Stanford Is Providing iPads To Medical Students

Stanford sees the promise of iPads, at least for medical students:

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Aji, LLC has just announced that their popular iPad app iAnnotate PDF will be part of the required course materials for first-year medical school students at Stanford. Apple recently announced that educational institutions will be able to buy apps in bulk through iTunes, and as part of a trial program to integrate the iPad into academics, Stanford School of Medicine will now be providing all of their first-year students with iPads. Recently updated to include full Dropbox and VGA support, iAnnotate is optimized to be the ideal tool to improve the student learning experience.

iAnnotate is a complete annotation solution that gives students and other professionals the ability to take notes, highlight and underline in documents and diagrams with the drag of a finger. iAnnotate eliminates the need for voluminous printed texts and easily consolidates and organizes notes and documents. Teachers can quickly grade assignments, and share annotated diagrams, charts or syllabi. Students can easily email and share notes on PDFs to their study groups.

I was taking Chemistry just at the time that programmable calculators were becoming affordable. The first semester no one could use calculators: we had to use sliderules. The next semester everyone had to buy a calculator, out with the sliderules.

What is the sliderule being displaced in this generation? Books.

So, Stanford medical students will avoid the 20+ pounds of books that students still have to drag around. And soon, students everywhere?