A reaction to Apple's "reinvention of the text book"

Jeevan Vasagar, the Guardian's Education Editor, asked if I'd be willing to comment on today's event and announcements in New York by Apple about education.

This prompted me to follow the event using the Verge's live pictorial blog, from which you yourself will get the gist of what Apple is doing. There is more on ZDNET; and there is this piece in the Guardian.  [At the bottom of this post I am adding links to pieces I come across that seem to shed useful further light.]

My reaction?

It is difficult to see how the impressive-looking tools, content and services announced today by Apple will not be the kind of "game changer" that we've got into the habit of expecting from Apple.

Students, particularly in the US, pay a lot for prescribed textbooks even if they manage to buy them second hand. Provided they own an iPad and provided the right text-books are available (the second proviso is even more serious than the first) then Apple's text book service will provide a more interactive and probably pedagogically more effective experience than will the use of conventional text books; and at a much lower price.

Alongside this, and only from the look of it, the text book writing software that Apple will be giving away will be of intense interest to teachers and content developers in the Apple-using world. It remains to be seen whether the teacher-creators will be any match, in the quality and/or slickness of what they make, for the big publishers with whom Apple is already working, or for the smaller content developers and in-house production teams in universities who get started with the software now.

But there are lots of issues. Here are three.

1. Learning requires work (rehearsal, re-expression, discussion, making things, analysis, etc) on the part of learners, and "activity design" to ensure that the work happens. Learning is helped by formative feedback - which is notoriously difficult so far for machines to provide. Will the content that flows via Apple from publishers and authors onto iPads now or in the future make/help learners do the work of learning? Or will what we see be mainly "jazzier text books" - in effect interactive TV documentaries?
2. How if at all will creators of Open Educational Resources be able to work within the framework provided by Apple? (I want someone to comment below "it will be easy, and here is how".)
3. What is the business and licensing model for Apple and for the content providers? Will it tend to encourage a "monoculture" of online text books where what dominates is what is available rather than what is good? Will it reduce the diversity of printed text books?

Over the next 18 months we are going to find out.

Note 1. I am grateful for feedback from several members of the Association for Learing Technology - for which I work part time - helped me work out what to say to the Guardian - and influenced this piece in other ways.

Note 2 - added after original publication. Links to other interesting posts I come across on this topic are below.

• Audrey Waters in Mindshift - 19/1/2012
• Leon Cych commenting on the Guardian piece "education is what happens between your ears and not on a screen" - 19/1/2012
• Peter Kafka on why it makes sense for textbook publishers to have their textbooks sold for $14.99 or less - 19/1/2012
• James Clay - "'Reinventing Textbooks', I don't think so" - 20/1/2012
• Niall Sclater - First impressions of iBooks 2 - 20/1/2012
• Downes - wide ranging overview of reaction - 20/1/2012
• Ed Bott - a scathing attack on the highly restrictive iBooks end-user license agreement - 20/1/2012
• Jason Perlow - an oversimplifying ZDNet piece asserting that the costs of providing childred with iPads are too huge to contemplate - 30/1/2012

Comments

[Sleslie]

To the extent to which their bookstore and app use open standards like epub (without bastardizing it) and allow for importing books that don't come solely from their bookstore, this isn't much different from their itunes play (which is not meant to minimize it, as clearly iTunes had a major impact on that industry), and as such, is of some but not grave concern to me as a proponent of open and free culture and education.

Not unlike iTunes, I do worry that by controlling the main channels (the bookstore) through which un-industrious users find content, they do start to cultivate monocultures, but then not sure this is that much different then other "channels" of the past.

What worries me most, though, is things like Apple's "PC Free" goal, which on the surface looks like "ease of use" for the consumer, but on a deeper examination looks less generativity, less tinkerability, and more lock in to the channels that they do control.

Time will tell; as people have come to learn through their successes with both iTunes and the iPhone etc, Apple's innovations can be disruptive in ways larger than one initially expects, and trying to predict exactly how large this one will be at this point is premature.

[Sleslie]

Who knows if this piece about the End User License Agreement is true, but if so, this is worse than I had thought.