“Bill Gates never finished college, but he is one of the single most powerful figures shaping higher education today,” Jeffrey R. Young reports for The Chronicle of Higher Education. “That influence comes through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, perhaps the world’s richest philanthropy, which he co-chairs and which has made education one of its key missions.”
“The Chronicle sat down with Mr. Gates in an exclusive interview Monday to talk about his vision for how colleges can be transformed through technology,” Young reports.
The Chronicle: Tablet computers are big these days. The Surface tablet was just released by Microsoft last week, and iPads are all over campuses, but it doesn’t sound like your approach has been to give devices to students and hope things change that way. What do you think needs to happen for factors like tablets to really make a difference? Or is that not even part of the equation?
MacDailyNews Note: Microsoft did not release their Surface tablets last week. They claim they’ll be doing so “this fall.”
Bill Gates: Just giving people devices has a really horrible track record. You really have to change the curriculum and the teacher. And it’s never going to work on a device where you don’t have a keyboard-type input. Students aren’t there just to read things. They’re actually supposed to be able to write and communicate. And so it’s going to be more in the PC realm—it’s going to be a low-cost PC that lets them be highly interactive.
Full interview here.
MacDailyNews Take:
As always, Bill Gates is the anti-Steve Jobs: no vision, no taste, and no idea what’s really happening.
Giving students Windows tablets has a really horrible track record, but iPads in classroom are gold medal winners:
• Student math scores jump 20% with Apple iPad; transforms classroom education – January 20, 2012
• OSU study finds Apple’s powerful iPad decreases expenses, increases productivity – May 3, 2011
• Apple’s revolutionary iPad dramatically helps Illinois autistic students – October 15, 2010
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
Related articles:
Illinois elementary school buys 650 iPads for students, 70 MacBook Airs for teachers – June 26, 2012
San Diego Unified School District buys 26,000 Apple iPads; one of the largest K-12 iPad deployments in U.S. – June 26, 2012
Archbishop Mitty High School in San Jose, California to get 1,800 Apple iPads (with video) – March 4, 2012
Madison, Wisconsin schools buy 1,400 Apple iPads – using Microsoft’s money – January 28, 2012
Colorado school goes all-Apple; iPads in classrooms spur student engagement to new heights – January 24, 2012
Apple reinvents textbooks with iBooks 2 for iPad – January 19, 2012
Schools expect iPads to outnumber personal computers in next five years – October 31, 2011
Growing number of U.S. schools embrace Apple’s revolutionary iPad as learning tool – January 4, 2011
Rising generation of iKids slipping Apple iPads instead of books into school backpacks – December 14, 2010
Steve Jobs met Obama to talk education, energy, job creation – October 22, 2010
University of Leeds gives medical students textbooks on Apple iPhones – September 29, 2010
N.J. schools explore using Apple iPads as teaching devices – September 22, 2010
Students in four California school districts trade textbooks for Apple iPads – September 09, 2010
Scottish school becomes first ‘iSchool’ where Apple’s revolutionary iPad replaces pencil and paper – August 31, 2010
Back to school personal computer sales slow except for Apple’s Mac – August 11, 2010
Incoming UC Irvine medical students to receive Apple iPads – August 06, 2010
New Hampshire school giving Apple iPads to incoming freshmen – June 15, 2010
iPad takes off as flight school teaching tool – May 12, 2010
California’s Monte Vista Christian School first to use Apple iPads in classroom – April 21, 2010
Seton Hill University to give new Apple MacBooks and iPads to every full-time student in fall 2010 – March 30, 2010
Kodiak Alaska school district to bid on upgrading to Apple MacBooks, iPads – March 24, 2010
Apple offering discounted iPad 10-packs for education – March 22, 2010
KeyBookshop has over 18,000 educational e-books ready and waiting for Apple’s iPad – March 16, 2010
His moment of glory long past, the dumbass refuses to STFU and get out of the way.
They are in complete denial over in Redmond and it would appear to extend to Gates. I know a guy who works on video production for M$ and he and his crew have to agree to no Apple products on set to get the work. They resort to sleeves to cover the MBPs and sneaking out back to use their iPhones. Their whole industry is Mac-based and M$ deals with it by burying their heads in the sand.
Seriously?! The boys in third grade used to hide their comics in brown paper schoolbook covers.
Is it just me of does Bill Gates seem clueless?
Bill Gates is a world-class pimp!!!
Bill, Bill, and For Gawds sake- Bill!!
Have you yet to see the train rolling straight for your dumb arse with horn blasting and light glaring? But, hold that that and position and watch what happens when an Apple Bullet Train collides with you…
I personally hate writing on my iPad. But that is just me.
It seems strange to me but Gates forgot to mention that if a device has no keyboard is should at least support stylus input (according to his “vision”)
I’ll admit to being old and old-fashioned, because it still seems to me that it would be more efficient to interact creatively with an iPad for text entry if you use a physical keyboard and are able to use the iPad as a display (leaning up on an stand – eyes-free typing, as it were). I have an iPad but no physical keyboard, and I rarely interact with it in any way other than for email, internet browsing, occasional games, and social networking – I find it tedious to do much more than that on it.
But a more important point to this discussion is which mode of use would be more efficient and helpful to students – tablet vs. traditional keyboard/trackpad and screen. Software is key, but I still have to give the nod to the latter. And if I were a school administrator looking to replace old computers in the classroom, on the surface (pun intended), and all other things seeming equal (they aren’t but assume I don’t know any better about OS and never had an iPhone or Apple product), the Surface looks pretty compelling.
Note that I’m playing devil’s advocate here – I’ve been Apple since the 70’s. And if I WERE a K-12 school administrator, I’d be buying mostly mac minis and third-party displays, and maybe a couple of base-model Mac Pros for the heavier lifting. I think the iMac is ecologically and economically as bad as the eMac was, from an upgrade and cost-of-replacement standpoint. If I had a bigger budget, I might add iPads for the students to take home. If I didn’t have enough money for all of that, then they’d get MacBook Airs.
But anyone is welcome to disagree and attempt to re-educate me.
Kids dig iPads. I have a 2 year old grandson that uses his iPad daily. He can type his full name and address on the iPad.
I’m sure when he gets to grade school he’ll have no trouble typing on an iPad.
What does Microsoft bring to the table? Office.
What does Apple bring to the table? Thousands of productivity Apps. Kids books by the bushel. Games to learn math, spelling, history, geography, biology, the list goes on and on.
We should be respectful. After all, there’s going to be an African village somewhere with a large statue of him someday.
you can input on an ipad by:
writing on it with your finger or (third party) stylus
you can write all kinds of alphabets including asian characters like Chinese, Japanese etc.
you can draw or paint
you can type on the soft keyboard or external hard keyboard
with proper software you can input via voice
apps have all kinds of touch input methods via dials, sliders, ‘calculators’, screen controls, interactive charts etc.
you can input via the cameras
you can input with motion via gyroscopes
you can hook up all kinds of third party input devices like microscopes, blood pressure devices etc.
what is Billl smoking?
man he sounds like a dinosaur.
This is like going after an Ant with hammer… Did he just tell everyone in education that Microsoft’s dud of a tablet should not be used in education? Ant verse hammer… Hammer time!
What’s interesting about his requirement that there be a physical keyboard…since having SIRI, I rarely type anything. It’s all voice…obviously, this wouldn’t necessarily work in a classroom full of kids, but for students doing homework, it’s a far better input method than even a hard keyboard.
Did Bill tell Bomber that?
I wish everyone would stop calling Bill Gates a philanthropist, take a close look at what his “charitable organization” actually does and its excessively dismal record and corruption.
It is not a charity origination it is a power and influence brokerage.
It must be eating his Heart out to see Apple’s iPad Dominating and the Majority Consumers Running away from his “POS Virus Infested Garbage of an OS”.
“Hey Bill, Karma is a Bitch”
Betcha his kids had iPods tucked away in the back of their school limo so they wouldn’t have to show up with you know whats.
Cornell University believes everything he says and shoves PC’s down our throat and does it’s best to shut out Macs. Of course Bill just funded a big Tech building here with his and Melinda’s name on it.
Since his departure, he’s become such a non issue. It seems almost a waste of time to interview him about new technology. He was never an innovator nor did he do anything to actually promote new technologies. This article and interview were a waste of time and resources that could have been better spent. Like interviewing roadkill.
Bill gates is irrelevant .he has alot of cash ,so people listen .doesnt mean he knows a damn thing about what he’s talking about .as a song once said ,if your not part of the solution ,then get the hell out of the way .enough said .
Sorry to the mindless potilitcally-driven haters out there, but Bill is actually correct on this one. MDN, like a biased media outlet, takes a snippet of Bill’s sentence and puts it completely out of context, apparently to bait all the haterade comments.
I believe Gates was trying to say that portable device of any kind won’t add much to the learning experience in the classroom compared to desktop machines. I agree, at least through high school. There is no point of having a classroom if the student is supposed to learn on their own little private portable screen, might as well be distance learning from their parent’s basement.
But a classroom can work dramatically better than internet-learning for many students, especially if the only machine(s) in the room are there for demonstrations and, yes, work where every student is assigned highly interactive tasking that requires significant personal instruction.
Portables of any shape or size are needless costly distractions and Bill Gates is not always wrong. Usually, but not always.
Well one out of a thousand love bill, it’s still bullshit.
Microsoft failed at tablets for the past 10-11 years and here comes Bill saying yea, it does suck. Problem is is Microsofts failed attempts suck not Apples.
San Diego school district just purchased 26,000 Apple iPads, not including all the other districts that have adopted Apple’s standard.
So hey let’s just say they suck for only one reason, since Bill says it.
Mike enjoy your little world of closed reality with Bill, he really needs the suck up approach to his irrelevant blabbering.
Speak of mindlesness.
Mike if you would have read the whole write up, it wasn’t written by MDN, it is a direct non edited interview by: Jeffrey R. Young reporter for “The Chronicle of Higher Education.”
Kill the messenger approach doesn’t cut Mike, Gate was direct with what he said, but you seem to want to interprut it your own way.
Talk about putting words in someone’s mouth, you blamed MDN for something they didn’t do then turn around and do it yourself.
Now that’s ironic.
I did read the article, and MDN’s wordsmithed headline does not match the quote.
The follow-up story on how well iPads hold up in primary education and what the cost comparison is to the current teaching method will probably be very interesting to you. The issue isn’t the company behind the portable, but the fact that portables are distractions and subject to greater wear & tear than stationary equipment. But you don’t want to think through this, do you, “Here we go again”, you’d just rather reduce the discussion to political attacks, is that it?
Tech Titan Gates more and more seems like a sideline spectator shill. Certainly living in the heyday past and quite possibly slowly becoming a luddite … Sad.
That said, philanthropy is highly commendable.
Fingers crossed your looking forward to what’s best for the future and set past allegiances aside. But after reading his statement, well, you know and no surprise.
philanthropy is highly commendable
Yes, of course. But there are two problems here:
1) The Gates money was obtained by keeping the majority of the computer community in The Dark Age of Computing. AKA screwing over suckers.
2) The Gates Foundation consistently forces recipients of computer technology awards to use Windows and Office. See #1 above. This perpetuates both The Dark Age of Computing and future sucker money coming into the Gates coffers.
Not good.
Is it me or was a lot of what he said just fluffy, hot emptiness?
My 5 yr. old nephew used an iPad and can identify every state in the union (“all 57?”–Obama), every capital, and every country in Africa.
It’s really odd that Bill Gates was ever considered any kind of futurist. He has been consistently wrong. And yet the HYPE lives on. As ever, I believe history in hindsight will consider him a charlatan and a parasite. Those of us with any kind of sane insight have already figured out that fact.
Gates vision is very limited as usual. Bill still thinks its 1995 and he has never left that vision. Technology has already moved past “his” vision. What Steve left us is technology would allow us to create and learn in new ways never thought. If Bill thinks that requires a keyboard then why not replace a math course with Excel and English with word. Remember he “never” finished college so how hi do you really think his value in education is. Worse yet how can he even appreciate something he never went through. There is a reason degrees and college matter “Billy”. Its a commitment to learn not simply steal.