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I share your worry about technology becoming a roadblock instead of an open door in teaching.

Hopefully, as these approaches become more common and institutionalized, it there will be more opportunities to receive support from colleagues and other educators in their implementation.

Online materials are not necessarily peer reviewed, and those which are protected by copyright end up with inflated prices. I am not sure what the answer to this problem might be, but it is something that I would like to examine further in class.

Both the teacher AND the students become the LEARNERS.

The learners will label, name and design… 2. The learners will paraphrase, explain and illustrate… 3. The learners will demonstrate, prepare and solve… 4. The learners will differentiate, analyze and infer… 5. The learners will devise, revise and integrate… 6. The learners will evaluate, critique and compare…

both assume a business model of competition and profit. Education needs to maintain its sovereignty from what is really a form of hegemony.

But that the existence of such technology necessitates a total rethinking of the whole process seems like a power grab by a pervasive form of administration that stems from the business world. It is ridiculous that to be able simply to sit with a book in one’s lap and not be compelled to maintain permanent connectivity has become an act of resistance.

And I didn’t really want to hear the opinions of the other students who didn’t know anything more than I did. Or rather, it was nice to have discussions about the professor’s lecture, but without the lecture, there wouldn’t have been anything to discuss. We would have a book club, not a class.

By de-emphasizing content and knowledge, we’re turning students into middlemen who will know how to use technology to present a given subject matter, but who will be free to forget it as soon as the next task arrives on their desk.

Any genuine solution will have to address the problems of the current informational age — and it will need to continue answering the problems of the previous informational ages. From what I’ve seen, Apple’s new iPad is the first device to promise this (even if that promise isn’t yet fully realized). That is what makes it such a compelling candidate to be the first platform that serves true digital books.

Books that are static, don’t allow customization, don’t connect with other information on the device, and don’t leverage social connectivity aren’t the future, no matter how sophisticated the device that serves them. They’re simply the past repackaged.

Given what I’ve seen of its features and approaches, the iPad shows the promise to engender such a change, though much development will have to take place for it to realize its potential. Nonetheless, the innovation it offers in three critical areas is especially compelling: accessibility, participation, and customization. Central to all three of these is the fact that the iPad is not a single-use, standalone device; it’s a powerful, converged platform with robust development tools and capabilities.

I would argue that the key accessibility feature of the iPad is its apparent “lack” of an interface (a feature Apple’s marketing is working hard to underscore). Unlike all of the other similar devices (including those running Apple’s standard OS), which require users to learn to negotiate complex symbolic interfaces — files, folders, hierarchies, toolbars, navigational buttons — the iPad limits or even eliminates these in favor of touch, an approach intuitive even to those too young to read.

The collapsing of symbolic complexity into the simplicity of touch enables participation by new groups of people — even relative technophobes — and this mirrors the increased accessibility offered by Gutenberg’s revolution while lowering the barrier characteristic of most recent technologies.

For those interested in culture and creativity, this is an exciting prospect.

In Gutenberg’s case, the increase in accessibility led to a dramatic increase in cultural participation, and this is another way the iPad differentiates itself from many of its peer devices.

Put in the hands of readers and students, the robust capabilities of its new version of iWork, combined with access to the complete range of apps on the App Store and an entirely new generation of native apps, the iPad could provide access to professional-quality creative tools that empower a new set of participants

the iPad’s blend of social and contextual technologies and its ease of customization offer useful ways for the device to help users sort, focus, and control the information around them. The iPad’s networking capabilities, linked to a new generation of digital books, could help people discover both new texts and the members of a discussion group who could help them process what they’re reading. Combined with a portable format that allows readers to carry their books into various contexts, this could be incredibly powerful. One imagines, for example, a field-guide to forests linked to live discussion partners, allowing a reader to discover the forest in a new and engaging way that offers the advantages of both the first and second informational ages. Yet this sort of capability also reveals an area where the iPad falls surprisingly short: its lack of a camera (let alone two, one forward and one backward facing) means the device has limited capabilities for interesting emerging technologies like augmented reality — a staple of recently-developed apps. In terms of future eBooks, a volume of Hemingway that could alert readers that they were only two blocks from the café Les Deux Magots, for example, and offer an augmented tour of the place or that could direct the reader of Brontë to a moor would be transformational indeed. Perhaps we’ll see such capabilities on iPad 2.0.