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Leslie Lieman

Apple and the Digital Textbook Counter-Revolution - 3 views

hackeducation.com/...he-textbook-counter-revolution

iPad iPads textbooks iBooks education technology

shared by Leslie Lieman on 28 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Leslie Lieman on 28 Jan 12
     
    I am posting two articles: 1) Apple's recent announcement about getting into digital textbooks (article/link below) and 2) the criticism (this link) by Hack Education blogger Audrey Watters. Education needs to rethink the need for textbooks altogether. Digitizing them is not the answer. She states, "You can disassemble, reassemble, unbundle, disrupt, destroy the textbook. It is truly an irrelevant format."
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Emily Lovell on 30 Jan 12
     
    I thought it was interesting to read Watters's criticism of Apple's textbook plans, although I also thought it felt pretty one-sided. I do have reservations about how Apple is going about this (expecting everyone to own an iPad, requiring textbook authors to surrender rights, etc.) - but I don't think that the overall idea is so unbearable. Digitized textbooks offer many affordances compared to what we're stuck with currently (textbooks that are outdated, heavy, expensive, and limited by static content). Of course, theoretically we could do without textbooks, as Watters suggests in her criticism... but I'm not yet convinced of this in a practical, realistic sense. I suspect that the resources required to realize textbook-free classrooms are beyond what most schools and teachers have access to. (I also realize that iPads are not cheap! But if digitized textbooks were to become popular across a range of platforms, perhaps they would be more accessible to a broader demographic... and it's not as if physical textbooks are cheap either.)
  • Leslie Lieman on 30 Jan 12
     
    Hi Emily - thanks for your thoughts! Bloggers (especially those who use the name Hack in their title) are going to be provocative (one-sided) in their writing... but it helps raise questions about standard practices. I too agree that eTextbooks or iBooks are going to be tremendously more engaging and up-to-date than the ones that weigh down kids bookbags. But now take a look at the other article I posted: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/flow-digital-textbooks that suggests how publishers are not open to new and niche ideas that might be incredibly beneficial to education. The publishing market has a hold on education. Is it possible that the textbooks will not be available across a range of platforms, but only on a few that the publishers agree to work with? Maybe it is time we push for a more open source model... that could also work towards digitizing textbooks... or would innovate other ways for students to access "textbook"" knowledge.
  • Emily Lovell on 30 Jan 12
     
    Thanks for the nudge to read the other article that you posted as well! It was a nice counterpoint to Watters and the FLOW platform seems like a promising stab at digital textbooks from an open-source standpoint.
Jackie Iger

iPad Textbooks: Reality Less Revolutionary Than Hardware | Wired Science | Wired.com - 2 views

www.wired.com/...ipad-textbooks-learning

technology education iBooks etextbooks

shared by Jackie Iger on 13 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Jackie Iger on 13 Feb 12
     
    An interesting article that explores the question of whether kids will learn more and better on tablets.
  • Katerina Manoff on 13 Feb 12
     
    Thanks for sharing! I think many of the strongest proponents of "tablets for all" would benefit from this more balanced perspective.
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