In the Uni-Key project we have promised to make our proposed digital course accessible on mobile devices so when I took the family iPad on a work trip instead of my usual netbook, I was taking note of what worked and what didn’t so that we can be better informed about good practice when we come to design the learning activities in a month or two.
Why I took an iPad
I took the iPad to save weight and bulk on a complicated trip which started with a trip to Italy and ended in Lithuania and became even more complicated as one of the airlines in my cunning plan went bankrupt. I was unsure whether this was a good idea as I knew that I had to do a lot of digital work while I was away, the biggest of which was to make a website from scratch with a group of university students.
How it performed as a work tool
I needed to use the iPad to:
- Access email including sending emails with attachments
- Access web pages including a Moodle based course and a Ning based community
- Use Skype
- Use the online website building tool, Weebly
- Use the online asynchronous audio tool, Voxopop
- Copy and paste text and URLs from one application, eg website to another, eg email
- Write extensive pieces of text
- Print out airline boarding cards
- Record audio which can then be transferred to a PC based audio editing tool
- Access my YouTube account, not just YouTube videos generally.
On the iPad, web sites automatically present in mobile format which meant that I often had only a stripped down version of the site. This meant for example, that I could not access my Google account to find out if it was linked with my YouTube account. At home I am always logged in to my YouTube account so I failed to log-in and could not access my Favourites.
Attaching files to my emails was back to front. I had to find the file first eg a photo and then ‘share’ it through email rather than starting an email message and then attaching a file. Also I found I could only attach one file per email message which was annoying when I had five documents to send.
Anything using Java or Flash was either problematic or impossible. For example I could do most things to build a website on Weebly, but adding links was something I had to delegate to those in the group who had Windows. Similarly, although I was able to record audio quite easily with an app called simply, Recorder, editing it would have required yet another app. The much acclaimed Mynah, part of the Aviary group of media tools, for example has not yet had its iOS version of their app approved by Apple and the web-based version does not work on the iPad. With Voxopop I could neither record nor listen to any audio as that is flash-based.
Skype worked fine but the Skype app does not seem to give you access to your account details, which I had wanted to change after learning that our house in Denmark had been broken into and our laptops stolen. I guess the solution would have been to go to the Skype website and do things from there instead.
Secure passwords are also a pain to key in, swapping between the three keyboards.
I think the iPad is heavy on connectivity. It seemed to me that web pages re-loaded every time I came back to them although a very few persisted in the browser when I returned.
Using Moodle and Ning was fine just as long as you only wanted to interact in the forums. As soon as I wanted to edit material in Moodle I was faced with the bare bones html view which made preparing the new week of my Moodle course a real challenge as I tried to pick my way through the code. Ning on the other hand seemed to work as normal.
Multi-tasking is not really practical on the iPad and I found that extremely frustrating. Even the so-called multi-tasking task bar is nothing of the sort, as every time you swap from one application to the other, you are effectively opening the application from scratch so everything takes an age.
Some challenges I just never took up. I could, for example, have tried to host a Blackboard Collaborate session, which was due as part of my online facilitation work but I didn’t want to experiment on my course participants, especially as a host. So that was delegated to my co-facilitator in London instead.
Printing I managed to do only by attaching the image of my boarding card, which I had screenshot to my photo collection, to an email using the Share option and sending it someone who had a Windows machine.
It could well be that many of these things could have been done more efficiently on the iPad but I just never discovered how. Some things I learned along the way, such as how to copy and paste across applications, which one of my student group revealed to me, while with others I just gave up.
My verdict
The iPad is a great consumption tool. I noticed that Air Baltic use iPads to offer their inflight entertainment and I expect that works really well. What I am less convinced about is when you want to use the iPad for more than simply opening a file (whether text, audio or video) or use an app with pre-determined functionality. Some universities are distributing iPads to their students and my immediate thought is that if I were one of those students I would also want a ‘proper’ laptop with which to do my work. Is it progress when you need two items of equipment instead of one? I also know that iPads are very fragile. The first one I ever saw was at a conference about 10 days after they had first been released and the screen was already broken. A school district here in Denmark equipped all their school students with iPads last September and were surprised at the rate of breakage. It looks like what they saved on iPad covers is going to be more than used up in replacing iPads dropped by exhuberant or careless 8 year olds.
So how to evaluate my experience? I have a feeling that the answer to many of my problems were apps but I didn’t know which ones. I would estimate that overall I was able to do about 90% of what I wanted to do on the iPad which is pretty good but it was irritating trying and failing to find out how to do the remaining 10%, while much of the 90% was also hard-won through much trial and error. Much is made of the intuitive iOS interface but I don’t think it’s intuitive until you’ve experienced it. … Which makes it … not intuitive, right?
So would I do this again? To save on hand luggage weight, I guess so, but I can’t see the iPad becoming my primary working tool on a day to day basis.
This article was written on an iPad but I waited until I got home to upload it to my blog as I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to use the WordPress dashboard with it.
PS. For a similar account from a satisfied iPad user see this.