I am in the process of making the jump to becoming as paperless as is possible…I have been using some tools like EverNote and Read it Later (along with a longer list of others…) to get to the place where I only had books as a potential paper source in my life. This is changing. I just got an iPad (yeah, yeah, yeah…they’re cool…), and now I am in the process of moving into the realm of adding books to the digital media I consume.
I have decided to make a small project of replacing my current computer setup with a much smaller equivalent. I will leave printers and scanners (except for my trusty ScanDock) along with my (dying) laptop. The replacement will be a NetBook in concert with my new iPad. This is actually less money than a direct replacement for my old laptop, and with the NetBook I can just as easily create all of the content (e.g. documents, pictures, videos, etc.) that I could have done with the laptop. With my new iPad I will be able to ‘consume’ content in a manner which is much more comfortable than with my old setup, and there is the added bonus of having a large cache of books to read too!
I have seen so many posts on blogs describing or covering how great the iPad is… (ho hum). I still haven’t seen anything which would lead me to consider this as some sort of panacea for education. There is a chance that the ‘new world’ of teaching methods may come from the iPad or from any other eReaders out there… But I think that this ‘new world’ of education will come from something that takes more effort than spending money on some new hardware.
So, with that last harangue out of the way, I intend to see how small and mobile I can make my ‘home office’. So far I have synchronized both of these computer appliances to one another via DropBox, Google (Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs). As time goes on I may experiment with some other tools, but for now I am happy enough with what I have.
There are plenty of other experiments to conduct (in the near future) such as:
· Streaming iTunes to the iPad
· Streaming Movies to the iPad
· I even have some ideas about posting to this blog via the iPad
· I am looking into some means of using the iPad as a presentation tool for education too…
So, these topics may come into this blog in the next couple of months. For this week, I will be continuing to complete this ‘personal network’. I may cover such new (to me…) topics as how to translate a variety of documents into the .EPUB format which apple likes (on iBook…).
I have some interest in trying out as many of the major online E-Book sellers, and the associated applications for reading them too… When I got the iPad I was still a by hesitant about its ability to perform as an adequate reading platform, and while there still may be some very ‘sensitive’ readers out there, I can’t see how this could be a problem…especially now that I have several hundred pages under my belt.
So, to sum up the nature of this personal project, I will be using ONLY digital documents from now on (we’ll see how long this lasts, as well as the how’s and why’s of my quitting …). The future of computing, as practiced in most homes is something which I can see will be in a lot of flux.
