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Edge User
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ebook8
Can anyone share experience ?
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Hi there, my name is Cooper and I am a high school teacher at Tempe High School in Tempe, Arizona, and I'm currently about two thirds through my D.Ed in curriculum and instruction via the University of Phoenix’s online program, and I'll gladly share my experiences with the Edge thus far. As a teacher, and a lifelong student, my advice is to have as many tools as possible, without developing a dependency upon on any one of them. Although the edge is great for PDF’s, it is far from being stand-alone, not yet anyway. At UOP the majority of the text books are e-books/PDF’s made available through the University bookstore for download. This is a bonus for Edge owners, but, if you’re getting ready to begin a doctoral program, and you’ve packed your Edge, make sure to take your lil’ laptop and external terabyte drive too…your backpack is about to become very, very heavy.
My dissertation is on the relationships, if any, that may exist between non-traditional curriculum/instruction and student achievement. My research actually includes quite a bit of data on E-learning, tech integration/tools, classroom response systems, and I’ve even gone so far as to take a peek at intra-neural implants, and what I feel is the future of education. I also did my M.Ed thesis on non-traditional curriculum at ASU which, ten years ago had a focus on information/content obsolescence, resource management and support systems, and let’s just say, given the rate of tech obsolescence, things are understandably a bit different…but not that much different.
All cool tech tools aside, ultimately, teaching and learning, decoding, and then processing and sharing information efficiently comes down to one variable; communication. Each year, the University provides a week-long residency where all doctoral students despite their respective degree programs come together to work on our dissertations, share ideas, and network. During my year two residency which took place last April I was having a discussion with one of the IS&T doctoral students concerning e-readers, and which one we felt would be ideal given the amount of reading and annotating needed for our literature reviews. Now of course, many students had the I-pad already, but primarily for leisurely activities, and at the time, the I-pad lacked many resources the Edge had integrated for meeting educational needs. Of course the Edge, although a just launched, had the e-ink screen and an LCD, so I could read my required texts, and do further research while surfing on the LCD. Over the duration of the week I read as many Edge reviews as possible, talked to as many of my knowledgeable colleagues as possible…and decided to pull the trigger; I ordered the Edge before I left residency, this was April ’10.
Fast forward to today: 1/31/11, and my year three residency is just over two months away. I feel I’m ready, but seriously, everything I accomplished on my Edge, I could have accomplished on my Dell mini (and in many situations, I did). Although when I first received the Edge it stood up to the I-pad and other similar devices, but the Edge was/is technically cumbersome. Initially, in a meeting/class/learning environment I could get out my Edge and take some notes, read a few chapters, build some on-line links, all while patiently anticipating firmware updates that would enable me to do what the edge had promised; seamlessly annotate and build internal links. However, there have been many occasions too, where the “ghost/droid in the machine takes over, and I find myself bumbling around trying to open a simple PDF file, get online, take a quick note, etc, …all while my fellow classmates with their competitive tablets run circles around me, despite my two screens. Now, if I were a general consumer, and if I didn’t possess the knowledge I have pertaining to tech, I would be setting myself on fire trying to escape the cumbersomeness of the Edge, but I’m not.
Personally, I believe the Edge, despite currently having outdated fumbleware, and Entourage, despite having “daddy issues with their ability to communicate to their stakeholders, could lead/ be the forefront of the future of education. The future of education is a very personalized, optimized, tech-based experience, but until we all have intra-neural implants (which I welcome and embrace), we will have to rely on our tablets….and our thumb drives.
Now, Entourage can wake up, implement a Kotter 8-step model for longitudinal organizational change, and lead the masses into the interconnected, metacognitve future, or they can continue to turn their backs on the stakeholders, and although they may diversify, releasing new products, ultimately their lack of support infrastructure will cave them in on themselves.
I sum it up like this, “ the Edge is good from afar, but far from good, and has yet to actualize its true potential as the educational/communicative tool the education world needs asap.
---Take care,
Aurareader
Last edited by aurareader; 02-01-2011 at 12:07 AM.
Reason: spelling retention
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