General help

You cannot upload from the iPad or iPod because they don't have a browseable file system. The web browser on the platform doesn't support the file object in web pages. in the iPxx world, all files are owned by a specific application. The issue has nothing to do with a lack of Flash support and won't go away in Moodle 2.0.x. In some cases, easy to use also means limited options and functionality.

Allan:
       I do feel your pain. None of the platform promoters are really interested in the needs of learning (or supporters of learning), they're interested in being the last platform standing. Flash may not be as safe, but tell that to all the non-profits -- universities, museums, even orchestras and art institutes -- who have developed Flash-based content.
      Of course, Apple's decision is compounded by a lot of individual school purchasing decisions -- teachers assuming that iPads are actually computers. That's the big problem. I suspect that an iPad-like interface will be leveraged by "real" computers.  But the "instant-on" and 8-hour battery life of the iPad are possible specifically because there is a long list of things it won't do. It's an attractive and elegant step forward, but it isn't the holy grail...not yet.
       It sounds like Shashi is trying to nudge this rock a little further up the hill, but writing an entire new display interface leveraging the underlying data structure for just the iPad doesn't seem like a good idea. A fair number of the iPad apps (including, I'm guessing, the few Moodle aps I've seen in iTunes, one of which I tried briefly) are just carving up Internet content into bites the iPad can digest. I'd rather see Apple engineers spending their time trying to redesign the device and its OS to deliver existing content, rather than pushing all the deliverers of that content into redesign themselves.

That would be a legitimate observation, except in the case of educational purchasing where the decisions to buy iPads in bulk is being driven by a bunch of things other than legitimate educational use.

Our Moodle site is used almost exclusively for so-called hybrid instruction, meaning that a lot of the interactive content is being consumed by students using school-based hardware. We have more than one school recently investing in iPads, only to find that they didn't interact with existing content management (including Moodle) as they expected. That's a huge mistake, and one which could have been avoided by listening to some of the observations made here.

iPad advocates use the popularity argument when promoting their own interests, but avoid it when looking at content and resources which are not handled well by iPads. That's why, as an educator, I prefer to talk about pedagogy rather than hardware. Hardware SHOULD be the caboose on that train. All other things being equal, it should not force us to choose one instructional practice over another.