Textbooks are dead. Long live textbooks.

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Predictably, the non-education tech press is focusing on iBooks 2.0 and iBooks Author. I still think that iTunes U is the bigger deal for education in the long-term, but somebody outside of the classroom may not recognize that. Interactive textbooks, while certainly an improvement, are still mostly presuming the same model of education that's persisted for 100 years. The importance of iBooks Author is that teachers now have the same tools (for free) that the textbook publishers have. It will be interesting to see what tech-savvy teachers do with that. I would imagine we will soon see content that is a "textbook" in name only.

Apple's Education Announcement

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Apple's NYC event just ended, and it covered essentially what was predicted. To wit:


Textbooks


Interactive textbooks are cool, but not new. Inkling has had a great app for a while now, but lacked publisher support. If the major textbook publishers are really behind Apple's initiative, that's huge. It could definitely help tilt schools currently on the fence about a 1:1 iPad deployment. The pricing of those textbooks ($14.99) is also pretty significant. For a private school like mine, asking students to buy an iPad and some $14.99 textbooks would end up saving parents a lot of money. The iBook authoring tool looks great too, and anything that makes it easier for teachers to create custom lessons is a positive.


iTunes U


As Fraser Spiers has said repeatedly, you need technology, pedagogy, and curriculum. Longterm, iTunes U could be a huge step toward integrating those three. The interactive textbooks don't mean much by themselves, but combined with the iTunes U app, teachers can really move to a curriculum and pedagogy that are entirely new. Even at the high school level, it is now possible to easily offer a course that is entirely digital, without expensive expensive hardware or software. All that's needed is a student with an iPad (and a teacher with a Mac to create the content).


What now?


There is often a very conflicted response to these types of announcements. The tech bloggers have never been a teacher, and are quick to praise any new technology as "saving" the broken education system. As evidenced by the lack of change over the last 100 years, that is rarely how it works out.


Among education technology people, most either rush to proclaim, "All our problems have been fixed!" or list the reasons why nothing will change. Of course the reality is probably somewhere in the middle. Any teacher who has been waiting for Apple to "save" or "fix" education is part of the problem. The tools are there, and have been for a while. Today's announcements just made those tools even better.


The challenge for me? I can think of 100 ways I could use these new tools. But my administration has 101 reasons why it won't work. Guess who will win?

Fraser Speirs: "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dematerialisation of Educational Technology"

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The entire post is worth a read, as most of Speirs' posts are, but here's the money quote:


Put simply, if you're in the business of making discrete hardware for the classroom you are in very serious trouble. Your business is about to be replaced by a $5 download from the App Store and the rest of your company's existence will be about trying to sell a refresh to your existing installed base.

I also love this bit:


Interactive Whiteboards are the next great Zombie Technology. The installed base is now so massive in schools that, like Internet Explorer 6, they will have a long, slow, lingering death.

 

Vocabulary

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Entire industries, including this blog, are centered around "technology in education."


I hate that phrase. Specifically, the use of the word "technology."


"Technology" is just stuff. In my classroom, some of the technology I have includes: a Fujitsu TabletPC, a SmartBoard, a dry-erase board, a plethora of dry-erase markers, books, paper, pens etc.. When I was in grade school, the technology consisted of a chalkboard and chalk, and again, books and paper. When Vergil was in school his technology was a stylus, wax tablets, and maybe some papyrus.


The vocabulary we use matters. When educators talk about the need for "technology in the classroom," most people translate that as, "We need more stuff." What they really mean, the smart ones, is that they want new tools to facilitate new ways of learning. I'm not trying to be pedantic here, and it's probably fine to use "technology" as shorthand, but I think this is indicative of many of the issues facing education. When educators are stuff-focused, they ignore the real needs.