I’ve just spent a happy half-hour reading through the entirety of The iPad Project over on Fraser Speirs’s blog. Amusing that at the end of day one, the kids had already figured out how to make mischief with their new devices:

We installed a drawing app – I forget which one but it might have been Doodle Buddy – that allows kids to collaborate on drawings over the network. The kids were fiddling around with this app when there was a knock on the door. “Errm….Mr Speirs? Are your children doing something to my class’s iPads?”

Turns out some kids had been joining shared whiteboards on iPads in the other classroom. Hilarity ensued, of course.

If you’re in education, go and read Fraser Speirs’ blog. Of late, it’s recounted his fascinating experiment of introducing iPads into the classroom for his young students. Inevitably, the Apple-hostile crowd has leapt on every article reporting on the story, and the national press has wrongly claimed that iPads are being used for everything in class, rather than as a supplementary tool; therefore, going to the source is your best bet.

Today, Speirs answers some of his critics, and the point I wanted to highlight was this one:

“Won’t the children lack ‘proper’ computer skills?”

This has been a criticism levelled at Speirs since he revealed the iPad experiment, and it is, frankly, utter bullshit. Think back to when you were at school. How does the technology compare to what you’re using today? In my case, rampaging as I am towards my mid-30s, I grew up with BBC Micros and then, in secondary school, the Acorn Archimedes. By sixth form, the school had some Macs in the graphics department, but both the hardware and software was a world away from even the technology I used at university (Macs for video editing, PCs for web access) and it certainly has little resemblance to what I work with today.

Even kids who grew up with PCs at school during the 1990s or later will find that many things have moved on. To that end, the only things that are really important are:

1. Providing the best environment for children to learn in, regardless of the technology. If PCs work for you, that’s fine; but if iPads (or some other tablets) engage the children more, and are more practical and manageable, by all means use them. Or have a mix of technology (as in Speirs’ school);
2. Ensuring that you’re teaching the children foundation skills in technical subjects, and that you use transparent software elsewhere. In other words, don’t teach software. Most applications in use today simply won’t exist in over a decade’s time when kids entering school leave education. However, fundamental skills (even in the likes of spreadsheet work, word processing, image manipulation and video editing) will always have some kind of analogue.

Speirs sums this up nicely in his article:

This is a constant tension in educational technology: do you teach for the current ‘business environment’ or do you teach for learning? I prefer the latter. I’m not doing this just to produce the next generation of cubicle fodder.

So I just installed iTunes 10 and… wow. This isn’t a good ‘wow’. It’s just a… wow. Here’s why:

Yup. Apple’s decided it’s been at least a few months since it screwed with the iTunes UI, and so it’s made some changes. Some of them actually work. There’s a decent ‘hybrid’ list view, and the main interface pane offers more clarity. However, two changes are mind-boggling:

1. iTunes previously coloured its sidebar items. This enabled you to—without thinking—associate certain items with certain colours; even if you didn’t do this, each item was differentiated. Now, you have to think before you click, and the usability of this area of the app has been substantially reduced.
2. The close/minimise/zoom buttons are now aligned vertically in the full window mode. In the mini-player window, this was always the case, but in the full window mode, it’s a baffling decision. Even though Mac OS X’s hardly a bastion of total consistency these days, these three important buttons usually stay put, and people’s muscle memory enables quick access to them. Now, iTunes 10 chucks Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines (the ones Apple seemingly expects every developer but itself to follow) out the window, in order to save a little horizontal space. However, this again reduces usability—not only are these buttons now in the wrong place, they’re also much smaller and harder to hit.

In the past, iTunes has foreshadowed subsequent updates to the look and feel of Mac OS X. I seriously hope that isn’t the case this time, because the iTunes 10 UI is a botch job—a collision of fairly good ideas (which are incremental updates) and the very worst in interface design. To that end, I wonder where all Apple’s best UI designers have gone. They’re certainly not on the iTunes team.

UPDATE: In the comments, mr_phillip writes: “For what it’s worth, defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1 restores the default close/minimise buttons”. So at least Terminal-savvy Mac users have an option to deal with the second of Apple’s UI disasters.

Apple yesterday had another of its special events, which I noted would provide immediate disappointment with its open streaming that was only available to Snow Leopard-equipped Macs and iOS devices. (Good move, Apple! That’ll show Google and Adobe!)

As it turned out the event was, as usual, a mix of WOW, bleh, and eh? I was going to write a piece about it, but journo chum Adam Banks got there first and, spookily, his thoughts on what went on in San Fransisco yesterday mirror mine exactly. So, er, go and read Adam’s piece to see what I think about Apple’s announcements.

In a press release on its website, Apple has confirmed that it will “broadcast its September 1 event online”, thereby providing immediate disappointment to users worldwide when Jobs doesn’t reveal a $50 256GB unicorn-powered iPod touch with Retina Display and sprinkles.

The event will be streamed using “Apple’s industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming”, which the company says is “based on open standards, so fuck you, Adobe”. In order to view Apple’s open-standards streaming, you require a “Mac® running Safari® on Mac OS® X version 10.6 Snow Leopard®, an iPhone® or iPod touch® running iOS 3.0 or higher, or an iPad™”, along, presumably, with a shield to defend yourself from the onslaught of registered trademark characters, hypocrisy and irony.