Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

My latest column at Inside Higher Ed is up — “The iPad for Academics“.

My review of the iPad was not unabashedly positive — I think it makes a great PDF reader, but that it hardly eclipses the laptop for most of the jobs that academics do. That said, I wanted to make a few comments about the iPad and the role it plays in the other major job in my life — raising my twin infant boys.

For raising small kids, the iPad is incredible. It’s small size means you can plop it down next to you anywhere, and you can work the thing with a single finger, leaving the rest of you free to burp an infant. When a good portion of your life is passively consuming media while juggling a bottle and a kid, the iPad is perfect for checking email, or reading the news. The speaker is big enough to be audible but small enough not to wake up people asleep in the next room, which means podcasts (wrapped up in fancy BBC or NPR apps, but still basically podcasts) of news are an option even if you were crashed out during the normal news time.

The iPad has turned me on to casual gaming — an area that I’ve ben trying to find time to explore for some time. I’m a little underwhelmed by the lack of tactile feedback on the glass screen, but with kids you don’t really have a lot of time to play real-time games. Turn-based stuff is ubiquitous on the iPad (including many cherished favorites like Rogue) and great to play in those half hour periods between when The Feeding Ends and They Fall Asleep, time that in the past, when I was less sleep deprived, I had the concentration to read.

What is so weird about the iPad + iNfant combination is the strange serendipities. The iPad isn’t just a netbook manque, it’s also become our photo album: we haven’t printed a single digital photo, nor had to view them on the strangely-ratio’d screen of our laptop. Instead the iPad lets us look through (and show others) baby pictures — and at a much larger size than most prints. We use the thing as a friggin’ nightlight when changing diapers at 3 a.m. in the morning. The white noise app helps the kids fall asleep, even if it doesn’t have the now-ubiquitous ‘womb sounds’ that seem to emanate from all childcare products these days. Just the fact that it doesn’t have to boot up and is on instantaneously makes it much easier to use than a laptop in situations where you need it up and running quickly.

There are a lot of apps that still need to be ironed out on the iPad (like a Mafia Wars client that connects with the actual Mafia Wars install on Facebook), but I will say that everyone in my household who is able to hold their own head up is glad that we spent the money on the device, despite the fact in the beginning that we worried it would be little more than an expensive frippery. No excuse me, I have a little boy who needs some supervised tummy time I’ve got to go see….