With the ipad, will learning still be based on a factory model, or workshop one?

Disclaimer: I haven't read through everything I'd like to yet about thoughts of the iPad in education, so if I rehash some ideas here it is unintential. I'll retroactively attribute any ideas I find later on.

So while today was pretty exciting, I'd like to delve a little deeper past initial reactions to the iPad (mostly technical), and move into the realm of learning. I think the unit has some upsides and downsides (No flash?). Of course, like the iPhone, we'll have no idea until developers start pushing out dedicated apps for the device that we haven't dreamed of yet). How anyone paid $600 for an iPhone on release without a functional app store is still beyond me.

There are indeed some severe hardware limitations, but those are far more succinctly summed up on twitter or here from Gizmodo. Andrew B. Watt's entry today also points to some of the teacher uses of the device (as well as student use).

There are two other pluses I see. One is applicable to inner city schools like mine where the broadband infrastructure or financial ability may not exist for complete access to the web. A school could conceivably create mobile learning environments if they could foot the $15 per month data plan for a classroom of students (a stretch, but perhaps deals could be struck with the providers). Hopefully verizon's data will be cheaper than att. The other benefit pertains to the tablet's lack of height (unlike a laptop). With the tablet in hand as backchannel and research tool, students couldn't (and wouldn't) hide behind their screen. Rather, more natural conversational conventions could be achieved from anywhere in the room, not just a desk. (Socratic circles here we come!).

My larger question addresses the difference between content creation and content consumption.

In my mind, the iPad's main promise is in more accessible information in different media formats (image, sound, video, text, etc.). However, the iPad (as it stands today) will block my kid's ability to create many of the things they currently create online.

The applications my students use the most are built on flash. Unless an app was built specifically for these (which I doubt there is much interest in now, but would be pretty cool), we would be stuck with laptops anyway. When I eventually getting around to teaching some of them to build flash games, their products will be inaccessible to the market. Maybe it would be different if I were a History teacher, where our projects would be less performance based.

I'm not worried about the keyboard, because I've seen my kids use touchscreens and think the experience could even be easier for them. I am worried about the lack of microphone and digital (and video) camera. Being able to edit sound and video (a la a simpler imovie or audacity) could score huge points for their brain time with new language concepts. Embedding these projects in their blogs could be a snap, but not possible due to hardware constraints. At least you can jailbreak an iphone 3G to record video, you can't affix a diy camera to the iPad.

So this boils down to the question. Does the move towards a device like the iPad, and all it's cloudness and sleekness, also indirectly create more use than creation?

The marriage of more powerful processors in smaller computers and great web apps have become like tool benches, where kids can do a load of things not dreamed possible 10 years ago on the internet (just look at xtranormal or animoto). These things aren't possible on the iPad. I'm afraid that the form factor and design speak more to factories than workshops.

The main thing I took away from the "1:1 school" I visited last week was that it takes a student centered institutional culture (more like a workshop) to make 1:1 really empowering and relevant for kids. In a school like mine (without that culture of student centered learning), I'm afraid a product like the iPad would only be used for teacher centered learning, much like laptops are being used there right now in most classes. Here, the iPad would work just fine in the factory like schools my kids attend now.

Just a thought to chew on.

Images courtesy of M J M(the workbench) and the http://www.flickr.com/photos/mjm/97000333/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/whsimages/998243013/ respectively.