Apple Reps Visit Me and are Rebuffed

On Friday, the team of local Apple representatives came in and did their full-court press to convince me that the iPad is the most wonderful thing ever. I remained unconvinced and explained why.

This has been a long-standing dance with me and the Apple representatives. Apple has consistently been wrong-headed with respect to education. Just as they're also increasingly wrong-headed with respect to the ability of technology to empower human creativity and freedom.

Our old rep and I had this conversation many times over the years where, with a nod and a wink, the rep would indicate that he understood the points that I was making, but that he was going to toe the Apple line and mouth the necessary talking points. This time, however, I was talking to a True Believer.

I tried to explain up-front that our goal is for students to be participants in knowledge construction. I explained that we're less interested in resources that are designed for traditional, didactic teaching that are intended to transmit information.

"Have you seen our new iBooks app?" he said and proceeded to show me a bunch of examples of resources designed for traditional, didactic teaching intended to transmit information.

I explained my position about textbooks (which is that the textbook companies are ultimately going away). I believe that the model where textbooks are designed to appeal to faculty, who require that students purchase them, is fast coming to an end. I pointed out that a number of our faculty were at the point of telling students that it didn't matter which textbook they got (new, old, whatever), because class was increasingly about small group problem-solving, where the goal was to present reasoning to support a good answer -- not to remember a particular right answer.

He continued that the app to create the books is free (as in beer) and that teachers and students could create similar resources. I admitted that Apple was deploying a clever strategy to monetize markets. I showed them the recent xkcd about this but continued that I would much rather have students working collaboratively on documents -- not creating them in isolation. And that the format of a "book" was less interesting (as a scientist) than having students create scientific papers and posters, which are the two most common forms of discourse in the life sciences -- not that writing for the popular media isn't also worth doing, but that textbook presentations were uniquely uninteresting as a form of student discourse. I indicated that I would much rather have students reading and extended Wikipedia. I showed that if you search for "mitosis" in Google, the first page that comes up is the Wikipedia page and that students could be profitably engaged checking and referencing statements there.

"But how can you know that Wikipedia is true?" he challenged.

I explained that one of the goals is to get students to embrace a more robust and tentative model for knowledge: to understand that any statement needs to be considered, checked, and integrated with prior knowledge. And that while the other resources depended on some authority (like the "author") -- they were probably just paying unknown writers to generate the content -- Wikipedia provided a history, so you could see who had contributed content when. I showed how you could assess the validity of a page by considered how many edits it had and whether those edits were gradually refining a topic, whether it was being edited back-and-forth by competing partisans, or whether it had been created by one person and not subsequently edited -- all useful information.

I also showed how I have used Drupal with the Diff module to have students write collaboratively and how the history of revisions allowed me to assess whether the writing was the work of the students and whether the members of the team had all contributed meaningfully to the project.

When I asked about centralized support of the devices, he explained that, although the devices really wanted to be "loved" by one person, it was possible to support them centrally (by using Apple's proprietary tools). We discussed BYOD and the challenge in having students come in with devices all configured differently.

I finally gave them my monologue on why I refuse to be bound to proprietary technology. How, as a grad student, when Supercard went bankrupt, I discovered that all of the work I'd done for 6 years was held hostage to someone else's business model and how I now assured that all of the work I did used open standards and could be done using Free Software.

They guy tried to argue that Apple supports Free Software, but I pointed out that Apple has moved away from any meaningful participation with the Free Software community and that, concurrent with their move into the cell phone industry, they were increasingly becoming a walled garden: that the Apple hardware you buy doesn't really belong to you and functionality often requires paying someone money so that Apple will unlock the functionality. I pointed out the recent article about how cameras in China won't do geotagging because the Chinese government doesn't permit it and how Apple had created a broken iPhone 3G for the Egyptian market for the same reasons. That kind of behavior is deeply disturbing to me.

As we were leaving, I showed him the recent Android tablet I've purchased recently and explained why I got it: on top of all of my reservations about Apple, I needed to write Esperanto characters and Apple won't let me have a keyboard with Esperanto characters. "That's an opportunity for someone to make an app!" he said.

"No, no, no!" I replied. "There is an app that I can use to copy-and-paste Esperanto text, but a third party can't fix the keyboard that you use in regular apps. Why can't I just type Esperanto characters in Twitter, Mail, and Facebook? It's a tiny fix: just a keyboard map. But Apple won't allow one to be provided. There are literally a dozen solutions in Android. But it's a problem that can't be fixed on the iPhone, because of the locked, proprietary operating system. That's just wrong."