In IT for Every Classroom, Paul Keery shares his insights on technology news, trends and best practices in 21st-century teaching and learning.
Apple’s Jan. 19 announcement of its new platforms and authoring tools has ignited a firestorm of debate across the Macintosh-based educational community. Has Apple finally found a way to create and digitize textbooks in a format and at a price accessible to everyone?
Apple’s New Paradigm
Apple introduced three big changes for digital education in its announcement.
The first, iBooks 2, is an upgraded version of iBooks, designed to handle the new media-rich textbooks that will be sold by major American publishers, including Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, through the iTunes store. Students will need an iPad to download and read the textbooks, which range in price from $14.99 to $19.99 U.S. The textbooks, as of this writing, are not yet available outside the United States. Those who have seen them are impressed with the powerful integration of media forms that convey knowledge compellingly and intuitively to readers.
The second, iBooks Author, is a new application that allows Macintosh users to easily and quickly produce e-books in an ePub-like format. From first reports, iBooks Author is remarkably easy to use. It allows users to include text, images, audio, video and a set of widgets that allow users to add Keynote presentations as well as interactive images and 3D objects that can be viewed from any angle.
The third is an expansion of iTunes U. Previously limited to university-level education, iTunes U will now allow K-12 teachers to upload full courses as well. Courses can be taught using video or podcasts, and supported by course content created in iBook Author and available through the new iBooks 2.
With these interlocking applications, Apple has created the tools that may allow imaginative users to redefine education for the 21st century.
New Opportunities
Digitizing textbooks was apparently Steve Jobs’ last major project at Apple. Jobs saw the textbook industry as ripe for Apple to challenge, as the old method of buying and then carting big, heavy, quickly outdated textbooks from class to class was now obsolete, thanks to the iPad. The challenge was to find a way to take advantage of the iPad’s capabilities to digitize textbooks in a format that could be created easily by publishers and was affordable for students.
Photo from The York School
iBooks 2 and iBooks Author have done this. Creating content for the iPad is now easy for anyone with a Macintosh, iWorks, and the iBooks Author software. It’s easy to distribute material created with iBooks Author through iTunes to be read using iBooks 2. It’s arguable that the iPad is at last a valuable educational tool for students in secondary school, who can now create content for it; most iPad educational applications have been directed at elementary students.
Content creation is particularly appealing. Creating content with the Pages ePub formatting tool does create ePub e-books, but it’s a clumsy, limited and frustrating process at best. iBooks Author opens up tremendous possibilities for teachers and students if they have access to the necessary hardware and software.
Concerns and Issues
However, Apple’s new educational initiatives do present several challenges for educators and educational administrators.
The most problematic issue is cost. Sure, it’s great that a textbook will cost less than $20; but the cost of the iPad has to be factored into that equation as well. Are there real savings when an iPad costs, at a minimum, $500? The textbooks files are large, too—often greater than 1 GB. The 8 and 16 GB iPads will not be able to hold too many textbooks. Also, an iPad will last only three or four years and is tremendously vulnerable to abuse—it could potentially be wiped out if someone spills water on it.
Ownership of the content is another problem. If a school downloads textbooks for its students for its iPads, do they own the textbooks in perpetuity? Unlike hard copies, libraries have not been permitted by publishers to buy ownership of e-books outright; the rights to the e-book expire after 18 months or two years. Hard copies of books do deteriorate and often have to be replaced; the digital limitation is meant to simulate this. Will schools face the same issues when buying textbooks from Apple? The same problem also applies to school libraries if the librarians decide to build a textbook collection.
Content creation also poses some problems. Great as it appears to be, iBook Author only works on Macintosh computers that run OS X Lion. Most schools do not run Lion because of cost or because they are running programs that are several years old and need Rosetta (which has been dropped from Lion) to run software originally designed for older processors.
There is a philosophical issue with content creation as well. Before the rise of the Internet, content was vetted for accuracy by publishers before it was printed; now, there is so much erroneous information on the Internet because anyone can create and upload a website (Wikipedia is very conscious of this, as is Citizendium). Will the same problem take a new form in the world of e-book publishing thanks to iBook Author?
Educators should be inspired by the new e-publishing world being opened up by Apple and be prepared to take creative advantage of Apple’s new tools. But they should be very aware of the pitfalls that may entrap them if they don’t think before they innovate.
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What do you think about Apple’s e-publishing revolution? Share your thoughts in the Comments section below.
Related:
A Look Ahead to the Educational IT Challenges for 2012
The Five Educational Legacies of Steve Jobs
Paul Keery’s articles and IT for Every Classroom columns
Lifting of Ban Means Classrooms Must Use Technology Smartly
Dialogue Magazine New Literacies Edition
About Paul Keery
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