Learning

>The iPad is growing on me. It feels like that’s the best I can say about it for right now. When I was first introduced to thing, I was highly skeptical, and my use of it reflected that. For the first month or two of my owning, the thing was filled mostly with game apps my friend had downloaded on it when was using it; indeed, the only time it got used was when he and I were sitting around my dorm room and he picked it up when I was on my laptop.

For a while we referenced it scathingly, calling it the “iPod Touch Pro” or calling the iPod touch the “iPad Nano.” And it honestly seemed like there wasn’t much else to it. Okay, so it did everything it said it would - hooked up to the internet, played music, displayed books for reading, etc., etc.; but it felt like nothing more than a giant toy. My laptop accessed the internet much more efficiently; it was easier to type on; it had a system set up for downloading images and other files from the internet; it had every program I could desire on it already downloaded and in its fullest form. The iPad felt like the new kid in my electronics collection, and the weird new kid at that - my phone and my laptop already had their purposes, were staple figures in my life, but the iPad came in and I had to work to integrate it. I didn’t like that.

However, a few weeks ago I started taking notes on the thing, as I documented here, and that one step was enough to completely renovate my view of the iPad. I started to recognize it not as a thing that was attempting to replace my laptop, but as a convenient little helper for me to use when I couldn’t use my laptop that could perform most of the same tasks. Once, when a paper was due the evening of a full work day, I took the iPad to work and composed the thing during my lunch break. The iPad is great when you want to check your Facebook or email between classes but don’t want to have to wake up your laptop from its sleep. And, in perhaps the most odd way I’ve used the device, the iPad is a great boombox: I’ve turned the volume all the way up and dropped the thing in my backpack, so that music follows me wherever I go and people get confused about where it’s coming from (to my enjoyment). I actively went searching for apps that would be helpful in my day-to-day and found several that I now actually use from day-to-day. Above all, I have begun reading on the iPad, fitting considering the content of this course. The book I had to present on was available online for free under the Creative Commons license and I read the entire thing on my iPad. Next semester, I have a class in 18th century British fiction where all the texts are available for free on iTunes through the Gutenberg project. I like reading on the iPad to such a degree that it scares me for the future of my hard-copy books.

My relationship with the device now is a loving one. Though it does sometimes distract me in class, I feel that overall, now that I’ve shifted my view of it, it’s come to be a great helper in my life. I look at it as sort of the “bridge” between the other technologies I own, something to fill in the gaps. It doesn’t have its own specific, independent function per se, but I feel like “assistant” is really the only title it needs to have in my life. I’m incredibly excited to continue working with this thing in the Reading w/ class next semester, since I feel I’ve finally come to a place of understanding with it.