21apples

According to Dr. Henry Lowe, senior associate dean for information resources and technology,“We really don’t know yet how the incoming medical students will use them,” but he claims physicians are quickly embracing the iPad. “Physicians are a mobile group,” he says. “They’re moving around from clinic to clinic, from patient to patient.

Hack Education posted a piece about Stanford Medical School requiring iPads for all students, along with a PDF reader that lets you take notes with your finger. I'm not quite sure how you take notes with your finger, but highlighting seems doable.

I'm neither an Apple fanboy nor hater, but I just haven't understood this rush in education spaces to acquire iPads. I think that the Dean's quotation above says it clearly. I've seen it from K-12 to higher ed, and everyone keeps seeming to say we're piloting it, or experimenting with it. But they're doing so in huge numbers, like Stanford's entire first year medical student body.

Why not go with what your teachers are trained to teach with, what your students are trained to learn with? Why just see where it goes? It sort of flies in the face of everything technology directors have been doing in recent years - sound technology adoption. It's like the whole world has become Google - just beta test everything. I wouldn't want to put my users through it. Perhaps I need to evolve, or perhaps people need to be less seduced by the hype. Perhaps...both.

Thanks @angeleamaiers for the article link

As the president of a university that is among the top-ranked universities, I hope I have the standing to persuade you that much about these rankings - particularly their specious formulas and spurious precision - is utterly misleading. I wish I could forego this letter since, after all, the rankings are only another newspaper story. Alas, alumni, foreign newspapers, and many others do not bring a sense of perspective to the matter.

      I am extremely skeptical that the quality of a university - any more than the quality of a magazine - can be measured statistically. However, even if it can, the producers of the U.S. News rankings remain far from discovering the method. Let me offer as prima facie evidence two great public universities: the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and the University of California-Berkeley. These clearly are among the very best universities in America - one could make a strong argument for either in the top half-dozen. Yet, in the last three years, the U.S. News formula has assigned them ranks that lead many readers to infer that they are second rate: Michigan 21-24-24, and Berkeley 23-26-27.

      Such movement itself - while perhaps good for generating attention and sales - corrodes the credibility of these rankings and your magazine itself. Universities change very slowly - in many ways more slowly than even I would like. Yet, the people behind the U.S. News rankings lead readers to believe either that university quality pops up and down like politicians in polls, or that last year's rankings were wrong but this year's are right (until, of course, next year's prove them wrong).

I quoted an excerpt. Please read the full letter here.

This letter is from Gerhard Casper, Stanford's President Emeritus. In it he urges U.S. News and World Report to move away from its college ranking system. He gives an elegant critique of their methods along with a plea to help families who are looking to choose the right college for their child.

He uses the University of Michigan as a case to show how the the ratings are faulty, and as an alumnus, I appreciated that.

It is somewhat sad that the letter is from 1996 and these pathetic ratings still last. Two years ago I even watched a newspaper in New York City rank the high schools with letter grades based on things like Ivy League matriculation, endowment dollars, and other odd pieces.

I am hopeful that schools are helping their families with much clearer methods of picking schools for their children. Parents, stand tall, and do what is right for your child. Do not become infatuated with the salacious bits of "journalism" around America's colleges.

via @krupali