Ken brought to my attention a good article that at first glance falls under the category of Apple Tablet speculation, but is really just a very clear vision of the educational technology that teachers and students want. Ken found out about the article because the author emailed him to point out that many of his requirements could be met by tablet versions of existing Omni software.
Will the Apple Tablet Support or Hinder Users’ Cognitive Fitness?
Learning involves a lot of thinking, writing, drawing and communicating. Learning involves anticipating what the author will say, setting learning objectives, detecting knowledge gaps, writing comments on the document, drawing diagrams. Unfortunately, today’s computers do not make this an easy task.
One item of personal interest is:
And why not allow users to directly add dictionary entries to their self-testing database, so that they never have to look up the same word twice?
In fact, I implemented a web-based version of this about ten years ago…
Update (August 2010): Inkling, just released, is the first iPad app I’ve seen that begins to incorporate some of these ideas, such as writing comments on the text.