A plan for economic development…

Today, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company plans to build some Mac computers in the U.S. for the first time in about a decade, investing $100 million in 2013 in an effort that could serve as a high-profile test of American manufacturing competitiveness.

This is a brilliant move and it leads to a great idea on how to move our economic recovery into high gear.

Imagine the US government saying they will only purchase U.S.-made products. If the populace wants to buy computers, for example, made in Taiwan, that is fine, but when it comes to purchases made with our tax dollars, the name and U.S. location of the factory where the products are made needs to be on the first page of every bid. No U.S. factory results in automatic rejection of the bid, independent of price.

Now some might argue that making computers in the U.S. means they will cost more. Perhaps they will, and perhaps they won’t. But even if they do, the salaries are being paid to American workers who pay taxes and support our economy with their own purchases.

Of course, such a move might be hard to implement right away, so I’d suggest a three-year rollout that looks like this:

Year 1 – products must be assembled in the U.S.
Year 2 – at least 50% of all components used in the products must be made here as well.
Year 3 – everything, including all components, must be made in the U.S.

I can imagine the cries of outrage from those invested in making things outside the country, but we need to help our trading partners know we are going through hard times and need to protect and rebuild our own economy at this time. That shouldn’t be too hard to grasp.

Is there precedent for this? Sure. Look at Brazil (a country already undergoing strong economic growth) where the government is planning to use tablets in schools, a project which could require about 900,000 tablets by early 2013. President Dilma has made it clear that government-purchased tablets for schools need to be made in Brazil. This has resulted in a flurry of new manufacturing facilities being built, including those for Apple’s iPad.

While it is true that the U.S. does not have plans to purchase a million tablets in preparation for a true country-wide rollout in education (another topic for another time), the purchasing power of our government is still strong enough to have a tremendous impact.

If we want to kick-start a serious economic recovery in the U.S., we need to start by putting our workers first. What could be more American than that?

Tablets as Disruptive Technologies

In 2010 I was quite enamored in the idea of “netbook” computers – low-powered laptops that not only had low price tags and long battery life, but also performed most tasks quite well, especially if the user was taking advantage of open source software ranging from Unix as the operating system, to Openoffice.org as the office suite. To prove the point, I wrote an entire book (When the Best is Free) on a netbook without any problems at all. It was so clear to me that this was the next big device that I predicted that every student would soon have a netbook, especially since they were cheaper than textbooks. In fact, since the introduction of this device, the cost of an average collection of textbooks was far greater than the cost of a netbook computer. The future of this new device was clear (at least to me.)

I was wrong – very wrong. The revolution did not unfold as I foresaw it. Netbooks became (and remain) a niche market and I think this is because of the emergence of a truly disruptive technology – the tablet. Led by the and famously successful release of the Apple iPad, and followed by Android-based devices from many other vendors (e.g., Samsung, Lenovo, Toshiba, Sony, Asus, Acer and others) tablets have caused netbooks to fade from view.

This phenomenon is quite interesting. First, as with most disruptive technologies, the tablet was not as powerful as the netbook. Furthermore, it generally cost more to buy, had less storage, and operated on a completely different premise. While the netbook had a clear evolutionary path from traditional laptops, the tablet did not. Devoid of traditional keyboards, the tablet operated with “soft keys” displayed on a multi-touch display. Gestures (pinches, swipes, etc.) previously seen in science fiction (e.g., Minority Report, Star Trek, Next Generation) became commonplace. These new ways of interacting with computer displays were readily adapted and traditional mouse movements were no longer needed.

So where did tablet computers come from? The origins of tablets had more to do with the evolution of advanced MP3 players (the Apple iTouch as an example) than with the evolution of computers. At the time of its introduction, the tablet had the potential to be a high-tech fad – like the Apple Newton from 1993. Instead, even with its limitations, the tablet became an overnight success. One could argue that this was a logical outgrowth of the popularity of smartphones (such as those based on the Android and iOS operating systems) but I think the tablet is generally seen in a different light. With screens ranging from 7” to 10”, tablets provide enough real estate to support web browsing and some limited text editing. While many people may find the light weight and long battery life of tablets to be compelling, and web-based tools (plus a few downloaded apps) to meet their day-to-day needs, most will find that they will still need a powerful laptop for the creation of documents, and rely on tablets for casual work on the road. The long battery life is one clear advantage, but another advantage of tablets is rarely mentioned. Because traditional clamshell laptops use a separate keyboard, users have to be sitting down, typically at a desk or table, in order to use the device. Tablets, on the other hand, can be used while standing. By holding the tablet in one hand, the other can provide the gestures needed to navigate applications. This plus reduced weight are quite compelling for some. Personally, if I had all my presentations running from my tablet, I would leave my laptop at home when I travel for speaking engagements.  My tablet computer fits in the seat back of an airplane, and allows me to watch several movies with enough power left over to run a 60-minute presentation without recharging.

Tablets also seem to meet the needs of a large number of people who never need the power of a real laptop  For them the tablet makes a great deal of sense, even though many high-end tablets cost as much as fully featured laptops. Of course, as tablets evolve, the prices will drop and the capabilities will increase, further cementing their role in creating a true disruption in personal computing.

All of which raises the question of what happens next. As tablets continue their evolutionary path, there will someday be another technology introduced that will have the same impact on tablets as tablets had on netbooks. Such is the nature of technological development.

Tablets in Brazilian schools

Brazilians love their technology.  I remember decades ago when I first visited the country to see that people would mark their seat at a buffet by leaving their cell phone on the table.  In fact, Brazil was probably among the first country to have cell phones outnumber wired lines, although that was largely due to the difficulty of getting a new wired phone line at the time.

But technological romance remains quite high.  Our local shopping center’s Apple store is full of people.  Samsung’s store in the same center is also quite busy.  Even Nokia, whose future remains uncertain, gets some traffic – and this is not just window shopping!  The number of iPhones, Galaxy tablets, and iPads coming out the door is amazing to see.  In fact, a recent study by Accenture shows that Brazilians are three times more likely than the global average to be purchasing a tablet in 2012.

This caught me by surprise given the explosive growth of this sector worldwide.

While tablets are coming into US schools at a fairly good pace, some Brazilian schools are listing them as back to school accessories along with crayons and paper notebooks.  The explosion is not restricted to the private schools.  In Pernambuco (the state where I am in the northeast of the country) the government is purchasing 170,000 tablets in a pilot with second and third year high school students.  Nationwide, other pilots in the public sector are adding 350,000 more tablets to the mix, with the goal to bring these devices to every student in the country.

Now if tablets were cheap devices, this would be one thing, but they are not.  The duty on imported electronics is so high that, for example, Apple products are nearly twice as expensive in Brazil compared with their price in the US.  Of course, with the rapid growth in sales volume, Toshiba and other major players are opening Brazilian factories to avoid duties and thus bring the price down.

The alpha-geek in me loves to see all this activity.  I’m an avid and active tablet user myself.  But when it comes to education, huge projects are taking a big risk if they are not thought out in advance.  For example, what is the wireless telecommunications infrastructure of the school?  Can it handle a thousand kids online at the same time?  How will the tablets be used?  If they are just glorified textbooks, much cheaper alternatives exist.  If the uses are more in support of creativity and inquiry, what tools will the tablets have?  Most importantly, how (and when) will teachers be provided not just with the mechanics of tablet use, but with the pedagogical support to transform education in rich ways?

Without thinking these questions through, the huge influx of tablets will likely fail to effect permanent change.  With the right support, though, we may see that the consumer driven romance with technology (especially among the young) will produce benefits that far exceed the cost of these devices, and this is a result worth seeking.

Why does Apple want to kill education?

Today Apple unveiled a free iBooks 2 application for the iPad that brings interactive textbooks to the popular tablet computer.  According to Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, “Education is deep in Apple’s DNA,” which is confusing to me since texbooks are a major component of an education that has been flawed since the late Middle Ages, and one would think that Apple’s DNA would recognize that schooling and education are sometimes at odds with each other.

“With iBooks 2 for iPad, students have a more dynamic, engaging and truly interactive way to read and learn.”  This quote is pure and utter garbage.  What is new about canned content from Pearson and the other companies drooling at the prospects of finding new ways to view children as bodies with wallets, and education as the memorization of mindless material that, most likely, can be found in better form in ten minutes with a well-crafted Google search?

He said the iPad is “rapidly being adopted by schools across the US and around the world” and 1.5 million iPads are already being used in educational institutions.  This should make us cry.  Apple has clearly lost its soul.

Back in the early days when Apple really cared about education, a variety of creative ideas were encouraged both inside and outside the company all centered on the idea that computers let us do things we simply couldn’t do before at all.  Languages like Logo were supported, along with other creative tools such as Hyperstudio, and some internal projects as well (especially Cocoa which spun off and became Stagecast Creator).

Then along comes the iPad – a potential game changer being driven into schools by the students themselves.  Scratch, an amazing programming environment for kids (and grownups) developed by Mitch Resnick’s group at the MIT Medialab, was REMOVED from the iTunes store.  And now, the offerings of the old guard publishers will be featured.  The message is clear – “school is fine the way it has always been – now buy some new toys that require no changes in the system at all.”

This didn’t happen by accident.  Careful thought went into Apple’s perspective on how tablets should be used by children.  Today they decided that the iPad should be a costly version of the Amazon Kindle Fire.  while this may be a lucrative move on Apple’s part, it destroys any semblance of Apple caring one whit about real learning.  It is as if Dewey, Piaget, Papert and other giants in the field had never been born.

The bright spot is that the MIT folks are currently working on bringing some of their creative projects for kids to the Android platform, so this is not a condemnation of tablet strategies in general, only of Apple’s astounding march to the 19th century (as so aptly put by my friend and colleague, Gary Stager).

I bear no ill will toward Apple, only sadness in their decision to sell out the nation’s youth to curry favor with the very publishers that have done everything in their power to hold education to the past – at any cost.

This is a sad day indeed.

Will 2012 be the year of the “ultrabook?”

The Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show opens on January 10, and there are rumbles that this show will feature lots of ultrathin laptops similar to the Macintosh Air.  Last year was supposedly the year of the tablet, but the rollout didn’t take place until months later, leaving Apple with the market pretty much to itself.  Of course that has changed, with everyone from Toshiba to Samsung offering quite powerful tablets at reasonable prices.  Schools, in particular, seem eager to jump on the tablet bandwagon and, while a good case can be made for this, my guess is that much of the early enthusiasm was generated by the freshness of the product category.

And some of these tablet installations are huge!  The Brazilian State of Pernambuco is placing an order for 130,000 tablets as a trial run for high school students to use!  Other projects on the drawing board are larger than that.  Everyone who can create code is getting up to speed on the Android OS and educational apps of all kinds are in various states of preparation – apps that go way beyond e-books or other applications reflective of the outmoded educational practices found today.

So, if the tablet is just now starting to emerge as a big seller (and it is), what is the rush to create a new class of ultrathin laptops that will cost a bundle, and do nothing you can’t do with the laptops we already have?  My guess is that this move is just to embrace an idea and hope it becomes a trend.

We saw this with Netbooks – a technology I endorsed when it came out.  Netbooks never achieved their potential because the price differential was not big enough to keep people from buying full-sized laptops.  The death blow, though, was the tablet – a truly portable device that can be used while walking around.

And that brings me to an important point.  I was an early fan of the Netbook, and it didn’t take off.  I am a current fan of tablets, so what are the chances I will get this one right?  I think my chances are pretty good.  The relationship kids have with tablets is different from the one they have with laptops of any kind.  That is true for adults as well.  Yes, tablets do not currently offer the rich variety of software found on laptops, but that is starting to change.

CES may be where the dreams of Ultrabook designers get shared, but I’m sticking with tablets as a dominant platform for the foreseeable future.

Painting over rust

In 1972, Alan Kay gave a speech at the ACM conference on the design of a computer for children (http://mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html).  This presentation introduced the world to the Dynabook, a concept of Alan’s from the 60’s that he was pursuing at Xerox PARC in the 70’s.

His comment, at the time, is that much that passes for “change” in education (and elsewhere) is simply “painting over rust.”  It looks pretty for a day or two, but then the paint falls off and you are back where you started.  When we look at the world of personal computing since the 1970’s, we’ve seen lots of attempts to force fit failed educational models inside the new tools, giving the illusion of change where none existed.  Like Seymour Papert, Kay was one of the few visionaries who understood from the beginning that the power of computers in kids hands came from the artifacts they created themselves.  This model (Papert calls it “constructionism” says that it is the act of creating something in which a child shows her true learning.  Whether (as Papert suggests) it is a sand castle, a poem, or a computer program, the point is the same – the student is not treated as some vessel to be pumped full of stuff.  Instead, the child’s mind should be triggered to do what comes naturally – to make observations about the world around him, and to create and test models of this world in the quest for understanding.

Which brings us to tablets today.  All across the world, we are seeing huge installations of tablets as the next big thing in education.  While there is much to like about these devices (their true portability, long battery life, etc.) I am still waiting to see the kind of child-appropriate programming environment envisioned by Kay and by Papert (to name two examples) with which children can build and run their own models.  This software exists on netbooks, laptops, and all the other computers we now seem to have put on the back burner and, as a result, we may be (in the short term) making a huge step backwards.  Search for Logo, Squeak or Scratch to see what I mean.  At this point, precious little exists to let kids harness the true power of the tablets they will be getting.

Textbook publishers love tablets.  Be afraid.  Be very afraid.  This romance is destined to drive tablet use as a distribution medium for the same content that has failed to meet the needs of all learners for generations while creating the illusion of newness.  It is, in fact, just another layer of paint over the rust.

Will this change?  Apple banned Scratch (a logo-ish language for kids developed at MIT) from the iPad.  This was one of the most stupid decisions that company ever made.  In the Android world, I expect Scratch to appear sometime in the next few months (at least that is my hope).  There is a language called Frink that runs on Androids, and while not based on Logo, still allows kids to write their own programs.

As schools race to embrace tablets, let’s stand up and ask: “Are you painting over rust?”  That is a question worth asking.

A response to Gary Stager

Those of you who don’t know Gary need to learn more about him.  He is one of the more articulate thinkers about technology and children of our time, and he shares his insights through a variety of means, including his own blog, Stager to Go.  In a recent post (http://stager.tv/blog/?p=2397&cpage=1#comment-56660) Gary says that “BYOD” is the worst idea of the 21st century.  His concerns are many, including the observation that the adoption of student-owned technologies absolves schools of the responsibility to provide powerful computing tools for all children, thus perpetuating the digital divide.  He also correctly states that a cell phone is not a personal computer, and that these tools make it easy to think of education as an information-gathering enterprise, not something that cultivates creativity and thinking.

What he leaves out is the fact that this is rapidly changing.  Powerful tablets running Android 3 provide access to many wonderful activities, and (as I mention below) students will soon be able to create their own programs for these devices using a Logo-like language (Scratch morphed into AppInventor).  Ever since Apple banned the MIT Medialab’s Scratch language from the iPad, Mitch Resnick and his band of followers have redoubled their efforts to bring this powerful language to what is destined to become the dominant platform. (Over a half-million Android devices are set up for the first time every day of the week.)

So, Gary got part of it right, but I respectfully suggest that the situation he describes is not nearly so dire as my response (below) to his blog suggests.

Gary,
As always, you stimulate thought. The fact is that schools don’t WANT one to one computing. As you correctly state, this would be amazingly cheap to do. One to one was fought because it is a real game changer. Now to the point. The reason BYOD is interesting is because it is a consumer-driven revolution – children are bringing their own tools to class with every expectation they will be allowed to use them. Schools are clamoring to set up the right backbone to handle traffic from myriad devices. While you are right to say that a phone is not a computer, that vision is blurring. The rise of powerful, inexpensive tablets will have quite an impact. Maybe you never heard of anyone going into Best Buy to purchase a “device,” but I’ve never heard a kid ask for a new “clicker”. What passes for technology adoption in many schools is a sad attempt to co-opt the revolution.

Like you, I believe children should use their tools as tools for creativity and deep understanding. This is why I’m so actively supporting the Scratch and AppInventor projects at MIT, especially now that they are merging. While you are correct to point out that some devices (like the iPad, for example) do a horrid job of supporting kids creative expression through programming, this is an Apple issue, not a platform problem. Android devices are far more flexible, and the release of Scratch on that platform later this year will bear that out.

If there is a downside to BYOD, it is simply that the establishement of education actively fought student technology until the kids brought it into their own hands. As Papert said, “Unless schools change, the students will create a revolution” The revolution is at hand.

Does an iPad killer exist?

It may seem like sacrilege to suggest that the day may come when Apple no longer owns the tablet market, but that day is coming – just not right away.

The problem with the iPad is that it is constantly running behind itself.  For example, when the original iPad came out, there was no front-facing camera, making it useless for Apple’s own videoconferencing application (let alone Skype, etc.)  Then, with iPad 2, there was no 4G capability, even though AT&T had announced 4G a few weeks prior to Apple’s launch.  And, as slick as the design of the iPad 2 is, it still looks like the Star Trek Next Generation PADD designed by Mike Okuda over 20 years ago (http://tinyurl.com/29tvorx).

Not that this is a bad thing – the iPad design is functional, just not as elegant as it could be.  In short, it is not truly “Appleish.”

Along comes Sony with their “S” tablet:

Not only is this tablet nice looking, it performs superbly as well.  First, the looks.  Instead of a uniformly thick plate, the “S” is tapered, kind of like folding a magazine back around itself.  This makes it easy to hold in portrait mode, and provides a nice typing angle when used in landscape mode.  Second, it is the lightest tablet on the market at this time – significantly lighter than the iPad 2.  The only physical design flaw I could see is the pop-out door for the USB and SD card slots (slots the iPad doesn’t even have.)  This door is just asking to be broken off by users who are either young, or who are trying to do things too quickly.  This, though, is the only physical design flaw.

As for performance, the unit I tested has the smoothest motion I’ve seen when it comes to moving stuff on the screen, or moving an entire screen full of graphics.  A lot of work went into having this tablet reek of excellence and, at similar pricing to the iPad, the Android-based Sony “S” is a device to watch closely.

The tablet world will continue to grow, and Apple’s lead will continue to decline.  Don’t weep for Apple, though, they have always done well as a minority player.  In fact, the best thing about the new competition in the tablet marketplace is that all new tablets (including the next one from Apple) are likely to advance even faster than they would if Apple had the market to itself.