Category — General

There is a post on TechCrunch today about the Top 10 Reasons The Apple iPad Will Put Amazon’s Kindle Out of Business

Certainly the iPad will give some competition to the  Kindle - especially the $489 model - but put it out of business ?  Highly unlikely.    Here are the top 10 reasons why the iPad will NOT kill the Kindle :

1) Price: The price point to compare is the $269 Kindle vs the $499 iPad.  The $269 Kindle works pretty well for reading books. And if  Amazon drops the price to $199 - there is no competition.

2) e-Ink : Makes reading a pleasure. Enough said.

3) Glare :  The backlight on the iPad makes it difficult on your eyes for extended periods of reading. Plus you can read a Kindle in broad daylight with no problems. Try that with an iPad.

4) 3G connectivity: is built in and free for life on the Kindle - with  no monthly fees, ever ! And anywhere in the world. First the iPad will cost  $130 more for the 3G option.  Second it  requires you to shell out  $30 (or $15) per month to AT&T to be able to use 3G.   Three negatives right there for the iPad  - the hassle of signing up, the cost  and AT&T’s awful connectivity.

5) Amazon vs iTunes : You can download almost any book on Amazon - and are not locked perpetually into the Apple/iTunes jail.   Apple hates giving up control on anything -  and that is not likely to change in the near future.

6) Size : The Kindle is smaller and more portable than the iPad.  Makes it easier to carry it around just like a book. The iPad - though portable -still feels like you are carrying around a tablet or a laptop.

7) Weight : It is only 0.6 lb compared to the 1.5 lbs for the iPad - another plus that makes it easier to carry around.   And you can therefore  hold the Kindle for extended periods with one hand without your hand getting tired.  Try that with the iPad.

8) Battery Life : You can easily use a Kindle for almost 2  weeks with a single charge.  That makes it the perfect device for reading books on long airplane trips  or vacations.  The iPad claims 10 hours for the battery life - we all know that the actual battery life  will be probably half that.

9) Touch : The iPad is a touch device, which means you will need to constantly wipe the greasy fingerprints  on it resulting from all that page turning when reading books.  No such problems on the Kindle.

10)  Fragility : Finally, I  could easily give the Kindle to a five or ten-year old child without worrying that they may drop and break the screen. Not so with the iPad’s expensive and fragile panel.  In fact, the Kindle may be the perfect replacement for all the heavy school textbooks that kids have to carry these days.

So what do you think ? Your comments and feedback are welcome.

It is now widely acknowledged that America’s  public school education system  is broken and needs fixing. Numerous studies rank US school children well below other countries in  science and math tests:

“The average science score of U.S. students lagged behind those in 16 of 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based group that represents the world’s richest countries. The U.S. students were further behind in math, trailing counterparts in 23 countries.”

Studies such as these have raised alarm bells among parents, educators, politicians and the media.  President Barack Obama has made it a priority and said  in a speech last year   :

” The future belongs to the nation that best educates its citizens — …….And yet, despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we’ve let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us…. The relative decline of American education is untenable for our economy, it’s unsustainable for our democracy, it’s unacceptable for our children — and we can’t afford to let it continue….”

It is indeed a paradox that primary education in the richest nation lags so  far behind the rest of the world on so many  metrics.  As an immigrant to the US ,  who attended primary schools in India, and as a parent with two children who graduated from public schools in America,  I have been intrigued by this apparent paradox as well.  While not an expert by any means, I have given this some  thought.

I believe I have benefited greatly from the education I received from  the schools I attended as a child in India, and I have some ideas on why and wanted to share my insights here.   We did not have spacious, well equipped classrooms, or  audio-visual equipment, projectors, or air-conditioning in spite of the hot weather. Many  classrooms were make-shift and some topped with a tin or aluminum roofs (”tin-sheds” as we called them).  We did not have a large playground, flood-lit basketball courts, a stadium or an auditorium.   We had no access to any of the facilities taken for granted in most schools today.    In fact, this actually makes my analysis easier :  You can see clearly what really matters since you have stripped away all of the  infrastructure elements considered essential for a school’s success.

So here for what it is worth, are my viewpoints for  what I think made a difference :

• We were fortunate to have had great teachers and a wonderful principal.  They were passionate, involved and committed.   They knew each of us personally and cared about what we learnt.  I  remember our English teacher in sixth grade - Mr. Krishnan, who urged us to be creative and original and to  use  our imagination in writing .  Our Hindi language teachers, Mr. Kumar and Mr. Jamuna Rai, had a  passion for literature and poetry that was infectious and passed on to us.  Our principal, Mrs. Visharda Hoon, was an extra0rdinary woman who set the bar high for both our teachers and students in discipline and excellence.

• We took part in a lot of extra-curricular activities and events - including “elocutions”, debates, recitations, essays at  both the  intra-school and inter-school levels.  This was invaluable in shaping our composition and thinking skills.

• There was a lot of writing and very little objective - True/False, mutliple choice type - tests.  I have always felt that this was one key difference between the schooling systems in India and the USA - we wrote a lot more than students here are required to.  I believe the writing was very helpful in allowing us to learn to compose our thoughts and express ourselves.  I also think writing  exercises and develops abstract  thinking abilities better than multiple choice questions.

• We had to learn three languages - English, Hindi and a third language  (Sanskrit in my case).   There is no doubt that this helped greatly and accelerated absorption of a wider range of viewpoints and perspectives - all essential to learning.

• It was actually considered cool to be smart or to be a “geek”.    The words “geek” and “nerd” were foreign to us. Academic success and  braininess trumped social awkwardness. You could always become socially adept later,  school was the time to learn as much as you could.   In the US though,  popular culture, movies, TV shows and celebrities (many who  have dropped out of school),  consider it is not so cool and  people apologize or feel embarrassed to admit if they were ever geeks or nerds.  How can a society, where being too  smart or brainy in your teenage years is disparaged and considered a socially undesirable trait,  ever hope to motivate its youngsters to study hard, learn as much as possible and become smarter ?  Banish this pop-culture attitude in  America and you will increase the average SAT scores !

• As a culture - both at school and outside school, learning is revered and teachers  are considered only next to God, and your parents in importance.  As our  ”gurus”  they are  given our ultimate respect and gratitude .  This is   ingrained by our parents into our young minds from early on and creates  the humility to continue to learn and grow.   Incidentally, this reverence and respect for teachers is common among all Eastern cultures  - including China, Japan and Far East Asia.

• And finally parents were an important part of this equation.   Although there were no PTA meetings or parent teacher conferences - as children we knew that nothing  was more important to our parents than  doing well at school, studying hard  and respecting our teachers. And that was somehow sufficient to motivate and spur us on.

Undoubtedly,  there are many  other factors which I have probably overlooked.  However,  these are the ones that I believe mattered the most in the end.    Money and resources are of course important to improve schools, and no one denies the importance of good teachers and parental involvement.  However,  just as  important may be a subtle but fundamental change in attitudes that needs to permeate  all levels of society and  subliminally signal the importance of learning, teachers and schools to our children.

So my favorite technology blog TechCrunch announced today that they were giving away a brand new Google Nexus to one lucky person who retweeted their blog post OR posted a comment about why they deserved to win one. This seems to have set off a tsunami of Retweets (6380 as I write this) and a veritajble flood of comments (2809 as of now). The contest ends at Noon PST tomorrow (Jan 6, 2010) - so expect those numbers to swell even more.

Intrigued by the hype and promise of the Nexus I thought it could be the perfect antidote to cure my Iphone envy. So just for  fun I took Arrington’s bait and decided to take the plunge.   And yes folks, this  pretty much … ahem… locks me in for the first spot to win the phone as who can resist a good old, funny limerick, right ?

So (drum roll…) here it is (originally posted on TechCrunch here …)

And in case TechCrunch thinks I am all talk with rhyme but no reason - I will go on record to guarantee that if I do ever win the Nexus I will find a restaurant that serves the Kugel for lunch, order it for the first time and Tweet about it from my Nexus ! How is that for commitment to a cause ?

College too expensive? Try YouTube http://bit.ly/uFFbo

This is a glimpse of the future of college education and education in general.  The convergence of digital multimedia and broadband together with global connectivity is paving the way for a new way to disseminate learning - 24 hour, on-demand   learning on any topic that may be of interest to anyone, anywhere !