Bill MacKenty

Tablets, netbooks, and refrigerator’s

I’ve always thought a device that works like an appliance would be ideal for education. I like tablets and I’ve played with netbooks - there is something about the simplicity I like. Word processing and internet services? Great.  When there is a problem, I just reset the device and poof, it’s working. Kids can use wikis, blogs, videos, all that yummy web-based stuff.

I’m willing to trade refrigerator-like reliability and simplicity over complexity and features we barely use.  The only sticking point I see is creating multimedia.  I want my kids to create multimedia (they can already do this online with tools like voicethread and these online video editors). And I see a huge change coming in the way video can be delivered and manipulated online (hi onlive).

I understand the rumor mill about an Apple tablet is churning up and the idea excites me (Chris Dawson has a nice take on this - I agree to a point, but there is already so much fantastic content on the web to offset lack of texbooks). Apple has this secret sauce that makes the user interface so completely pleasant.