The Metro is today running a piece called Will turning to tablet computers to educate pupils kill handwriting?, which offers some interesting takes on the future of education and handwriting.

If you were a teenager sitting at school and your teacher asked you to choose between a Biro and one of the most sought- after devices in consumer history, which would you go for?

My assumption is that teenagers (and other pupils, for that matter) won’t necessarily get a choice—they’ll get the tools that are best for purpose, making allowance for budget and politics. In the same way that I find it unlikely 100 metre runners will be offered, say, a motorbike, teachers won’t be offering a shiny tablet for all school tasks, or asking a pupil to choose between technology and traditional media.

Both are key tools in a child’s development but there are concerns that handwriting will be drowned in a new wave of technology in schools.

The use of ‘drowned’ is very loaded. But here’s the brutal reality: most people in the UK don’t write much these days. I mostly type words, for both work and play; now and again, I’ll make written notes, but I genuinely cannot remember the last time I wrote anything long-form traditionally.

‘I can’t understand why the schools are doing it,’ says Sarah Mooney, principal of the London College of Graphology, who believes writing promotes creativity in a way a computer cannot.

Person with vested interest in the science of writing and relation to psychology in ‘technology that makes handwriting less important is bad for people’ shock! And while she might believe writing promotes creativity in a way a computer cannot, I’d say that’s rarely the case these days. Most people who write for a living are thrilled by the sheer flexibility computers offer. In my case, I can rapidly bang thoughts into WriteRoom or Scrivener and then mould and shape them rather like a sculptor working on a piece of rock. When I used to write using only paper, the process was slower and I’d be frustrated by errors and editing. At school, this was even worse, since we were encouraged to submit final English essays with no errors at all, or we’d be marked down. This turned a creative pursuit into laborious drudge work, which the computer typically makes significantly less painful.

Also, if we look at very young children, the simple act of holding a pencil and learning writing doesn’t come entirely naturally, whereas interaction with something like an iPad is far more intuitive. Children have stories to tell, and enabling them to do so before they’ve mastered writing unleashes creativity—it doesn’t restrict it.

‘People won’t be able to write eventually. It needs practice. I think that it will affect people being able to express themselves properly.

I don’t fully understand why Mooney thinks this is an either/or case. Yes, digital is becoming more important, but kids on our street still play football, despite EA’s FIFA being available for every modern console known to man. Kids still love making music with real instruments and learning to play them, despite digital music tools existing. Kids love painting, despite the prevalence of Photoshop, Painter, Brushes and other creative apps. More to the point, core physical skills aren’t going to disappear. Schools aren’t going to ban children writing and instead force an iPad into their mitts. Instead, physical skills and digital skills will go hand-in-hand, and pupils will use the most relevant skill and medium for the project they are working on. Again, this is beneficial, not a drawback.

‘It’s money being spent on the wrong thing. I think it should be spent on the teachers and less on, shall we say, material things.’

Mooney makes the assumption that this is about glamour and having more possessions. It’s not. I last year spoke to Fraser Speirs about his project, where every child in his school now has an iPad. He believes this has saved the school money through the shifting of purchases, empowered students, and also, importantly, made things better for teachers, not least in them being able to engage students and be more creative in terms of teaching. That to me suggests an investment in the right kind of technology is a good thing, not wrong.

I’m glad to see that the Metro’s article does provide balance. It next talks to Sara Davey, headteacher at Mounts Bay Academy comprehensive in Penzance, who says giving every pupil an iPad will make learning more interactive and democratic:

‘We actually think it’s the future,’ she says. ‘Learning used to be, particularly in IT, an individual at a monitor. What the iPads allow is collaborative group work and students chatting about ideas, brainstorming.’

And Speirs is also quoted, offering the kind of future that would make Mooney’s toes curl:

[He] makes it clear handwriting has not been discarded—‘we are not a paperless school’—[and] would welcome a time when pupils do exams on iPads or computers instead of using pen and paper.

‘I think that’s something that’s got to come,’ he says. ‘It seems a logical end point. Handwriting already is a dying art and it’s you and I who are killing it, because adults are not handwriting.’

However, he notes that writing itself isn’t going to die through the use of touchscreens:

‘What you might see is a generation of kids growing up who are as good at writing with their finger on a touch screen as they are with a pencil.’

It’s also worth noting that while everyone’s touchscreen crazy right now, there’s a good chance devices may offer more physical interaction in the future that dispenses with the generic ‘pictures under glass’ UI that’s now so popular. Bret Victor talks about such an idea in A brief rant on the future of interaction design. In such a future, paper might well be dispensed with, but writing might in some ways return to more physicality than less. Even if not, we’re at a point where we can unlock unbridled creativity in children barely old enough to talk. It’s not time to slam on the brakes, but to go full-speed ahead and see where the journey takes us.

Previously on this blog, I’ve provided some handy hints for iOS developers regarding boosting your chances of getting a review in Tap! magazine, and for creating press pages for your app or game. In the first of those articles, I offer the following tip:

Let me know about your game. Email me or get in touch on Twitter. If I know about your game, there’s obviously more chance of it getting coverage.

These days, I get a lot of press releases, and about half of them are doing it wrong. So, here’s what you should be doing when you send out a press release:

1. Use the email’s text body. If your press release is mostly text-oriented, use the email itself to provide the text. This text remains searchable, and so when I later remember your product and want to check it out, I can easily search for your press release in my email client.
2. Get to the point. I’m fine with friendly, amusing language and a sense of fun in your text. I’m not fine with you waffling on for ages and not making it obvious what you’re talking about. You’ve made a game, so now imagine selling it to me in one minute. That’s pretty easy. Now do it in ten seconds. Tougher, but possible. Once you’ve done that, you should have the basis for your press release’s text. Note that this should include, right at the start, why I should play your game and what your game is about.
3. Don’t try to hide. You’d be surprised how many press releases I read where I’m none the wiser afterwards about how the game actually works or what it does. The text tries to disguise a derivative mechanic, but here’s a secret: a derivative game is not necessarily a bad thing, if what you’ve created is great. Some games I’ve rated very highly in Tap! include: Space Junk (Asteroids), Monsters Ate My Condo (deranged Jenga), All-Stars Racing (kart-racing), Contre Jour (more or less Cut the Rope). Don’t get me wrong: innovation is a good thing. But a derivative game isn’t necessarily bad, and it can even be a hook used to gain interest.
4. Don’t lie. There’s a fine line between positive copywriting and outright bullshit. You need to ensure you do not cross that line. I’ve had several press releases lately that have outright fictions in them, designed to make the game in question look better or be reviewed more favourably. In all cases, brief research via a search engine enabled me to find the facts behind the claims, which contradicted what I was initially told. And even positive copywriting needs to take care. Send me a press release claiming you’ve made the “best match-three game ever” and you’d better be bloody sure your game is amazing—as in ‘Zookeeper amazing’—because if it isn’t, why am I going to believe anything else you say? But while ‘best’ is almost impossible to prove, there’s nothing wrong with positive descriptive terms instead: addictive; engaging; exciting; great; terrific.
5. Do not use text attachments. If you send me a Word document which is just text, you’re wasting my time. I get dozens of press releases every day. Wasting my time does not go down well. If you send me a link to a Word document, you’re wasting even more of my time. I was today also asked on Twitter if sending a link to a Google doc is OK. No. If you want me to read something, put it in front of me now, or I will just move on to the next of the dozens of emails I need to get through.
6. Minimise other attachments. It’s increasingly common for emails about iOS games to be extraordinarily weighty. I’m happy to receive some attachments, such as a couple of screen grabs, but keep it light. Don’t provide me, as one PR recently did, with over 10 MB of grabs and an attached video. A couple of grabs that show off your app in its best light (i.e. not Game Center shots, the title screen, or options) is what you want to be sending.
7. Don’t make me jump through hoops. An email from ‘no-reply@’ with no other way to contact you means you’re making my life harder. An email where (and this happened recently) you say I can get promo codes, but only after I spend ten minutes signing up to your PR website that then takes 24 hours to acknowledge I even exist… well, that means you probably won’t get coverage at all. If you want your game covered, contact me, but also make it extremely easy to contact you.
8. Where possible, provide a video link. This is a new one, and something I’ll talk about in a later post, but gameplay videos can be an effective way to convince me to check out a game for possible (and even probable) coverage after your initial email has grabbed my attention. Sadly, a large proportion of iOS gameplay videos are utterly dreadful, and so my next ‘helpful hints’ post will provide ways to address this.

Marco Arment on the Asus Zenbook (and with a less-than-subtle ‘the assbook air’ URL):

It’s sad, really, that the state-of-the-art in the PC world is attempting to copy Apple. Why isn’t Asus trying to blow the MacBook Air out of the water with something radically better?

Looking at the insides of the two devices, it’s almost criminal; it really looks like ASUS bought a MacBook Air, tore it down and told its engineers to reproduce it. The even more depressing thing: despite a bundle of cash from Intel and having Apple to use as a template, these other companies cannot match the MacBook Air. Every new ‘ultrabook’ that appears has some massive problem or other: a crappy screen, a rubbish trackpad, overheating. Of course, blogs are still banging on about the ‘Apple tax’, but when you’re paying over a grand for a notebook, would you really want to save a couple of hundred bucks by buying what almost amounts to counterfeit goods?

More to the point, this showcases problems in the tech industry as a whole. As Arment says, ASUS and other notebook makers shouldn’t be copying Apple—they should be trying to better it. And yet all we see in the market is Apple-like designs showing up a year after Apple’s released something, and often, comically, after it’s moved on to something new. Remember that rash of MacBook Pro clones when Apple unveiled the MacBook Air? Embarrassing.

The same’s true in the smartphone space. I’m hoping Samsung gets nailed to the wall worldwide in its legal spat with Apple, not because I dislike Android (despite what you may think from this blog, I don’t really care either way for the platform), but because I utterly despise the kind of lazy pilfering that goes on in the market these days. I’m sure some smart-arse will yell “XEROX! Ahuh-huh-huh” at me. Sure, because Mac OS was exactly like Xerox, and Xerox didn’t at all invite Apple over knowing full-well what it was developing and also get a ton of stock for good measure…

At any rate, Apple’s never really claimed to invent a great deal of things anyway. The company has at its best been about refinement, and its rivals never manage that. Had Asus come out with something that largely resembled the MacBook Air but somehow took it to the next level, that would have been close to the Xerox/Mac OS scenario, and that would also have been great. Something new. Something exciting. Something where you’d be saying: you know, Apple should really have created this. Instead, we just get knock-offs that do little more than dilute the original design and attempt to confuse people into buying something because it’s just like the (slightly) more expensive real deal, even though it’s clearly not.

Flurry has written up a report, Is it Game Over for Nintendo DS and Sony PSP? It shows market percentages for major handheld platforms and notes that over the past three years the PSP’s share has all but dried up and Nintendo’s has declined from 70 to 57 to 36 per cent. What’s filled the gap? iOS and Android!

The problem is the manner in which the data’s presented. In the pie-charts provided—the hook that’s being reported everywhere—Flurry combines iOS and Android. Last time I looked, iOS and Android were not the same thing. In fact, I’m pretty sure you could consider them rival platforms, so why the hell combine them in the charts? “Because we’re trying to make the point that smartphone-oriented systems are beating the traditional ones, you idiot,” Flurry might say. So why then not combine Sony and Nintendo’s share in the same charts?

Data’s only really useful if the same methodology for presentation is used throughout. When even one set of pie-charts screws that up, the rest of the report is akin to stabbing myself in the eye with a fork, no matter how happy I am that iOS revenue is now outpacing even Nintendo’s handheld revenue.

Matt Alexander, writing for The Loop:

Simply put, Mobile Flash has been an excuse of a “feature” for platforms in the face of iOS.

[…]

Having pushed Mobile Flash as such a key differentiator, they’re looking at dealing with a whole host of confused and misinformed consumers.

That assumes most consumers will hear this news (they won’t) and that Android tablet manufacturers will stop bundling Flash, even as it ages and doesn’t get updated beyond security fixes (they won’t). I think it will be a while before the Flash bullet-point is dropped from the spec list of most Android tablets.