Do iPads belong in the classroom? A pair of articles on TechCrunch raise and address the question. Matt Burns argues that tablets should mostly be kept out of the classroom, fearing that they could turn into yet another crutch for our youth, just as pocket calculators mean kids no longer need to know how to actually do math. Kids are now taught to pass tests. Knowledge is externalized, stored on some Wikipedia server or graphing calculator until needed. Learning is still prevalent in schools, but the storage of facts and thoughts is not. Digital...

Remember the claims of cold fusion that fizzled when scientists tried to reproduce the results? In that light, Fusion Garage’s name may have proven prophetic, because instead of shipping the promised new Grid 10 tablet, Slashgear reports that the company has just gone into liquidation. It turns out that there just weren’t enough pre-orders of the Grid 10 tablet to save the company, and it couldn’t secure additional funding—so instead of shipping the tablets (and sending a free one to everyone who bought the original Joo Joo) it went under, reportedly owing $40 million to creditors. (It was pretty clear when...

It’s been a couple of weeks since the Kindle Fire came out, giving people time to get past their first impressions and see how it actually works in practice. Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch has taken such a look at his family’s Kindle Fire, and determined that while it may be a “mediocre” general-purpose tablet, as a media viewer it does a few things very well. Schonfeld reports that the Fire has become a favorite device in his family, with everyone trying to steal time on it. He goes over all of its major uses—reading, watching, listening, browsing, and playing—and...

Reading is a deeply solitary, immersive activity. We bury ourselves in books for hours at a time, and if you’re like me you can be decidedly grumpy if someone comes up to try to have a conversation with you while you’re reading. So, naturally, the biggest thing e-books need right now is something to make them more social. Because despite engaging in a solitary, immersive activity, e-book readers secretly just want to have conversations with everyone about what they’re reading. At least, that’s what the people behind Subtext seem to think. TechCrunch is reporting that this startup...

Former “Fake Steve Jobs” technology columnist Dan Lyons looks back at TechCrunch writer MG Siegler’s Amazon tablet “scoop” (that I reblogged here) and makes a point that’s worth remembering: Siegler’s breathless report on the tablet that would become known as the Amazon Fire was almost completely wrong in the details. The name, the price, the CPU, the internal storage, the free subscription to Amazon Prime, the browser, the e-reading apps, the lack of new e-ink reader models or touchscreen: all wrong. The only things TechCrunch got right were that it had a seven-inch screen and would run Android—and...

TechCrunch is running another “death of the bookstore” prediction, in which a columnist extrapolates from the current amazing performance of e-books to predict that the last print bookstores will close by 2018. There really isn’t all that much that’s newsworthy about this particular set of predictions, but it interests me that people continue to make them. I mean, why do people expect that the millions and millions of paper books are just going to evaporate overnight? There are still plenty of used CD stores, some of which even sell records and tapes as well as CDs, even...

I have had a little fun over the last month, perhaps about the same kind that comes from watching a train wreck, in watching the fracas surrounding TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington’s decision to start a venture capital fund, and his subsequent ouster from the tech blog he founded. There was some concern that being a venture capitalist could somehow lead to a conflict of interest in his reporting on the blog, and after some discussion AOL (in the person of Arianna Huffington) decided it would be best if Arrington was let go. Fellow TechCrunch writer Paul Carr followed shortly afterward....

Like a creeping zombie that refuses to lie down and die, it appears that Fusion Garage is primed to claw its way out of the grave with another try at a tablet device. Liliputing reports that Fusion Garage has sent a device to the FCC for testing. Details are sparse, but it’s apparently tablet-shaped. This wasn’t entirely unexpected, given that the company said last year it had a new model planned for this year. All the same, it’s still a little surprising they’re actually going through with it. Fusion Garage’s first device, the JooJoo, might as well have...

It’s long been a truism of the net that free information flow and freedom have a lot to do with each other. You see it in cases like the recent revolution in Egypt where the Egyptian government tried to stifle dissent by shutting off the Internet, and again in the current situation in Libya. E-books and other long-form digital reading matter are one point on that information spectrum, but so are forms as small as tweets or as large as digital video broadcasts. TechCrunch has an interesting post by guest author Shervin Pishevar, founder of the OpenMesh Project, in...

On TechCrunch, guest writer Jim Dalrymple from The Loop looks at why, a year on, Apple’s iPad still has no real competition and all the other hardware manufacturers are still scrambling to catch up. He points out that Apple has done such a good job making the tablet useful in people’s everyday lives that everybody else is still trying to be Apple rather than beat Apple. Every other tablet introduced thus far has looked remarkably similar to the iPad. Even the competitors who come the closest—HP and RIM—still haven’t done anything. And Apple is only a week...

The Borders post-mortems continue. Here’s a couple more of them that are particularly worthy of note. First, on Quora, another Borders ex-exec sets down his thoughts. Mark Evans, former Director of Merchandise Planning & Analysis, has a six-point analysis of why the store failed. Though he goes into detail for each one, his list comes down to the following reasons: Failure to adequately address the Internet sales channel and the subsequent e-book market. Poor real estate strategy. Over-investment in music. Over-reliance on assortment size to compete...

On TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld takes a look at the problems magazines have been having adapting to the iPad—in short, they are over-bloated, under-featured, and cost too much—and suggests a blueprint for magazines and newspapers to follow to take full advantage of what the iPad has to offer. Even though most iPad magazines are frankly lousy from a standpoint of usability, Schonfeld points out, they’re still doing major advertising business because “advertisers want to be associated with anything shiny and new.” It is, he says, considerably more advertising dollars than readers that are driving iPad magazine apps right now. ...