iPads, much like Apple’s laptops/desktops in schools, prestige only pays for prospective parents’ eyeballs as they walk around school. They see the logo glowing or gleaming from the backs of them and it shows that the school must put technology high on the agenda. This is no longer the case - it only means in the current climate that money is being willingly being thrown away where, it once had a strong argument due to ease of use and processes such as AirDrop. The iPad (Macbooks too) now have serious competition and I think that the once scoffed at Android/ Chromebook combo is making a lot of ground.
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Pen Enabled Devices For All?
When I presented with a few colleagues last weekend at FOBIT about the move (in our school at least) from solely typing into a device, that drawing on the screen has shifted from the basic slew of mis-matched jumbo-nibbed styluses we have seen in the last few years (both passive and powered and not including Wacom slates) to a fully functioning, Wacom precision input, we were heckled with a range of counter arguments. All of which, come from a place of either: my school would never allow this, an iPad can do the same thing, we want typing only and not reverting to old-school analogue methods, staff need to type and not write and, as our CEO had talked at length about our school’s ethos of using technology as a 1:1 school to harness future uses, we were told that we contradicting each other. The mentioning of change conjures funny reactions in the most unusual places.
Read MoreSonic Pi - Making, Mixing and Live Coding Music
Two performances did seem to transcend the present, with artists sharing music that felt like open-source software to paths unknown. The first, Sam Aaron, played an early techno set to a small crowd, performing by coding live. His computer display, splayed naked on a giant screen, showcasedSonic Pi, the free software he invented. Before he let loose by revising lines of brackets, colons and commas, he typed:
#This is Sonic Pi…..
#I use it to teach people how to code
#everything i do tonight, i can teach a 10 year old child…..
His set – which sounded like Electric Café-era Kraftwerk, a little bit of Aphex Twin skitter and some Eighties electro – was constructed through typing and deleting lines of code. The shadowy DJ sets, knob-tweaking noise and fogbank ambient of many Moogfest performers was completely demystified and turned into simple numbers and letters that you could see in action. Dubbed "the live coding synth for everyone," it truly seemed less like a performance and more like an invitation to code your own adventure.
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