Food orders? Dating? Professional networking? Party planning? 80s music? Photography? Budgeting? Project notes? Security and tracking?
[A crash course for readers who are new to the app culture]
Applications, better known as apps, are programs created for people to use to network, keep fit, learn skills, follow celebrities, create themselves, and communicate among many other things. These thousands of apps each fulfil a niche requirement in social, educational, financial, informational, and emotional arenas of human life. Although some of them are often quite similar in their purpose, they each vary slightly in design, in-app activities, and the way it engages the user. Art apps, like Word Cloud, Floor Plan Creator, and Calligraphy Name for example, all fall under the same category but they each possess different qualities and functions. People can develop their skills through tutorials or simply just use the in-app function to bring their imagination to life - and the trick is in knowing what one wants before attempting to go through hundreds of apps in a broad category instead of expecting to find a perfect fit.
Developers, the people who create apps, distribute and profit from them on app stores. These platforms are essentially an online business for the developers and the companies they work for. Although users are required to pay for apps, most of them are free and require in-app purchases instead. This means that any extended features can be bought if the user decided to upgrade their app experience. Take Skype for example, a popular communication app, allows users to make free voice and video calls to others who use Skype, however if the user wants to make a phone call they need to buy Skype credit in order to do so.
Another thing to watch out for when browsing through either Google Play or Apple’s App Store is the difference in operating systems. What an app works on is determined by the users’ operating systems, so depending on the device there’s usually a variation in the types of apps available for an Android, which runs on Samsung phones for example, and iOS which runs on iPhones. As far as this blog is concerned the most important thing to know about operating systems is that both Android and iOS are popular operating systems used in phones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers. And apps for each operating system work differently, so it's up to the user to know and check this before downloading it for their phone.
Now that we’ve explored what apps do and some basic differences between them, we can move on to the Screenboard angle: what’s the big deal about apps for education?
The future, along with its education, is mobile. While the methods of teaching are flexible, the core of education apps is that they are updated and self-paced. The student chooses what to look at, and how far they want to go through the learning material.
People between the ages of 18-24, in the USA at least, are proportionally the largest users of apps, according to Business of Apps. This can be extrapolated to some extent to other technologically able countries with a large youth population such as South Africa and India, where students can be the naively obvious answer to the high app-use statistics. When it comes to students, their (our) preferences in apps range from board categories like entertainment and social media with apps like Netflix, Spotify, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to interest specific apps like Pocket Physics, Quiz&Learn Python, and GRE Prep & Practice.
With such a large user base in educational environments, i.e. the “Golden Trio” of teachers-students-parents, there are no shortages of what one can expect an app to do for the student. From keeping timetables to generating quizzes, grading school work to helping students prepare for standardised tests, students and educators have access to everything that makes learning easier and more interactive while still maintaining discipline and focus on the subject.
- https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how-to/a3102/how-to-make-your-own-apps/ - https://www.appmakr.com/ - http://www.appdeveloperstudio.co.za/
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For any of you who are new to the world of constant app use, On The Hub suggests the top apps for students. These cover what students between high school and university would be likely to use everyday:
Now, speaking of constant use, there are concerns about how much time and information these apps receive from us. One of the first is that of app-addiction. Although apps give students the opportunity to learn and grow as intellectuals, they also spend all their time staring at a screen because of how engaging the app is. According to this fantastic TIME article, an estimated 5 hours of our day is spent actively engaging with our phones, and the American Psychological Association discovered that close to 65% of the US population think “unplugging” is a desperately necessary detox. This holds true for adolescents and young adults in particular seeing as, according to New York University psychologist Adam Alter, the obsession with technology is “epidemic”. Apps like Pintrest are one of many to hire a behavioural psychologist to help their designer create engaging interfaces to keep the eyeballs glued to the light, and eventually the tailored content along with a fresh and entertaining interface wins over the mind.
It's not all doom-and-gloom, because Boundless Mind has offered a solution to rework our brain networks so that we teach ourselves to be less addicted by rewarding a particular type of behaviour. They believe “human behaviour is programmable, as long as you know the language”.
This, ironically, is an app.
The second concern is that of privacy. Having spent hours on my own apps to follow the Zuckerberg privacy scandal, I kind of regret the trail of clicked breadcrumbs now. Many apps allow us to control how our access to our devices and personal data is used, which unfortunately gives us the illusion of control. However, according to S. Shyam Sundar, professor of communications at Penn State and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory, we don’t quite mind the personalised messages and ads if the apps tell us what they will do with our information. He also says that we engage with apps more positively when they are transparent and also when we are familiar with the technology we use, and this is what developers ought to keep in mind when designing for the public. Security is just as much a concern and goes hand-in-hand with privacy for the same reasons.
In a world fraught with contested views about how education should be administered, anyone who uses apps to support their learning should also consider the risks involved. At the same time, there are risks with poorly equipped schools that are unable to give students the motivated teachers and engaging materials they need.
I now pass this question off to you - those of you lucky enough to make your own choices about from whom, how and when to learn - what do you think about having an app for that?
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Look out for my next blog post on how technology has influenced the revolt against institutional culture. See you next week!