An iPhone OS Lesson for Edu Apps

What I like about this genius exposition on what should be in the iPhone OS for writing and virally spreading information is that you can abstract it to talk about what is needed for an education applications platform.
In education, knowledge is the application. There are so many ways to package knowledge in information form. I just want to stop right here and say that going forward, I always insist on there being a teacher. Teacher’s are masters of delivering information with context.
That being said, this is the type of thinking we need in education applications development — stop thinking about the specific silo, and start thinking about what every type of information parcel can do and how it can impact a student and the student’s community:

That’s a shame. Every app with a text field should be able to email, tweet, blog, print, transmute, translate, and read aloud the current selection. Every app with an image view should be able to rotate, crop, set as wallpaper, save to Dropbox, post to Flickr, and upload to an SFTP server. Of course no single developer should add all these features to their application—we have a word for software like that—so a more elegant solution is called for.

An elegant solution… what would that look like in education?
It certainly wouldn’t be the mobile version of a website information architecture. That’s just more of the same.
We need to start thinking about object coding for information. How can we preserve the reality of the information, but alter its shape and its deliverability with a holistic platform or set of applications specs?
Give me that answer, and we are on our way to solving the $750 billion puzzle.

Getting Smart Staff

The Getting Smart Staff believes in learning out loud and always being an advocate for things that we are excited about. As a result, we write a lot. Do you have a story we should cover? Email [email protected]

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