Uncarved

I found a curious Business Insider post via Daring Fireball, which contained the following chart, visualizing the growth rate of various “smart phone” platforms, across carriers:

I’m noticing a significant difference in the angle of elevation that the Android adoption curve is showing, amongst the different carriers. Specifically, I’m looking at how it’s showing the flattest rate of growth on AT&T, the only carrier on that list that’s also offering the iPhone.

General Thoughts Android, Blackberry, chart, iPhone, mobile

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recent proposal to adopt so-called e-textbooks for his state’s public school system has triggered a flurry of press coverage, as well as new products like the Kindle DX and CourseSmart‘s iPhone app in the market.

The idea has critics. There are concerns regarding the economic feasibility of the idea, as well as the intellectual property management, and naturally the functional requirements for such devices.

An overview of these matters includes the following:

• Economic Feasibility

  1. How will the costs behind distributing the readers (the actual hardware units) to every student be covered?

  2. What business model(s) will be available for textbook publishers?

• Intellectual Property

  1. What safeguards do publishers have against unauthorized distribution of their materials (eg, piracy)?

  2. What safeguards does the educational system have against vendor lock-in?– schools should never become beholden to any one company.

  3. What about ownership of the software itself? The operating system, the format of the interactive materials, etc.

• Functional Requirements

  1. What sort of hardware capabilities must these devices offer? Of course, they’ll have to display text in layouts with photos and diagrams, but what about video? What about 3D rendering for visualization purposes, or network connectivity?

  2. What sorts of interactions must these devices allow students to conduct with the educational material? Will it support touch-based hyperlinking, annotations, or some sort of data sharing? What about end-of-chapter quizzing?

Clearly there are several matters that need to be thought through, but here’s a “sketch” for a potential solution.

Read more…

Modernizing Education, Public Brainstorm Android, education