Apple's new iBooks Author has the potential to change education. It allows the user to drag and drop entire PDF or word documents into a program. It then auto-formats the text to fit the page. The user can then customize the font, layout, add videos, create study guides, notes, and formative assessment like mock-exams and practice questions. It's super interactive and seems stupidly easy to use.
But while students would love to carry a shiny iPad instead of a heavy backpack, schools don't seem likely to catch on to this craze for some time to come. I'd argue that a single classroom of iPads would fair well in price against the costs of paper and printing for a semester. In college, a $500 iPad is cheaper than a semester of books, given the books sell back for nothing.
Apple has priced some of the textbooks as low as $15. That's insanely low for a textbook these days. Unfortunately, one cannot read the textbook without an iPad or iPhone.
One more drawback with iBooks is that textbooks have been given a 2gb limit. This leaves larger anthologies, and media-heavy resources will be left behind or missing lots of content.
Overall, I am looking forward to seeing if Apple will advance the textbook industry into the 21st century. I am also curious to see if the ease of publishing directly to iBooks will democratize the publishing and writing culture.
Things like this kind of upset me because they always say a semester's books are 500 dollars. I don't think I've ever paid close to that much, and I always have to buy 5 novels for each class plus an anthology. The price of books, and the interaction you can have with paper text is just as endless as technological text, teachers just have to build that foundation. They never do, in my opinion. I have an iPad, and I'm completely against e-books, but as a social experiment just so I can say "Yes I've done it, yes I hate it." I tried to read Dr. Zhivago on it. I gave up after a week. It's just so cold and lifeless. I totally love the possibly of e-books having an influence on young readers, and I hope endlessly that it will make a lot more people readers, but I just can't accept e-books as a proper substitute for paper. I wrote a similar blog post that contests your post a bit, and what I said has some ground in your post too. iBooks Author sounds great, and it gives the user the ability to be their own publisher and the interactivity sounds like it'll get kids super excited about the possibility of books, but what are they creating? It exists inside a computer, it's not permanent. As I say in my post, I think readers and especially young readers, need the permanence that paper text offers. Once it's printed it's eternal. There can be other editions that funk it up, but that one edition is eternal. Every time you take it off the shelf it's the same book. You open it, it's the same book. For a young kid playing around with publishing, he can see a sense of completion that being an author requires. If your text only exists on a program that you can continue to manipulate, there's no completion, there's no permanence. I can't help but feel like everything is just a work in progress in a program like this. Though, as a writer, it does excite me, and as someone who wants to have a job as someone inspiring kids to write, it excites me. I'm so torn with e-technology, because it's such a double edged sword.
ReplyDelete" It exists inside a computer, it's not permanent."
ReplyDelete...and paper is permanent?
I recently had an encounter with iBooks, and I have to say that the user interface is not very friendly. I became frustrated with the software within minutes of opening the screen. One of my professors told me that it is possible to even upload lesson plans through this software, and that it makes for efficient planning. A friend who recently got offered a job at a school also told me that the school no longer accepts paper lesson plans, only online ones. The school also isn't interested in the procedure of the lesson. They want to know the objective and the standards. No more lesson plans for her. As technology takes over the material that we teach, it is also taking over how we teach, so it is important that we began to immerse ourselves into this world!
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