- with the iPad you can do interactive books which are basically the new "interactive CDROM" you had some years ago. - with the Kindle you cannot easily flip through the pages and write notes on them, this is why it does not improve the traditional textbook.
Nothing new, you know that after 15 minutes using the devices. But I must say, to read novels, news and stuff like that, you cannot really be better than the Kindle at the moment.
Disclaimer: I am an avid user of my Kindle combined with Instapaper.
I don’t think that’s a fair description. Why were interactive CDs so horrible? Well, you needed this huge clunky machine (the wall of screens between teacher and students) which takes ages to start, you need to find the damn CD and you need to wait forever until the program is loaded. Oh, and that whole interaction thing with the mouse was very clunky. [+]
The new tablets are small, lightweight, you don’t have to boot them up and apps load practically instantly.
I wouldn’t be too dismissive of them. They are a far cry from the old experience. It still might not work but I don’t think it’s enough to say “Oh, just like the old CD-ROMs!” and leave it at that.
[+] To be fair, I think that horribly production values had also something to do with it. That’s something new devices can’t remedy but I think we are a lot more experienced and have better tools today. The technology and our knowledge is more mature.
So, I do think that we will be able to get wonderful tablet based text books, but it will be for main stream topics (most likely all the undergraduate stuff, like the Feynman books in physics) and not cutting edge.
This is why I put them at the "interactive CDROM" level, in the sense that it will be available for topics which were covered with these CDROM.
On a side note, I really hope people will produce a lot of good content for the tablets and make the content available for not a lot of money. The more we get people to know what is science, what we do as scientists, how we try to reason on problems and argue with data and theories based on data, the better the world will be.
And I still kind of think that was a solution in search of a problem. Are there any evidence that stuff like that helps learning?
In exercise you cannot get strong without effort, and there is no way to learn without effort.
The most effective way to teach someone and to learn is with a teacher, blackboard, and chalk. Everything else is second best (including the wonderful Kahn Academy).
I can't say for sure, but this article seems awfully close to this:
A professor that had students with Kindles says it wasn't very useful because it was slow at highlighting, note-taking and turning pages.
The CEO of inkling.com, who make e-textbooks for the iPad, thinks the iPad is better than the Kindle for interacting with textbooks. The professor is also hoping that the iPad will prove better than the Kindle. A couple students that already had iPads said it was pleasant to use in class but considering the cost, a laptop would also suffice.
Do most people feel otherwise?
I loved so much fried chicken I got a so badly indigestion that I don't like it anymore(my mind associated it with bad feelings, so much pain)
My grandpa gave me a book before dying, and that made that book (and to a lesser extent all books)special. My first girlfriend send me notes on a book. My family read a lot of books. I learn a lot from books, enjoyed some books a lot, and in general had good experiences with them.
But young people will have good experiences with ebooks-tablets as good as we had with books. Maybe their first girlfriends will send then furtive IM messages they will later remember later in life, whatever. They won't understand how we can use those old and stupid things that can't display movies or read text.
They will have children with different devices and we will die and nobody will use books anymore.
However, there is one huge problem with textbooks on things like an iPad, that I've already run into in other contexts, and it has nothing to do with feel, or annotation (which still sucks on an ipad): You can't have more than one book open at one time. Not multitasking in the ipad sense, but literally, two ipads. Can't do it unless you spend another $600.
My feeling is that these device are the future, but two(three) things need to happen -- you need to be able to write/draw on these just as well as you can on paper (or close to it). And they need to be dirt cheap enough that everyone has three of them handy (and can have them communicate seamlessly).
I think this is a difference horses for different courses. If you study English or Political Science (like I did), you'll probably find a Kindle easier to deal with. If you study biology, chemistry, or topics like that, the animations and rendering of diagrams on an iPad will be superior.
1/2 a minute? That isn't how long it takes me.
This is just an Apple ad-itorial, "with the iPad all the diagrams in your textbook can be interactive"
If the Kindle doesn't handle random seek well, it's no better than a textbook in that regard (textbooks also fail at random seek).
The ability to have 2 simultaneous books open and displaying on a laptop is nice. It also allows split screen views of the same book so that you can view non-contiguous pages. This comes in extremely handy when doing problem sets that have the answers in the back of the book. Wish my math book was offered this way. Would save a lot of page flipping between problems and examples. It's also much easier to compose annotations than with an iPad. In hindsight, this will probably always be a shortfall of the tablets/ereaders. You could put a wireless keyboard on them, but at that point you might as well just have a laptop.
One thing I don't like at this point is the limitation of only being able to open the book on 2 devices that have my account registered (sort of like registering your iPhone with iTunes on up to 5 devices). From what I understand this is a restriction imposed by the publishers, not the distributors.
The cash-strapped college student would be best served by a cheap netbook, or if the student insists on a variety of media appliances, perhaps a laptop with a large screen. That should be adequate for any sort of interactive content, and a plethora of free content.
And of course, the student will require a healthy amount of discipline. Both the iPad and the Kindle make great publicity stunts, but neither is going to make a significant difference in a student's ability to learn.
There are a variety of interactive demoes that do help, but personally I think people should be making those demoes available in cross-platform form, or on some Linux/BSD variant so any cheap computer can be repurposed to run the software. If you convince yourself that the iPad or the Kindle or the Courier is the best device for education, I doubt you really have any insight to offer on education.
Every device has strengths and weaknesses. I'd say the best devices to allow skilled educators to create novel educational software are those that place the least restrictions on the educator. That's neither the iPad or the Kindle.
This student will be best server for a cheap tablet, not laptop or netbook. You need "portrait mode", instead of panoramic to really read fast and well, there is some reasons for that(), but laptops need to be only panoramic because of the keyboard.
It is not a coincidence that all document papers are portrait, and xerox Palo Alto graphical UI computer was portrait. Computers are panoramic because at first they used commercial TVs(Steve Wozniak monitor) because it was already mass produced and cheap.
()with columns like in a newspaper you are able to read "between lines" because you eye see in a circle area. You don't need to move left and right, just down. Your eye doesn't need to adapt to different level of dept, and some more.
Also, my finger/hand/arm never gets in the way while scrolling.
Besides, I still have my undergraduate textbooks from ten years ago on my shelf and occasionally look something up. If they'd been in an electronic format I'm sure it would be far too much trouble to find a reader for them.
But I wanted to check my intuitions against some facts. And I happily remembered that I have an old _An Introductory Course in College Physics_ from 1958 on the shelf. The pages from 1958 measure 5 1/4" by 8 1/4". Much much smaller feeling than the (typical from my college time) Tipler, _Physics_, with pages of 7 1/2" by about 11".
But the diagrams are not worse in any substantial way on the smaller pages. And the text is all quite clear and elaborates things quite well. Only very few of the larger tables, like the one showing the moments of inertia for various shapes, take up the entire, larger page in the younger book.
So I guess my point is, textbooks can work just fine with smaller pages if they are laid out with that in mind. The benefit of focusing the reader's full attention on a few diagrams and explanations at a time might easily outweigh being able to pack more information on a larger page.
Physics textbooks rapidly get smaller and lighter the more advanced the material gets, though.
But I could see a future where a student carried perhaps two 8"x10" e-ink displays in a package no bigger than a composition notebook. They could have two different page views of the same book (or multiple books), with wireless sync between them. Touch (at least resistive) could improve the interface for highlighting and some notes. It'd be easy to support slim wireless keyboards for longer notes. I don't know if they'll ever be able to improve the speed of the displays unless they change technologies.
For that reason, I'm looking into the new Sony eReaders[1], specifically the 650, because they have a touch-screen that you can write on and not-too-bad note-taking capabilities. For the price, I think they're going to be the best of the eReaders for higher education, if people can just find them.
Today people can share(or rent) relatively expensive scanners(1000$) with ultrafast feeders(any book in less than a minute) it they don't care about destroying the original book(just "guillotine them"). I had so many books that I did it with hundreds of them, my entire collection will be digital some day.
It hurt the first time I did it, but there are so many advantages(you can move with all your books, no weight, search funtion, indexing, digital notes)
Somebody never tried to get a site license for something that is worth its money. Electronic media are much too expensive for the education market (at least for universities etc.). A "traditional textbook" you can sell once you don't have a need for it any longer. The effective cost is less than the list price. I've also made the experience that electronic media usually lacks the depth of "traditional textbooks" unless it's the textbook put on the web.
