Let me guess - the solution is open source right?

Let me guess - the rant suggested that the university go with an open source solution right?

UWS

Unsafe Windows Setup

Disgruntled student?

I reckon.

Perhaps he was hoping for something a bit more Androidy.

Sigh...

I can't agree with the decision to buy iPADs, but seriously: Protecting people's free speech on the internet by selectively taking out the systems of people whose use of free speech you disagree with is not legitimate protest.

he has a point

I don't bemoan the fact that they gave out iPad's, I do bemoan the fact that uneducated marketing tools got to call the shots on IT purchases and strategy.

I ran an InfoSec team within one of the worlds largest banks and had to constantly deal with the fallout from marketing departments doing dumb shit like this.

Everyone else in the company has to go through an exhaustive justification and requirements process to put anything in place, yet these asshats some how chase the latest shiny shit with no justification whatsoever. Oh and guess who cleans up the mess they leave.

If people weren't such gullible morons these people would be out of a job.

Anon don't make actually bother making a rational case for which tablet to use instead... for textbooks, only the the Nexus 10 springs to mind, though f you took a hit on screen res, a Galaxy Note could be handy for annotations and presentations.

A quick web search reveals the existence of the Kuno, an Android tab aimed specifically at the education market (and only sold in bulk to schools, it seems), but with a 9.7”: 1024x768 16:9 screen. Not ideal. However, it is designed to managed centrally.

http://www.mykuno.com/index.html

Pretty good deal for Apple

University purchases IPads for students from Apple. -> students pay increased tuition for the equipment.

Students buy into iTunes environment -> not going to give up investment in music etc after graduation eh?

$profit$

Really nothing different than what Apple was doing in the 90's with schools, just with iPads now. Don't really agree with the mandatory part of it with the Uni, but that's how it goes sometimes.

That being said, we did it a little differently, my son started college last fall and we set him up with a car (to get there), a bike & bike car rack (for getting around once at school), an HP Win7 gaming-capable laptop (for real work too lol), and a Kindle 3 (some school books that are available, mostly for all the required reading - the kindle is light, battery lasts forever, and is better suited for extensive reading).

;)

Most expensive to maintain? how did they come to that conclusion?

Surely Android is more expensive given it is a harder platform to lock down. Students would brick them and nothing costs more than an inoperable device.

Supporting iPads is cheaper too, there's only one interface to learn, there's only a few models out there.

More

...ASSnonymous to do the perp walk, soon. Fools never learn, they just go to jail.

basic functionality, that Just Works OOTB on other platforms

Yup. So all those iPad users with no technical knowhow whatsoever are hacking their iPads just to be able to use them?

Come on, pull the other one.

There's so much anti-ipad stuff in these comments that i seriously believe that none of the the posters have been anywhere near one for longer than a 10 minute play in PC World.

At the end of this month The BETT is on at the EXCEL. Apple will be there in the guise of its education suppliers.

Just sit and watch how Apple have developed classroom. lecture room, interactive workbook and data storage scenarios that answer nearly every point made above. Also the costs are much lower than presumed.

My other half is a teacher and child psychotherapist. She works in a number of schools and generally carries a laptop and a large amount of paper around with her in a wheelie-case.

Shortly after the start of the current school year she came home and the first thing she said (to my great suprise) was "I'm going to get an ipad." When asked why, she listed a whole load of issues that were getting her down using the laptop in the various schools, the IT infrastructure in the various school and lots of little niggles to do with working space, time, moving around and a few others I can't remember now.

Next morning she bought a base model ipad 3, installed Pages, Dropbox (and iPlayer and Skype). I haven't seen the laptop since. She does all her record keeping, note taking, report writing and email on the iPad. All her files are up in the cloud (suitably anonmysed as required by the BACP) and the iPad has never been physically connected to a computer at all. She has had no need for memory cards or any of the other 'add-ons' that are deemed to be so essential in order to do 'real work'.

The only time she uses her desktop Mac now is when writing letters.

There's someone with no technical knowhow at all who has not 'had to hack' her iPad to get any functionality at all. To use a rather hackneyed phrase now - it just worked.

Why is it so bad?

It probably was a marketing decision to select ipads, as it is UWS is not often the first choice for university selection in Sydney so they were looking to get a minor advantage so they can increase their enrolment numbers. Ipads are certainly still popular and it is often the cost factor that has some (not all) people selecting other tablets so it was a prime choice.

They are very intuitive to use, I often see many non technical users easily start using ipads with no training. Even my mother, who is practically computer illiterate, uses one with no problems. Ipads are relatively easy to support, at worst you can wipe the thing if it plays up, although normally a restart (like with most tech devices) works to fix a large number of problems people encounter.

No doubt it was an expensive purchase to buy that many units, but given the number of ipads involved, the Uni would hopefully have negotiated the cost down to well below retail. They probably could have saved more if they went with another product but they went with a relatively well known brand which is quite common for people to do.

Given that UWS caters to a large number of students from a lower socioeconomic background, it would certainly help students to be able to purchase digital textbooks to keep costs down. It also provides them with a device that can be used for further online research (I assume the Uni provides a decent wireless network now) without having to wait on shared computers to become available (often a problem at the end of semesters during exam times). The lack of keyboards is certainly going to make using ipads to write major assignments less appealing, but at the same time, who would want to sit in a lecture where 50+ students are furiously clattering away on keyboards?

There are certainly many options to choose from when it comes to tablet or even laptop devices, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and the Uni chose one. No doubt if another product was selected there would be fanbois for other products up in arms over the choice. In the end, the Uni is copping flak for giving something to students that they can use in their academic life. Those bastards...