Welcome INFS 1020 Spring 2011!
Read the following article from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Sign up at bloger.com – create a response to this entry, speak to a subject from this article. Possible subjects could be:
- E-Text books, have you used one? How was your experience? Would you rather have E-Texts or are regular texts just fine for you?
- Tablet PC's, are they useful? Are they just for consuming information? Or can you really produce something with them? Have you considered buying one? Is cost a factor? Do you know the real cost if you buy a data plan from a cell carrier to go with it?
- Feel free to find your own topic if you wish as well.
Expert Predicts a Deluge of Tablet Computers on Campuses
January 7, 2011, 3:43 pm
By Josh Fischman
Las Vegas—In his keynote address at the Higher Ed Tech Summit, Walt Mossberg, the influential technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, told an audience of higher-education officials and company executives that their future held many tablet computers. And not just the iPad, but some of the 70 or so new tablet devices that have been announced this week at the Consumer Electronics Show here.
Speaking yesterday, Mr. Mossberg noted that CES this year should be renamed "TES" because there were so many of the things. (There was Motorola's new Xoom, for instance, and Dell's Streak 7, Lenovo's IdeaPad Hybrid—a laptop with a detachable tablet—and devices from Samsung, Toshiba, Motion …)
And tablets will matter in higher education, Mr. Mossberg said, because students will bring them to campus, and colleges and—in particular—publishers will need to meet their needs. "The actual users, like students and faculty, will barge in," he said.
Books should cost less, and they should be digital, Mr. Mossberg said. He is a trustee of Brandeis University, and "I vote on cost-cutting at every meeting. So the idea of having to spend a fortune on books is just primitive." Course materials, including books, are less expensive in digital form, and tablets make them easy to use. "The multi-touch tablet computer has a serious chance of challenging the mouse-based interface, which has been around since the 1960s and came to fruition in the 1970s," Mr. Mossberg said.
