When It Rains It Pours – New MS Courier Tablet!

Just when we are all rubbing our hands and running our minds on the possibilities of the upcoming Apple Tablet, Microsoft has to drop a bomb that blows all those thoughts into oblivion and brings everything into question about where we’re going next.

Watch the clip at Gizmodo before reading on.

After watching the video I just sat staring at my screen. And in the back of my mind a question started repeating – “This is from Microsoft?”

I was an early adopter of the MS Tablet concept. Actually, we had the privilege of getting Acer Prototypes for an early BETA a full year before they hit the shelves. While the Tablet was a great idea, it was never really picked up by developers and most software (good mainstream software) never fully embraced the Tablet gestures and possibilities.

The little that we do see in this video gives me a lot of hope that they may have actually nailed this one. I am so sick and tired of the Windows/Desktop metaphor of all current computers (including the Mac). This UI looks to mirror the way you would do these things in the real world on screen with a pen interface. And there’s a huge core focus on collaboration.

I really want to know if the pen is required, or if fingers will do? It looks like it has multi-touch. Over the years I twice had pen mishaps with my tablets where my only pen was destroyed by a careless slip of fingers, only to leave me with no way to use my Tablet. And one very new HP Tablet took six week to receive a replacement stylus. I wonder if this pen is electronic like the Tablet pens or simply pressure based (like the Cross PDA pens).

I can see teaching young students in a very short amount of time how to use this device. I can also see students opening pages in their Courier to their teacher so their work can not only be graded, but reviewed over the time they work on the assignment to see how they are progressing, and getting nudges in the right direction to complete their project successfully. Not to mention on the flip side “Johnny, I checked your Courier last night and I see nothing for your assignment that is due in two days.” Whoa, think about all the possibilities.

In class a teacher could have their Courier in hand up in front of the class and be flipping through the pages of their students while they work through solving a math problem or writing out an essay. To me, this brief look has teleported me forward about ten years into the realm of the Jetsons, something I’ve not experienced at all while dreaming of the Apple Tablet. I’ve been focused on the Apple Tablet as a eBook+ connectivity.

Hard to make any judgment calls on the success of this or the Apple Tablet at this pre-release late concept stage, but I just snatched up a few of my chips and moved them over to the MS square based on this peek at the Courier.

Another Prospective Eee-Book

While we all sit around and wait for the promised Apple Tablet (aka Ebook+) and the “Kindle Killers” just over the horizon, EeePC announced a two screen full color and connected E-Book in two flavors. A budget and premium model are in the plans. Here are two articles about the announcement with a graphic of a prototype that was shown (likely the premium model):

• Asus ‘Eee Reader’ to Join E-Reader Fray, says Report, PC World
• Asus Rethinks Laptop With Dual-Panel Portable at Cebit, PC World

One thing is certain (and this comes from an early adopter of the Kindle with a very large library), the Kindle is not the device for school kids and education. A school district is not going to adopt a single purpose device that costs $400/student to replace textbooks. Out here in California we are seeing our budgets waste away to nothing, and there’s no relief in sight. In my district we’ve cut over $20m in the past two years, and are due to cut another $20m+ this next July. There are not a lot of places to cut anymore without removing entire departments or programs.

The textbook market is a cash cow and a consumer of big chunks of the annual school budget. Districts already find it impossible to keep up with computer replacements, with many having inventories approaching 10 years old. The only places still getting new computers are labs, and these are usually funded out of non-general fund sources. It’s not a stretch to see districts leveraging the budgets allocated for textbooks to address these shortcomings. If you can replace expensive textbooks with ebooks capable of full color and animation AND Internet connectivity (either through wireless LAN or other) you have a killer device that can change the landscape of the classroom.

Out here in California there is a move to promote open source textbooks by the State. Here’s an artile from Ars Technica on open source textbooks and the challenges they face. Open source or not, e-books do have the potential to ditch those 50lb backpacks and bring fresh computing power to technology starved classrooms. This may finally be the one-to-one technology that sticks. My hope is that one day we can get out of the business of providing students desktop computers and they can bring their own e-books to school. We could provide loaners for those students meeting low income standards who would be exempt from purchasing their own. This would save the most money, but likely not be very popular with parents.

There’s got to be a better way. With budgets tightening I am already hearing rumblings from school administrators to extend the adoption cycle on textbooks to more than five years to cut costs. I can’t imagine the publishers are going to enthusiastically embrace an e-book model, just like the recording industry still battles MP3 players and online music companies. Somebody needs to step out and pilot this technology in a meaningful and measurable way. Until we can show that this will benefit students, not many districts are going to offer up precious budget dollars to test it out.

What saddens me is the lack of enthusiasm or even interest in these technologies by many school administrators. So off to a new school year the students go, weighted down with heavy backpacks and little technology integrated in their daily school lives.