StefanClaypool.com

I remember clearly the first time I used an Apple product.

I was probably fifteen years old. It was an iMac G4 – you know, the lamp. I had never seen anything like it. It was love at first sight.

I was living in Naperville. My dad was beginning to put time and energy into building his recording studio. Although we had always been a PC family, he decided that a Mac might be better suited for this endeavor. It was meant to be a music machine only – something to sit by the guitars and nothing more.

To this point, computer shopping had always meant going to CompUSA or some local retailer. Not for this. For the first time, we drove to the Apple Store. From the moment we entered it was obvious: this was a whole different world.

Dad made the purchase and set the machine up downstairs with the family PC. He would use it when he was recording, but for the most part we all stayed on the family’s PC. I can’t even remember what it was – some beige box running Windows 2000, but an HP? A Dell? Who knows. What I do remember is that I had never even considered that there was another philosophy of personal computing. To put it tritely, I wasn’t thinking different.

But there sat the iMac, the art machine, purchased for a specific function and never considered for anything else. I had no reason to think anything of it, but every time I walked downstairs, I looked at it for a little bit longer. It was beautiful and new and I didn’t know how to use it. How could an adolescent resist?

I finally decided to try it out. I didn’t really understand what was going on, but I realized that it was different from every other computer I’d ever used. Every time I went online, I’d use the Mac a little longer. Soon I wouldn’t even look at that ugly beige box.

One day dad found me on the iMac. I don’t know what I was doing – probably burning a CD or looking at something online. “Why are you using that?” he said. Without thinking, I knew the answer: “The Mac is a superior computing environment,” I said. I never looked back.

The family starting thinking differently about what we were looking for in our computers. And for Christmas 2003, we took the plunge: iBooks for all.

Image courtesy of This Is My Next

I’m two weeks into my studies at the Johnson School at Cornell after just over two years away from academia. One of the things that’s struck me about the way education has changed in that short period is the speed with which iPads have integrated into the classroom. When I was a college student, there was no such thing as an iPad. Now it seems that everyone has one – in fact, I’d wager that there are more iPads than Macs in the Johnson Class of 2013, and it’s not hard to see why. The iPad offers the opportunity to dramatically improve a student’s ability to manage his academic life, and I can’t count the number of times since my arrival that I’ve wished I could have had one at Middlebury.

Calvetica, Evernote, and Todo are indispensable elements of my grad school routine, but the one app that I don’t think I could do without is one of which I had not heard even a week ago: Kno. More than any other app, Kno is redefining how I function as a student, and hats off to them for it.

Kno is ostensibly a digital textbook retailer and reader. Its catalog is both broad and deep – every book I’ll require for the next semester is available for rental and purchase, and at substantially discounted prices, lower than the college bookstore’s and even Amazon’s. Used copies might run cheaper on Chegg, but are both heavy and contain annotations from another student. Kno, by contrast, weighs only as much as the iPad, and takes up practically no space in a crowded book bag.

Where Kno really shines is in course planning. A simple drag-and-drop interface enables me to create a customized curriculum, containing not only my texts, but also any additional readings such as PDFs I import. As long as digital copies of class materials are available (almost a given in this day and age), Kno completely replaces both my textbooks and binders.

Best of all, Kno knows notes. (That’s the worst sentence I’ve ever written.) What does that mean? It means that anything I highlight in any text, or any graph I tag as important, or anything I choose to bookmark is automatically copied into a digital notebook contained within the app. It’s amazingly simple and saves significant time highlighting and copying notes. Brilliant.

Kno is fantastic technology, and what I mean by that is it simplifies the tasks I need to do to such an extent that it almost doesn’t register. The results is that I can stop worrying about the things that don’t matter in the process of being a student and get down to what’s important: learning. Highly recommended to anyone going into a classroom. Check it out.

This week, I subscribed to a magazine for the first time in five years. The magazine was National Review, the de facto publication for thoughtful conservatism and a shining beacon of light on the right for more than sixty years. Why am I posting about it? Because I didn’t subscribe to the print edition. I subscribed on my iPad.

National Review made the bold decision to embrace Apple’s subscription service and offer its product in on a new media platform. It’s not a completely independent edition of the venerable publication – in fact, it’s simply a high-quality PDF of the printed version – but it is in no way dependent on outdated models of publishing. Unlike The New York Times, let’s say, which has built its cost structure to incentivize users to subscribe to its print edition ($8.75 a week for unlimited digital subscribers vs. $7.40 a week for home delivered print AND unlimited digital) , National Review has embraced the benefits of digital publishing and distribution, and is giving its readers every reason to do the same. A one-year digital subscription costs $19.99, as opposed to a $29.50 print subscription, or nearly $120 for twenty-four individually purchased issues. (For comparison, NYT digital costs $1.25 per digital edition, while NR costs 83¢. NYT with print costs $1.05 per issue. Not trying to compare NYT and NR by content, but rather the ways they are using pricing to incentivize digital subscriber behavior.)  Even better, by using Apple’s subscription service, National Review allowed me to opt out of sharing my personal data. That means that I won’t be sold as a product to any cause that wants to send me their mail (or more accurately, send my trashcan their mail). That’s something that would be worth paying more for – and I’m paying less for it.

This is my first experience with Apple’s subscription system. It took less than a minute to do. I don’t know if National Review is going to make enough through this process to justify shifting more of its resources to digital, but if there are more users like me out there to whom the ease of the process and the lowered price makes a difference, then the publisher has a good chance of making up in volume what it gave up in price. And that’s a very good thing for National Review, for Apple, for the future of publishing, and for users like me.

I’m going to propose a radical idea here: our education system is not underfunded. It’s poorly funded.

There is a sizable contingent that believes the surest way to increase the quality of education in American schools is to increase teacher salaries. The thinking goes that if a teacher’s pay is on the same scale as a lawyer’s or a doctor’s, then a greater percentage of intelligent, capable people with gravitate to the field and students will be the beneficiaries.

With all due respect to the fine men and women who are genuinely gifted educators (and I was lucky enough to learn from a couple myself), this notion fundamentally misunderstands the forces already at work to determine teacher’s salaries and misjudges the relationship between a good teacher and good students. Furthermore, it ignores the fact that students, parents, schools, and governments across the country have no idea what a good teacher is actually worth, or even what constitutes a good teacher to begin with.

Some will contend that a good teacher is invaluable. Ridiculous. Any individual who trades a skill or commodity in a marketplace has a value determined by the rarity of the skill or commodity and the desire of the potential customer – in short, by supply and demand. Determining that value is far more difficult when outside forces interfere with the functions of the market. In this instance, the primary culprits are teachers’ unions, whose primary motivation for decades has been to secure greater pay and benefits for their members, even at the expense of school districts’ budgets. By artificially driving up prices across the board, rather than allowing the market to determine the value of each individual educator, teachers’ unions are interfering with the only mechanism truly capable of identifying what good educators are worth.

The qualifier “good” is particularly important in this case, as a more market-like system would inevitably result in some teachers receiving significantly higher compensation than others, even within the same school. Unions would cry foul, of course, but this is how individuals’ value is determined in every other sector of the American economy. Everyone brings a certain set of competencies and experience to the table, and they are compensated accordingly by organizations that can benefit from the application of those competencies. Why should educators be any different? And if the market were allowed to determine the value of a good teacher, and if compensation reflected this value, then the result would be not only a wider range of salary between good and bad teachers, but also a greater incentive for bad teachers to improve themselves, and for good teachers to maintain a high level of performance. It would be as if they were – gasp! – employees!

I believe that the market is the only tool that can properly determine the value of a good teacher, with one condition: we must determine what constitutes a good teacher. This, I believe, is the single biggest challenge facing the American education system, and one few people seem to ready to acknowledge. In a country of 300 million people in vastly different economic and social situations, how does one establish a baseline for what an educator should be? Test scores are insufficient – tests are easy to game, easy to teach to, and reflect neither creativity nor lateral thinking (with a few exceptions). Nor can we rely on intangibles – teachers who will make students feel good, who “inspire” them, Dead Poets’ Society-style, but without corresponding results.

Google’s Chrome OS is perhaps the company’s greatest tragedy. Announced in a pre-iPad world where netbooks reign supreme as the hottest selling computing devices on the market, it was uniquely well-positioned to take advantage of growing dissatisfaction with Windows, the rise of the cloud, and the trend toward a browser-based paradigm. Fast forward to the present, and the world has changed. The netbook market has collapsed. Tablets are the new hotness, led by iPad. And the Chrome OS, once Google’s greatest hope for redefining the way users interact with their computers, has been shoved aside in favor of a still-developing Android.

Chrome OS is not dead yet. In fact, Google today announced the launch of two “Chromebooks,” one by Samsung and the other by Acer. The machines, which take design cues from the 11″ MacBook Air, appear to be inexpensive, capable devices that will function as well as an OS based on the generally reliable Chrome browser can. The fact that Google has worked so hard to get these devices to the market, when logic suggests that shifting resources to Android might be more prudent, indicates that senior management believes in the concept underlying the product. However, I can’t help but wonder if even in its finished state, the Chrome OS is simply entering the world too late to make a substantial impact.

After all, with iPad having all but destroyed netbooks, the market Chrome OS was intended to dominate no longer exists. Individuals in the market for an inexpensive computer are now gravitating to tablets – specifically iPads. Consumers who are not won over by the iPad will look at both Android and Chrome OS, and choosing one will inevitably hurt the other. In essence, with the netbook market hurting, Google may be pitting its two OSes against one another. Maybe that doesn’t hurt the company in the grand scheme of things, but it doesn’t give me much confidence that Chromebooks are going to make it big.

So will it work? Personally, I think a Chromebook is a more compelling product than an Android tablet, but as an iPad user, I’ll be purchasing neither. I suspect that unless the Chromebook experience is so outlandishly good that it pulls users from not only iPad, but also from the dying Windows netbook market and elsewhere, it will ultimately end up a disappointment. What then? I suspect Google will do what it always does: sigh, kill the product, fold its most appealing features into something else (probably Android), and move on.

I don’t think that Chromebooks are going to be bad products. I just think that the Chrome OS, because of delays and unexpected shifts in the market, is simply a product that’s time has passed before it even began.