Stanford School of Medicine equipping students with Apple's iPad
The School of Medicine at Stanford University has adopted Apple's iPad, providing the device to all incoming first year medical students and Master of Medicine students.
The school cited four reasons behind the new program, including student readiness, noting that iPad "creates opportunities for efficient, mobile, and innovative learning."
Stanford also noted "the flexibility of iPad technology," noting that "iPad allows students to view and annotate course content electronically, facilitating advance preparation as well as in-class note-taking in a highly portable, sharable and searchable format."
Access to information and "information literacy" was also a consideration, with the school pointing out that "students will be able to easily access high-quality information at any place, at any time (for example, images from textbooks on digital course reserve, image databases, journal articles, Lane Library?s various search tools, etc.)"
A fourth rationale was Stanford's intent to go green, "replacing printed syllabi with PDFs is in line with the Sustainable Stanford initiative, which aims to build sustainable practices into every aspect of campus life."
Stanford and Apple
Located near Apple in Silicon Valley, Stanford has long had a history of interaction with Apple and its chief executive Steve Jobs, both in computing technology in general and within its School of Medicine.
The university invited Jobs to give a commencement address in 2005, and Stanford doctors later treated Jobs through his battle with pancreatic cancer.
The university was also an early participant in Apple's iTunes U program, which enabled schools to share free educational courses and other content with the public.
In 2008, the school announced an iPhone development course, and last year it began publishing its "iPhone Application Programming" course on iTunes U for free to the general public.
The school cited four reasons behind the new program, including student readiness, noting that iPad "creates opportunities for efficient, mobile, and innovative learning."
Stanford also noted "the flexibility of iPad technology," noting that "iPad allows students to view and annotate course content electronically, facilitating advance preparation as well as in-class note-taking in a highly portable, sharable and searchable format."
Access to information and "information literacy" was also a consideration, with the school pointing out that "students will be able to easily access high-quality information at any place, at any time (for example, images from textbooks on digital course reserve, image databases, journal articles, Lane Library?s various search tools, etc.)"
A fourth rationale was Stanford's intent to go green, "replacing printed syllabi with PDFs is in line with the Sustainable Stanford initiative, which aims to build sustainable practices into every aspect of campus life."
Stanford and Apple
Located near Apple in Silicon Valley, Stanford has long had a history of interaction with Apple and its chief executive Steve Jobs, both in computing technology in general and within its School of Medicine.
The university invited Jobs to give a commencement address in 2005, and Stanford doctors later treated Jobs through his battle with pancreatic cancer.
The university was also an early participant in Apple's iTunes U program, which enabled schools to share free educational courses and other content with the public.
In 2008, the school announced an iPhone development course, and last year it began publishing its "iPhone Application Programming" course on iTunes U for free to the general public.
Comments
Smaller... Lighter... Longer Battery Life = Win!
Save the trees, save the environment! Free iPad for all. No more wars, let's use the money for school.
Sounds like the logical move for the medical industry... Windows-based Tablet PCs ---> Apple iPads.
Smaller... Lighter... Longer Battery Life = Win!
also...virus free device!!
also...virus free device!!
In these 'highly specialized' environments, the software run is pretty locked-down, so viruses and the like aren't usually an issue... 'usually'
I see the iPad taking over the medical field!
Best
Every student in America should be given an iPad. No more books. The cost of an iPad is cheaper than a semester cost of books in most colleges, and even in many high schools across the country.
Save the trees, save the environment! Free iPad for all. No more wars, let's use the money for school.
Agreed, and you can throw in Newspapers and Magazine subs...Company reports, the list goes on and on. And don't forget all the oil/gas it takes to ship them and the oil/gas to get the raw materials to the paper mills and printers...it's not just about saving trees!
Edit: and the water pollution b/c of having to bleach the paper to white.
Every student in America should be given an iPad. No more books. The cost of an iPad is cheaper than a semester cost of books in most colleges, and even in many high schools across the country.
Save the trees, save the environment! Free iPad for all. No more wars, let's use the money for school.
No.
Chuck Dick
President of the American Book Publishers Union to Promote Killing Trees to Print More Books To Gouge College Students
My daughter is in Med School and I will be getting her one to augment her MacBookPro 13.
I see the iPad taking over the medical field!
Best
Only if they can sterilize them.
Every student in America should be given an iPad. No more books. The cost of an iPad is cheaper than a semester cost of books in most colleges, and even in many high schools across the country.
Save the trees, save the environment! Free iPad for all. No more wars, let's use the money for school.
When college books stores lose that extra revenue from not selling as many text they will just increase the cost of tuition.
When college books stores lose that extra revenue from not selling as many text they will just increase the cost of tuition.
College Bookstores generally are independent businesses that lease space from the College. If books drop under their own cost and weight, the College would simply lease the space out to some other entity for some other use. The losers will be traditional publishers that don't adapt. The winners might be students (cheaper and better interactive "texts") and professors (indie industry).
Save the trees, save the environment!
I would be curious to know which is more environmentally friendly...
The winners might be students (cheaper and better interactive "texts").
My son was given a CD to complement his 4th grade textbook two years ago. What a disappointment to find that the CD was just a PDF version of the book. No interactivity...I don't remember if it was searchable, or not. Other than that, no added content.
In these 'highly specialized' environments, the software run is pretty locked-down, so viruses and the like aren't usually an issue... 'usually'
Yea right. Nothing but WinXP terminals in large hospitals that constantly need reboots to update their patient records. Yeah, that's a secure, real-time environment.
When college books stores lose that extra revenue from not selling as many text they will just increase the cost of tuition.
Given the costs of shipping storage and handling in the store - not to mention (even cheap student) staffing to stock bookshelves - this is a win for them too. Set up a row of simple kiosks to pay for and download textbooks directly to your computer or iPad, yeah that is the way to go. Less staffing required, virtually no storage, shipping or handling. Space requirements are smaller as well, heck you could even have a "bookstore app" for that - once on campus your bookstore app checks your location and asks for validation and your class list, downloads your textbooks and supporting material and you're done.
I would be curious to know which is more environmentally friendly...
Paper industry uses heavy equipment to cut drop and transport trees (arguably a renewable resource) to a paper mill where equipment requiring energy is used to grind the wood to pulp (maybe mix in some level of recycled material), uses tons (literally) of chemicals to treat the woodfiber and make it better able to be rolled out into thin sheets and bleached white and inked with lines. Once produced it has to be cut, formatted for notebooks, lab books, or wrapped in reams for printers, or transported in large spools to printing houses where it is printed, treated, cut and bound into books. The books are sold, used for one semester, resold, recycled or just thrown away. If you are taking four classes per semester, that usually mean one to two (or more texts and supporting material per student per semester (that would be roughly 20 million students in the US alone for undergraduates), or 160 million text books and related material, most of which will be updated in the next year or two with a new edition making the old editions obsolete. So figure on average half that or 80 million texts needing to be replaced with new ones each year. Estimate at 1-2lbs of paper per textbook (or more) thats 160 million pounds of waste paper to process, recycle, incinerate, or landfill. *whew* someone else tackle the electronic side of the equation
Every student in America should be given an iPad. No more books. The cost of an iPad is cheaper than a semester cost of books in most colleges, and even in many high schools across the country.
But is it cheaper than the difference in cost between the electronic version of the text and the treeware version? My guess is that e-texts *won't* be that much cheaper. Certainly not enough to offset the cost of an iPad in a year (much less one term).
Save the trees, save the environment! Free iPad for all. No more wars, let's use the money for school.
There *are* benefits to treeware versus etexts. Higher resolution, for example.
Estimate at 1-2lbs of paper per textbook (or more) thats 160 million pounds of waste paper to process, recycle, incinerate, or landfill. *whew* someone else tackle the electronic side of the equation
The textbooks I've seen for medical education seem to be heavier than that, I'd say 2-3lbs. I would hope that 1 ipad + what is needed to support it for 2 years would be better than the ~20 books that it might replace, but it's important to actually get a good analysis, because high technology often takes a lot more power, water and chemicals to manufacture.
I had this discussion with a green blogger some time back, he assumed that an SD card per movie for distribution would be better for the environment than an optical disc because it's a lot smaller than the disc that it replaced, he gave figures on the amount of water, oil & energy it takes to make a disc, & packaging, but didn't bother to find info on equivalent figures on the SD card to make a comparision. I dug up information showing that one SD card takes a lot more to make than a single optical disc & packaging than the SD card & packaging..