On the iPad screen, subtitles are of an appropriate size and enhance the archival use of materials spoken in foreign tongues. The iPad has enhanced the usability of university vodcasts in research and teaching: when watching lectures recorded with a static camera, the platform offers an intimacy with the speaker.įor sessions in foreign languages where subtitles are used, the small screens of the iPhone and iPod do not assist viewers. While the iPad will not replace this function, there is no doubt that the smaller screens of the iPhone and iPod are not conducive to viewing scholarly visual presentations. On most days over the past few years, I have listened to sonic sessions delivered by great scholars. Before the iPad, I favoured podcasts and audio-only lectures and presentations from iTunes U. He could have viewed the videos on his computer, but found it more effective and efficient to separate watching and note-taking.
Originally, it seemed as if he was treating the iPad as a small television in his office, but he was actually using it as a specialist visual archive for his work. He has been watching lectures by cultural theorists Sylvère Lotringer and Paul Virilio for his research, taking notes on his computer while viewing the footage.
He immediately started to download seminars and sessions from iTunes U and positioned the iPad alongside his laptop computer. My husband, Steve Redhead, recognised an innovative use for the iPad straight out of the box. The iTunes version was as mobile as its owner. Writing this article while in Australia, my Zone 2 DVD would not operate. I own the film on DVD and via an iTunes download. As an example, let us consider the interview mentioned above with Rams in Objectified. If a British-based scholar wishes to work with a UK-purchased DVD in the US or Singapore, the film will not operate on local hardware (unless it is chipped or multiregional).Īlthough it is often more expensive to download films and television programmes to the iPod, iPhone or iPad, one advantage is that the material is mobile. One difficulty of relying on DVDs for this work is the restrictive nature of region codes.
The iPad’s portable screen encasing downloaded visual media enables staff to conduct research as they move around the world. The YouTube application resident on the platform helps ensure that popular culture and user-generated content can be deployed in appropriate and thoughtful ways throughout a seminar or tutorial. The iPad’s capacity to operate as a self-standing screen for time-shifting and space-shifting media makes it ideal for small-group teaching. One of the advantages of this dependency is that screen-based media – including film, television programmes and vodcasts – can be downloaded, played and viewed. The tethering of the iPad to iTunes ties the user to Apple in a way that would make Microsoft blush, or at least put the anti-competition lawyers on speed dial. One feature that drew me to the iPad – and makes it distinctive from laptops, netbooks and the iPhone – is its presentation of photographs. From this early experience, I offer Tara’s 10 uses for the “aca-Pad”. I report not only on my household’s engagement with the device, but also on the iPad applications used by my students. Two characteristics make it distinctive in the overcrowded technological market: its screen and its mobility, through which students, teachers and researchers can create new ways of reading, writing, watching and thinking. However, below I explore some specific functions that academics may extract from the iPad. While Stephen Fry and the usual Apple advocates and enthusiasts express their “love” for the platform and its “intimacy”, I have yet to be convinced. Occupying the space between the smartphone and the laptop computer, the iPad probes our consciousness of technological obsolescence, waste, viral-marketing excesses, public relations and the usefulness of design. This product has divided critics, raising questions about its purpose. Rams made these comments before the release of the iPad. In Gary Hustwit’s Objectified (2009), a feature-length documentary about society’s complex relationship with manufactured objects, Rams anointed Apple as the corporation that best perpetuated his legacy. Other characteristics included consistency, simplicity, honesty, understandability, unobtrusiveness and innovation. Among his 10 rules for successful design, Dieter Rams, the German industrial designer, listed usefulness as a key attribute.