Thursday, October 25, 2012

Too Bad There are No Educational Technology Standards for TECHNOLOGY

Carl Franzen:

“The almost instantaneous obsolescence of the new iPad was a bit of a surprise,” said Vineet Madan, senior vice president at McGraw Hill Education, in a phone interview with TPM. “If I were a teacher who had spent the last pennies of his or her budget buying new iPads for students a few months ago, I don’t know if I’d be too happy waking up and finding out that there’s a new iPad with a completely different connector cable now.”

What's especially galling is the way Apple's decision flies in the face of the National Educational Technology Plan which specifically calls for portable devices in schools to standardize on mini-USB chargers by 2014... oh, no, I'm sorry, I forgot, there is nothing of the sort in the plan, because the people who work on those kind of things are much, much too smart and important to waste their beautiful minds on such issues, especially since it may inconvenience present or future corporate (or recently corporate) benefactors.

As a consumer, I applaud Apple's willingness to always rip open the scab to move forward. I can afford to keep up. Schools have entirely different requirements.

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