I’m sort of amazed that traditional textbook companies, with decades of a head start in this arena, have been so slow to adopt digital and interactive textbook development. From Ars Technica:
Apple is slated to announce the fruits of its labor on improving the use of technology in education at its special media event on Thursday, January 19. While speculation has so far centered on digital textbooks, sources close to the matter have confirmed to Ars that Apple will announce tools to help create interactive e-books—the “GarageBand for e-books,” so to speak—and expand its current platform to distribute them to iPhone and iPad users.
The fact that today’s science (and all students, really) are still primarily staring at drawings on paper while in school and completely immersive digital environments pretty much all the rest of the time is absurd. If you have stock in tree publishers, I’d sell it today, before Apple’s announcement tomorrow.
Also, digital education revolutionaries, please hire me when I finish my PhD this year.
I’m interested to see what they’ve created. So many professors are moving away from textbooks and compiling their own resources for students. These are typically done with black and white handouts, slides, etc. being spiral-bound or in binders. Hopefully this would be a great tool for those people who’d prefer to create their own textbooks for the classes they teach. It would be great to create something a little more polished with the ability to link to other sources and (relevant for my classes) include color pictures and other media (videos, animations, etc.).
Saving more trees would be nice too.
