s premises. This is because to register your I-Pad and get it running you have to log on to iTunes and download it to your iPad. The only problem with that is that my company specifically blocks iTunes from any of its computers. This meant I had to take it home and register it there.
You can connect a memory stick (a.k.a. a flash drive) to your iPad but in general it is very dependent on almost constant internet connection. It was fine at home because where I am living has a very good wireless signal that in fact goes with me quite a way up the street if I choose to forget to switch my iPad off. However, again once inside the company’s premises things got harder. The company has good IT support, though at this time of year its opening hours are not as long as at other times of the year when people are not taking summer holidays. First of all I tried following the online guidance without any joy. I then went to one IT helpdesk which was closed for the day. I ended up at another which does not specialise in connecting to the work wi-fi, but they saw it as a challenge. After 30 minutes of working with a knowledgeable IT colleague he was able to finally connect me to the wi-fi.
The iPad does not count as a laptop, it comes under the heading of a smart phone. In many ways that is accurate and worthwhile bearing in mind if trying to connect yours to someone’s system. Of course, if you have the money and a spare 3G sim card you can slot that it using Apple’s low-tech modified paperclip helpfully supplied with the iPad and then phone into the internet. For me, without those resources, I am dependent on what free (or paid for by someone else like my landlord or my company) wireless signals I can get into.
Now I was up and running. I have found some problems that others have done, such as every time I move it the screen tips. I know you can lock it in place, but that is not what I want to do, because some things are better done in landscape and some in portrait. It is just that it never seems to go in the direction I want it and I often end up with it upside down from how I am viewing it. It is ideal if you have small fingers, because often when I am trying to ‘click’ on to something (which is done by jabbing your finger on to it on an iPad; very much more forcefully than you see people doing on the advertisements) I would end up hitting something else and it constantly seemed to think that I wanted to bin whatever I was working on. If it was my own device and not the company’s I would stick a big arrow on it saying ‘this way up’. The ‘Home’ button is small and looks pretty like the camera at the other end. Consequently using the various camera functions, I ended up finding I was holding the iPad ‘upside down’ but only when I emailed the image to someone else.
Taking photos is pretty easy. However, getting the right exposure and lining up a camera which is as large as an exercise book to take pictures is quite a challenge. The images are not bad but with no way to focus in except by moving closer nor to adjust the exposure to light conditions, it can be harder than even using your mobile phone to take a picture. Some things are very easy. One is connecting to YouTube though locating the volume control when music starts blaring out is far harder. The image is pretty good as is the sound. If you want to play clips and stand around discussing them, as I did with colleagues about clips from some film noir movies from YouTube, you can do that very easily.
You soon find, however, that YouTube is pretty much the limit of the video resources you can get into. I tried accessing BBC I-Player and Channel 4OD without any success, just messages saying that what they were offering was not suited to the device I was using. Some of the problems appear to come from tensions between Apple and other companies, notably Adobe. This means that neither can you watch anything which needs Flash nor can you even read PDF files which is an obstacle in the average office.
Another thing I experimented with was using the iPad for tweeting. I am pretty sceptical of the purpose of tweeting and as a result of playing a lot of ‘Total War; Shogun 2’ ended up writing tweets in the style of medieval Japanese death poems (translated into English of course) constantly reflecting on the ephemeral nature of what I was writing and the fact that you toss it into the ether with no idea if anyone pays attention to it. As you will know, I have had similar thoughts around blogging.
The shortness of tweets means we tend to see that as ‘lighter’ and so unsurprisingly rather than the lead tablets I throw out here, they seemed more like messages scribbled on scraps of paper or even dead leaves. Interestingly, dying Japanese warriors seem to have had a similar view on their lives and their significance after their death, with lots of reference to dead leaves, falling blossom and melting snow. What happens to a tweet that no-one reads? Anyway, my scepticism of tweeting has not abated. However, having attended a conference recently at which the audience was regularly harangued for not sending sufficient tweets during the proceedings and me not actually having any device on me that would enable me to do it (nor a Twitter account in fact), it did seem that now I had the iPad, the tool of choice for tweeting during conferences, I should at least equip it with that functionality.
In many ways I was trying to use the I-Pad in the way I might other devices. One was to use it like a Kindle. Certainly you can download e-books on to it. I accessed some by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from the Guttenberg site. This was fine except for the functionality you get, i.e. the book appears like a very long scroll that you unroll with your finger. Much of the iPad functionality depends on you pulling things around with your finger. This can be a challenge with even a comparatively short novel, but might work well enough for short reports. The only benefit is that when you go away from the book and return, it brings you back to the point that you were at before.
Moving away from things you have opened is the toughest part of using the iPad and I found myself constantly hitting the Home button. However, this did not resolve the problem because if I clicked back on to the internet browser (Safari) or the iTunes or YouTube buttons, I would simply find myself back at the document/video/audio I was at previously. You can sometimes press a button to bring up all the panels you have opened and then close them from there. However, sometimes the functionality seems to disappear causing difficult situations. I had heard about iTunes U which is a variant of I-Tunes that universities put written, audio and audio-video content on to. I download a Basic Chinese course for free from the Open University which probably unsurprisingly is a big user of the site. This was great. However, once I ran the first lesson all I had on my screen was a large image of a dragon and no buttons to pause or stop or even quieten the rather loud declaration of ‘ni hao!’ booming out across the office. This issue of going away from things is not helped by the fact that the functionality seems to differ depending what kind of item you are looking at and at times seems dependent, as in the case of the Open University material, on choices made by the provider rather than you.
The fact of being 'locked into' something worsened as I used the iPad more. I found that the web browser became fixed on to Google Docs which I had been using. No matter what I pressed it would not go back from the page or go to any other website bar Google Docs, effectively rendering the search engine useless. Unlike with a PC or even a laptop, I am unable to reboot, as even if you switch it off entirely it always comes back to whatever you had it set on when you switched it off.
You might expect the iPad coming out of the iTunes context to be good with audio/video content, but using it in the workplace I was interested in what it could actually do that was not about entertainment. You can get on to a range of websites very easily, so checking out a company before you get there is straight forward. There are diary functions and maps available in a range of formats such as relief and street map, so you get the functions of a PDA and a bit of a sat nav in there too. At least the iPad can tell you where you are and unlike most sat navs does not assume you are in a car making it easier to navigate as a pedestrian, useful in London.
What I was interested in was whether I could effectively use the iPad as a laptop when I got to the meeting. There is a notebook function, but that did not seem appropriate for the kind of thing I might be doing. This is when I realised that it was fine for my company to give me an I-Pad but without a budget to buy supplementary packages, i.e. ‘apps’ then I was limited. Apple do produce a wordprocessor package for the iPad, Pages, but this costs $9.99, I was not able to find a UK price. Similarly, Keynote for the same price allows you to do presentations, though I am pretty averse to this, given the unhealthy dependency so many office workers and their audiences have on ‘slides’.
If you want things like spreadsheets and other office packages, then you need iWork which has Pages and Keynote in it plus Numbers which is the spreadsheet package. I have been told there is an iPad version for $80 but tend to only find the Macintosh version online. Someone noted to me the other day, that if we only ever go after free stuff why will companies ever both producing packages if there is no money in them. This is a good question. However, even if I had had a £100 budget then I would have bought some products from Apple. Given how tight my money is, I am not in a position or willing to subsidise my company. Any company that is thinking about equipping their workers with I-Pads should either buy all the necessary packages before they dish them out or give the workers a budget to buy the apps that they feel are most appropriate.
I then thought of using Open Office, the free rival to Microsoft products. Unfortunately, as you will see discussed on forums, because the operating system of the I-Pad is different from that of the Macs and is more ‘closed’, the Open Office people have not been able to develop a version for iPads. This may come in the future. So, what do you do if you have no budget, are as poor as I am and want to wordprocess on an iPad? The one solution I found was to use Google Docs. You can set up a Google email account, gmail, for free. Then you can access Google Docs. The documents you produce in Google Docs are incredibly primitive with no formatting. You can do carriage returns but little else. However, you can email them to yourself as .doc or .rtf or a range of other formats that allows you to work on them on a proper computer. This works fine for my note taking. I can type pretty fast so found it not much slower than handwriting the notes. The key problem is the predictive text approach that Google Docs uses. I found it changing many of my words, sometimes into very American terms. As these were notes, I abbreviated a lot but found ‘mkt’ for market for some reason became ‘MIT’ and ‘wkplace’ for workplace turn into ‘ail lace’ the first time (ail being the French word for garlic) and then ‘sip pace’ the second time. I will have to explore if I can disable this function.
Accessing email accounts is pretty easy off the iPad. Leaving a particular account proves much harder and I found that when I clicked to the email facility (you can go in through Safari or connect your favourite email account to the separate Email button) it kept returning to the email from my girlfriend that I had opened as the first one that morning. This could be embarrassing, but I battled to get away from this email. This issue of ‘dismissing’ things you have finished with is one of the most frustrating when using the iPad. The next issue is attaching things. I am used to creating a document or an image and then attaching it to an email. You do this a lot with an iPad as you need to get the item off that machine on to one where you can work on it more with formatting, etc. However, you find no matter what email account you use, and I went into a Hotmail one, a gmail one and an Outlook one (through web access not a client) that I could not attach anything. With the iPad you have to do it in reverse, i.e. go to the item whether an image or a document and click something like ‘Share’ or ‘email’ and then it goes back to the email account you are using and attaches the item. I suppose being so used to different ways makes it harder to adapt.
I find it funny that when Sir Clive Sinclair produced the home computers, the ZX80 and ZX81 unsurprisingly in 1980 and 1981, people criticised the touch keyboards that they used. By the time he produced the ZX Spectrum in 1982 he was compelled to include rubbery keys. Subsequently all home computers have had ‘fully travelling’ keyboards which move and clunk like typewriters used to. Now, however, with the iPad I find myself slapping my fingers across the screen hitting letters (and additional one with my cuff links; for these sort of devices wearing a teeshirt and not having flabby wrists is advised) as if I was back in 1980 or working a till at MacDonalds. Apple emphasises how easy it is to use such approaches and no-one seems to be complaining. Though the IT man who helped me connect to the wi-fi said he always used a Bluetooth keyboard instead, but in some ways I guess that reduces the portability and increases the danger of finding you have left either your keyboard or your I-Pad somewhere different from where you are with the other. The other thing is that the face of the iPad looks like the panel of an arcade game at a fun fair in the 1980s, covered with greasy finger marks. I am sure some enterprising crime writer is producing a story in which fingerprints and even DNA are taken from an abandoned or dropped iPad.
Anyway, this was what I discovered in the first four days of being assigned an iPad. I guess if you are in a company more set up for using them, especially connecting them to the company’s wi-fi and especially if you have an allocated budget to go with the device, then it will be easier. The lightness (1.4 Kg) and the decent battery life (10 hours) means that it is a portable device. My colleague sees the main function being to keep him entertained while travelling on the train and it is decent for this though he will probably need a sim card for it. For office work, the main thing it has replaced is my paper notepad that I used to take to meetings. If I can scrape together $9.99 then I may invest in Pages; but this month I was down to £32 with three weeks left until pay day. Years of fixed-term contracts, three mortgages and rising fuel prices mean I am dependent on left over sandwiches from meetings to make up my evening meal at present, so not really in a position to splash out on apps.
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