TeacherTabletPC

At least, I hope I’m not a pointy-haired boss, but today’s Dilbert was about blogging…

e-Lab-book.com is a blog about the electronic lab notebook. From the about page at e-Lab-book.com:

This site is a log of my quest for the next step in the evolution of lab science. Scientists have historically been on the cutting edge of technology. However, recently the technology sector has diverged a bit from the ‘lab’ scientist.

Why are we still using pen and paper to record and organize our data?
Why do we write out all our protocols and data by hand?
Why do we then copy stuff into excel for calculations?

The Tablet PC is here and ready to use. It gets better all the time, but is certainly ready to help streamline laboratory science today.

I found out about this relatively new blog from an article on SciScoop.com, which gives some pros and cons to the idea of an electronic lab notebook. You’ll have to read the full article for details, but to summarize—Pros: Templates, Collaborate, Data Access, Organize, Data Backup, Super Calculator, Infinite Colored Pens, Camera; Cons: $$, Write Speed, Battery, Scanning, Chemical Spill!

Mostly, these posts run along the lines of product announcement rather than actual review, but here are some excerpts and links anyway. From my perspective, it’s another convertible that’s just a little heavier than I’m willing to carry around and has the unnecessary internal optical drive.

jkOnTheRun: Gateway announces new Tablet PC- E-155C

I get a lot of early announcements about upcoming products, almost always under embargo until the OEM is ready to have the product officially released. Normally I don’t have a problem honoring those embargoes but this new Convertible Notebook from Gateway is so sweet that I had a hard time keeping this to myself. The new Gateway E-155C Convertible Notebook is a 12 inch widescreen packing, Core 2 Duo spinning, dual digitizing Tablet PC with an internal optical drive. Weighing in at 4.5 pounds the E-155C is light enough to be used in most mobile settings and the powerful hardware components will handle any task with ease.

GottaBeMobile.com – Gateway’s New Convertible Tablet PC: The E155C

With a lot of the Tablet and UMPC world focused on the Intel Developers Conference, Gateway has jumped back into the Tablet PC game with news of the release of its newest Tablet PC, the E155C. We’ve been seeing hints of this for awhile here at GottaBeMobile.com, but now the news is out. The E155C is a Core 2 Duo convertible Tablet PC with an active digitizer and touchscreen capabilities. According to Gateway, “the E155C is designed to compliment Gateway’s desktop-replacement M285 Convertible Notebook.”

Laptops Blog » Gateway released new convertible Tablet PC E-155C (noteworthy much more for the pictures they have than for their minimal text)

Gateway introduced their new Tablet laptop E-155C. This thin and lightweight PC combines the “Tablet” (by allowing to input information using Stylus), and a laptop with a touch screen.

Gateway E-155C is a Thin & Light Convertible notebook : Specs, reviews and prices.

An amalgamation of style and functionality, the Gateway E-155C draws it juice from an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and uses the new Microsoft Windows Vista as its Operating System. One also comes across a a biometric fingerprint reader and Wacom digital pen with digital eraser.

From The Tablet PC Education Blog:

The Google Teacher Academy is a free, one day professional development program designed to help K-12 educators get the most from innovative technologies. Each Academy is an intensive, one-day event where participants get hands-on experience with Google’s free products and other technologies, learn about innovative instructional strategies, receive resources to share with colleagues, and immerse themselves in an innovative corporate environment.

GTA Southern California

May 23, 2007, 8:30am – 7:30pm

Registration

The Student Tablet PC has added three new authors: Will, a mech eng student from Australia; Frank, a math student from California; and Robert, a history and archaeology student from Scotland.

Will wasted no time in posting a rundown of tablet hardware released in 2007:

Lots of new tablets have been released in the last 6 months as well as a host of new UMPCs. Every serious notebook manufacturer now has at least one Tablet PC model on the market. This means that there is a lot of choice as well as lots of confusion for the student and consumer. Here is a rundown which is not intended as a review of each but instead a refresh, just to let you know whats out there.

He goes on to summarize the Gateway E-155c, Lenovo Thinkpad X60, Fujitsu LifeBook P1610 and T4125, Toshiba Portege R400, HP TX1000, Motion LE1700, TabletKiosk Sahara i400 series, Fujitsu ST5100 series.

Ubiquitous broadband may not be as out of reach as I’d once thought. Spurred by the death of my mother’s ancient Qualcomm phone, I found myself at a Sprint store yesterday working on getting my parents a new family service plan to try (their current service, as well as mine, is from Verizon, but choices in mobile telecom providers is a whole separate off-topic entry). Somehow, the sales guy talked me into a Novatel U720 USB and a broadband account—attached to a family account and loaded with special discounts, it added a net of something like $30/month to the bill (it’s really more like $50-$60, but there are combination discounts with the other wireless accounts and some percentage discounts for employees of certain companies, etc.). Even at $30/month, I’m not sure it’s something I can justify, but I’ve got thirty days to try it and see if I feel like I can’t live without it. At the moment, though, I’ve got it running in my bedroom, providing me with internet at a slightly slower rate than if I’d just turn on the WiFi in my tablet. The demo machine in the store registered about 1.8 Mbps download and about 200 kbps upload (both about 1/3 of the speed of my home DSL). I’ll have to write more as I actually use it.

Tablet PC Stylus Innards

Due to an equipment malfunction just prior to my Tablet PC presentation at NoVA Code Camp, I can now show the world what’s inside the average EM digitizer stylus.

“Is the pen still mighty in the computer age?” from CNET News.com:

Your grandchildren may use a stylus on a tablet PC instead of a Bic on tablet paper, but they will continue to write.

That’s because even in an era when elementary school students are adept at mousing and teenagers are fiends at text-messaging, some experts say that writing with a pen is still the backbone for teaching people how to read and learn facts.

The difference will be in how the characters are made.

It’s interesting to look at how handwriting has evolved. Having learned mostly D’Nealian print, then not really ever learning cursive script, my handwriting is a strange mix of printed letters and things that just run together (are they called ligatures even when handwritten?). For my purposes in writing, it’s not really an issue since I can write fast enough most of the time and my students eventually can figure out how to read my handwriting (and they also learn how to figure out missing or hard to read words from context), but it has also meant that I am horrendously slow at reading cursive script.

The article goes on to say:

Even some college professors prefer the pen to the keyboard.

David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, banned laptops from his classroom in part, he said, because writing in longhand forces students to pay more attention.

“The (laptop) note-taker tends to go into stenographic mode and no longer processes information in a way that is conducive to the give and take of classroom discussion. Because taking notes the old-fashioned way, by hand, is so much slower, one actually has to listen, think and prioritize the most important themes,” Cole wrote in an essay published by the Washington Post.

So, how would this professor feel about Tablet PCs? While I suspect that the professor is not entirely wrong about students being more concerned with writing stuff down than processing it (and frankly I see this with kids taking notes with pencil and paper in my classes all the time), the response seems very misguided to me.

From The Tablet PC Education Blog:

One-to-One Institute and the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) offer One-to-One Information Resources. The original site (“The Ubiquitous Computing Evaluation Consortium”) was developed by SRI International under a project funded by the National Science Foundation.

I figure it’s just a matter of time before one of my kids gives me this excuse…

The Vermont Slate: My Computer Ate My Homework

The last thing we want to do is put a program in place that causes someone to lose significant amounts of work. The second to last thing is to give kids yet another excuse when they don’t turn in work.

…

So why not just put [automated network backup] on the students’ Tablets and give them the same level of protection that [faculty] always have? Well, one factor is cost, though this could be built into the program or managed in any of several different ways. A bigger issue, I think, is what we are teaching the students. Or, more precisely, what we are not teaching them.

I have not, however, heard anything of a data backup plan from the IT people at my school.