Question 96 of 365: What’s touch got to do with it?

My son wouldn’t stop screaming in the Apple store today. I tried to give him crackers and even Vanilla Wafers to try and get him to entertain himself. But still he wailed. He threw his food on the ground and then screamed until I picked it up for him to throw again.

This was at the second Apple store we went to today.

The first store we went to, I let him out of the stroller and let him run around. The store wasn’t really supposed to be open yet, so there wasn’t anyone there except for the “trainers.” I was all alone with the iPads, except my son wouldn’t let me get a good look. It was like he was trying to make sure that I didn’t become too attached to the “magical” device.

He nearly knocked one off of the table and almost knocked over a couple of signs before we decided that the training time before the store was open was not an appropriate time for a screaming one and a half year old. And yet, all I wanted to do was to let him see it and touch it. And that is what he wanted too. It was a shame that there wasn’t a kid’s iPad section, with foam rubber on the ground and huge numbers of kids apps ready to play with.

So, what was I able to do with an iPad while parenting my child who is not quite ready for the intricacies of new technology? I have written an e-mail, opened up a number of apps, checked out openspokes.com (everything but the flash video works great), and checked out Pages. While those 7 minutes (total) are not enough to write an in-depth review, they are enough to make a single pronouncement: my son will likely use a touch screen of some kind almost every day of his life.

While I do not believe that the iPad itself (at least not in its current iteration) will be what my son uses in the future, the power of telling a device what you want it to do with your fingers is exactly what my son expects to do, all of the time.

He didn’t want to watch me touch the giant screens. He wanted to do it. He wanted to run his hands over them and make them do stuff. Whenever I bring out my laptop to show him something, he immediately thinks that I am going to check e-mail or look at something that will distract me from time with him. When we pull out the iPod touch, he immediately thinks that it is something for him to touch and for us to interact with, together.

That is the difference of touch. Touch is for working together and for sharing, a computer with inputs that must be learned (keyboards, mice, etc) is for being alone. Touch is for changing what is in front of you, traditional computers are for making incremental shifts (in text, in presentations, etc.).  Touch is for show and tell, the desktop is for sit and stare.

While many people are arguing that the iPad is turning us back into consumers rather than producers or creators, I would like to argue that touch devices like the iPad are what will teach my children to never be satisfied with sitting back and only being entertained. Because they will literally be making changes to what they see with their touch, they will always question the content that is in front of them. They will want to manipulate every type of media. They will want to watch movies with on screen chat. They will want to read newspaper with commenting always turned on. They will want to draw on everything and manipulate where the buttons go and what they should do. I’m not sure they will even know how to simply be consumers.

My children want to touch everything, so why should I usher it out of them by introducing computers that do not require this creative part of them. If I believe that touching other people and giving my kids toys that can be manipulated (blocks, legos, crayons and the like), why should I not extend that to the devices that I ask them to use.

If we are really talking about making our schools, our businesses, and our personal life more intuitive and filled with authenticity, touch is what we need.

Not the iPad, but touch.

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Hack your learning: The way it works now.

I didn’t know that there was a giant subculture of 12-16 year olds hacking their iPod Touches.

I didn’t know that a community of kids existed that were helping each other to troubleshoot, adapt code, or discuss best practices for making the Touch do what they wanted it to.

I didn’t know that my entire idea of what it means to be a nerdy kid who is interested in computers and gadgets had shifted to include kids who just wanted to be able to have something they were recognized for being good at.

I didn’t know these things because I never asked. I never had a reason to.

This lack of knowledge really is making me think. It makes me think about what we are not asking our students. It makes me wonder what other supportive communities exist that are underground learning environments. Why doesn’t the whole world know about the kind of learning that is going on here? Why aren’t we in awe of the building blocks of critical thinking being laid. Is it because we are simply too busy trying to force our own ideas of community and learning upon them? Is it because we can’t come to grips with the fact that they may not actually need what we have to offer sometimes?

So, this blog post is an attempt to call attention to this community. It is an attempt to shine a light on the collaboration and ingenuity that is increasing with every search for a new way of doing things, with every creation of a new hack, with every question of how something works.

I purchased my iPod touch last Monday for my upcoming birthday (03/15). I did not purchase it because of what it could do out of the box. I purchased it for what I thought it could do if I bent it to my will. You see, I had been doing a little research earlier that morning on YouTube. A simple search for the terms “ipod touch” at that fine repository of videos will yeild quite a few videos with the word “jailbreak” in the title. This meant nothing to me when I first came across it, but after a few videos it because abundantly clear that I would have to spend some time hacking my iPod if I wanted to use it for anything that wasn’t created by apple (upon much research I learned that this is in no way illegal but I will void your warranty, but I have been voiding warranties since I was a kid so I was not afraid.)

However, I started noticing a pattern in many of these videos. The age of the creators was startlingly low:


It is hard for me to say that these kids are not providing valuable information. Their videos have an audience of thousands and they receive huge numbers of comments, spurring them to create more. The most surprising element of this community is that this is a genre of text that most kids do not engage in of their free will. My students groan each and every time they have to provide a step by step process for a written prompt. They run away from instructions on nearly every piece of paper or blog post. So, what makes these instructions so engaging? Why do they flock to these tutorials as a means of expression?To me, it is about purpose. The purpose they have is to create useful learning for others. I believe more surely than ever that each of us has an innate need to teach others what we know. Most of the time, however, we all know similar things or we are being asked to learn similar things. This does not provide many people with the ability to teach something new. It allows for learning together, but not learning from one another.

This community exists only for the purpose of information sharing and learning. It is what we should be modeling our schools and classrooms after (without all of the swearing in the comments hopefully).

My personal Journey with the iPod Touch:

So, if you believe in the idea that everyone not only needs to learn but also needs to teach, I must now teach you all of I have learned about the iPod Touch:

After much searching and looking for ways to get 3rd-party programs onto my iPod (a function that Apple will not make available until June), I found a few helpful programs:

ZiPhone – A jailbreaking program for mac and PC.

iJailbreak – A jailbreaking program for Mac. (The blog is incredibly helpful as well)

independence – A jailbreaking and unlocking program for Mac that also allows you to add wallpapers, ebooks, files, etc. manually from your computer.

However, because I have the latest version of the iPod Touch, none of these programs worked for what I wanted to do (although they may now because most of them have had a few updates within just the last few days). I used this amazing tutorial for figuring out the inner workings of my iPod. (Not to geek out too much, but I really like knowing how things work rather than just pushing a button and having it “do its thing.”)

After I set up my iPod to accept 3rd-party programs, I decided to actually install a few and try them out. Here are a few of the ones that I have kept:

1. Books – Allows you to read eBooks on your iPod.
2. MxTube – Allows you to download Youtube videos to view later.
3. VNSea – Allows you to view and control your home computer remotely (mouse, hard drive, etc.) from any remote location with a wifi connection.
4. WeDict – Open source dictionaries and encyclopedias.
5. Mobile Scrobbler – Listen to great internet radio thanks to Last FM.
6. Sketches – Use your iPod Touch like an etch-a-sketch (my 17 month old loves it)
7. iStudy – Use flashcards.
8. Homework – Keep track of homework assignments
9. Photoboard – Play with your photos like they do in Minority Report.
10. DashBuster – Update your Blockbuster Queue (I always forget to do this and get terrible movie choices in my mailbox)

Please let me know if you have found anything else that is useful for the iPhone or iPod Touch. I will be writing more about the pedagogical implications of many of these tools soon.

The new natural: blogging with iPod touch.

Well, this is my first blog post from my new iPod touch. I have to say that once I got it up and running (it only took me 10 hours of hacking, jailbreaking, researching and troubleshooting) in really started to bond with it. Now, as I am tapping away at a pretty quick clip, I am wondering if I will ever want to go somewhere that doesn’t have wifi access. This experience has really gotten me thinking about where things are going and how tools can actually make a difference sometimes.

What it will be like for my childen? Will they ever experience disconnectedness? Will there ever be a place for them or a need for them to get away from their network. When learning is limitless because the very atmosphere is filled with information, it is hard for me to imagine a way to escape.

Do we need to protect our kids from overexposure to tech, to hyper-stimulation?

Well, perhaps (I’m pretty sure this is the best response I’vw got). You see, my daughter grabbed a hold of the iPod earlier and she proceeded to get as much fresh snot on it as possible. She is 16 months old and she already knows that you can create hints with touch. It makes me think tat a lot of these hangups we have about ubiquitous tech are ours and ours alone. We can either impart them to our children or we can learn to embrace their willingness to break things, use them for unintemded purposes, and look beyond the multi-tasking moniker and trust that this is the new natural.

Does it make sense for me to think these these things. Should I be contemplating these consequences all because of a simple iPod?

Is there a particular technology that really will shift us like we keep saying it will? What do you think?