Don’t take the title of this blog entry the wrong way. I’m not suggesting that the recently announced Microsoft Surface tablet is something that I’m going to be purchasing for every student and staff member in my district. I very well MAY end up purchasing hundreds of Surface tablets, but last week’s announcement by Microsoft was so vague (It didn’t include detailed technicial specs nor even a definitive price point!) that I couldn’t begin to analyze whether or not these Surface tablets are going to be a good fit in a K-12 environment. No, it’s a DIFFERENT prayer that these tablets are answering…
Over the last month I’ve had three different staff members (two principals and one high school teacher) ask me whether we shouldn’t consider changing our district technology plan–which takes effect in three days and runs for two years–to include the purchase of an iPad for every teacher and administrator in the district. And I understand where they’re coming from. The number of iPads in my district has grown by a huge percentage over the last twelve months. Actually, to be accurate, I guess the right way to say it is that the number of iPads in our district has grown by an UNDEFINABLE percentage over the last twelve months because on June 28 of 2011 my school district had ZERO iPads (and there’s no way to define a percentage increase from zero!). Today we have 37 iPads, 15 of which are student pads, 20 of which are used by administrators, and only 2 of which are used by teachers. As the teacher who was encouraging me to buy an iPad for every teacher said (in front of her school’s entire teaching staff during a faculty meeting), “How can you expect us to use this technology, or even know what this technology is capable of doing, if we don’t have one of our own?” The argument certainly makes sense, and I told her so.
“So?” she asked me.
“So what?”
“So when are we all getting an iPad?”
I looked her squarely in the eye and said, “Never.” When pressed to explain why, I told her (and the rest of the school’s faculty) the following: Because the iPad isn’t going to be the device we’re all using when the smoke clears in the Tablet Wars.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not bashing Apple. It may well be that the device that we end up using may be an Apple device, and it may be some future iteration of the iPad (the iPad V maybe?), but the current iPad is in my opinion a “bridging” device, a device that shows the promise of a type of device (in this case, the tablet computer), providing a sort of bridge in the end user’s mind between what was possible with an old technology and what will be possible in the future, but that has some real flaws that prevent it from being the “final” device and being universally adopted. In the case of the iPad, the device was an eye opener when it came out, and it included some features that really showed us what was possible. Things like
- Virtually “instant” on access to the device (I have an HP tablet PC on my desk, and like every PC, if it’s off it takes a very long time to boot up and start the hundreds of programs and processes than run during start up)
- Day long battery life (My HP tablet PC–though it claims 5 hour battery life–only lasts about 2 hours if I actually want to USE it.)
- An ecosystem of apps that provide increased functionality.
- Relative ease of use
- A purchase price that is less than a desktop computer
All of these things opened us up to the possibility of what a tablet could do, and the iPad was soon followed by various Android tablets, including the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet. But all of these devices share the same limitations of the iPad:
- No physical keyboard
- Difficult to integrate into a network
- Fairly flimsy contruction
- Difficulty printing
- Limited compatibility with desktop/laptop programs
Eventually, the tablet is going to evolve to incorporate features that will overcome those limitations. And the tablet that overcomes those limitations, THAT’s the tablet that’s going to be the device to consider purchasing for every staff member in the district.
The key, I guess, comes down to “revolution” vs. “evolution.” The revolutionary device is always the sexiest one. It’s the device that gets all the press, that people write about and get excited about and that years later will be given credit on Wikipedia (or whatever) as being the device that started it all. But it’s rarely the revolutionary device that ends up being the final device. It’s the EVOLUTIONARY device that takes that product’s strengths and fixes its weaknesses that ends up being the de facto device in its category.
The most obvious example, of course, is in the area of desktop computing. More than a quarter century later, people still crow about the Apple Macintosh, the revolutionary computer that was announced during the 1984 Super Bowl. It WAS an amazing device, the first successful desktop with a graphical interface. But it had one serious flaw: It was as expensive as hell! The IBM/Microsoft personal computer came along with a much lower pricepoint and blew it out of the water. Microsoft was the first to come along and provide a similar experience to the revolutionary device and also to overcome the deficiency.
So the personal computer is the most obvious example of the success of the evolutionary design over the revolutionary design, but it’s probably not the best example for this case. Instead, think of the Palm Pilot. Remember the Palm Pilot? The first successful hand held computer. In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, the Personal Digital Assistant was as big a category in information technology as the tablet is today. Everyone wanted a PDA. After all, you could do so much with them. Both my superintendent and my high school principal used them to do classroom walkthroughs and to remind them of upcoming appointments. But just like today’s tablet computers, there were some real problems with the Palm Pilot. I absolutely LOVED my first Palm Pilot, and I carried it with me everywhere I went. But I remember thinking, Man, this thing would be better if only
- It had an operating system that was a little more familiar, or at least a little more intuitive
- I didn’t have to tether it to a computer and synch it to get my data on it
- There was an easier way to find and purchase programs for the thing
- It could also function as a cell phone.
And in the end, of course, the PDA of 1996 slowly evolved into the smart phone of 2012. Palm actually overcame numbers 2 and 4 on their own (The first smart phone I ever owned was a Palm-branded smart phone), but they stubbornly stuck to their quirky PalmOS, and when the iPhone came along…Well, you know the rest.
Imagine if in 2004, when my superintendent and principal were both using their non-smart Palm PDA’s, someone had convinced the district to purchase a Palm Pilot for every staff member in the district (and I do remember my principal saying that would be a great idea). I’m sure that some of the teachers would have found some way to use them in their classes, but really: what would a teacher do with a single Palm Pilot? And when smartphones exploded onto the scene a couple of years later, would we have regreted that decision?
Are you still reading this blog entry? Really? Because this is a LONG blog entry! And if it’s long reading, imagine how much fun it is to have someone SAY it to you in a faculty meeting. I think I lost people when I went through everything I just said to them and tried to explain how the iPad isn’t the final device. It’s important to understand, but hard to explain quickly. At least by me. It would be nice if someone a little less long winded could describe all of this for people. Or even better, SHOW them.
And THAT’s where I’m grateful to Microsoft Surface. Their minute long advertisement, which is VERY short on details but is long on coolness, pretty much says everything I spent 1000 words writing. When one of my elementary principals came into my office Monday and asked me that same old question–when are we going to get everyone an iPad–I told him, “You’re not going to want everyone to have an iPad.” And when he asked why, I just said, “Watch this…”
As I said at the beginning of this WAAAAAAAY too long blog post, I don’t know if we’ll ever purchase a Microsoft Surface tablet, but I’m glad Microsoft made the commercial above because that principal forgot all about me buying an iPad for every teacher in his building and instead said, “Wow! When can I get one of those?”