Last May we explored student use of digital textbooks and learned that they were not going over well. “Students around the nation are flunking the format,” we reported. “They want their paper books back. It seems that e-readers are okay for reading, but textbooks are seldom read immersively like novels, and so far the e-books can’t match the functionality of good old paper. And even when it comes to reading for pleasure, gadgets like the Kindle DX tablet did not fetch high grades.”   (See Students Give E-Textbooks a Failing Grade)

That happened BiP – Before iPad. We suspected that once iPad found its way into schools we might have a different tune to sing.  We do. Winnie Hu of the New York Times reports that a number of schools are not merely encouraging the use of iPads but are actually purchasing and distributing them to students.  “As part of a pilot program,” writes Hu, “Roslyn High School on Long Island handed out 47 iPads on Dec. 20 to the students and teachers in two humanities classes. The school district hopes to provide iPads eventually to all 1,100 of its students.”

At $750 a pop, that’s no small investment, but there’s a tradeoff for savings on the cost of paper textbooks and other traditional school materials, plus a less tangible reward in the form of better student performance.  The iPads “allow students to correspond with teachers and turn in papers and homework assignments, and preserve a record of student work in digital portfolios.”

Not everyone is convinced of either the financial or the educational value.  If a school wants to go electronic there are cheaper devices, but they’re not as sexy as the iPad, and besides, “about 5,400 educational applications are available specifically for the iPad, of which nearly 1,000 can be downloaded free,” writes Hu.

As for academic benefits,the jury is still out, as researchers and psychologists report that screens create distractions for students. (See The Medium is The Screen. The Message is Distraction) Focusing attention on the subject at hand, even with colorful, entertaining and interactive applications, is a problem, as is retention of information. “There is very little evidence that kids learn more, faster or better by using these machines,” Larry Cuban, professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, told Hu.

Despite unproven educational benefits, it looks like nothing is going to stop the iPad steamroller. The Times tells us that schools and school systems in New York, Illinois, California and Virginia have invested in iPads.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

Whether you’re entering college or a returning student who’s been burned by paying a premium for textbooks and selling them for a fraction of their value, you will bless Tara Siegel Bernard for her New York Times article on how to shop for textbooks.

Bernard points out that “Federal rules that went into effect in July may help ease the pain. Publishers can no longer bundle their textbooks with accompanying materials like workbooks, and they must reveal their prices to professors when making a sales pitch. Colleges, meanwhile, are now required to provide students with a list of assigned textbooks during course registration, which allows for more time for shopping before classes begin.”

Here are some tips Bernard garnered from an interview with Nicole Allen, textbook advocate at the Student Public Interest Research Groups:

Free Books. You can find them in the Google Books database. Another source is Project Gutenberg.  There are problems with this approach (incomplete or poorly reproduced texts, page numbers that don’t correspond to course requirements, etc.) but still worth a shot.

Downloads and e-texts: Check out ManyBooks.net, for instance.  E-texts are (or should be) cheaper than their paper counterparts, but you won’t be able to print them out, and at this stage of the Digital Revolution most students prefer paper textbooks.  See E-Textbooks? Another School Makes Them Sit in a Corner)

Open Source Textbooks “Students who are assigned open source textbooks can usually download a copy for free, or they can buy a printed and bound version for $20 to $40,” Ms. Allen said. See FlatWorld.

The use of so-called open source textbooks, offered by companies like Knowledge, is also on the rise. “Students who are assigned open source textbooks can usually download a copy for free, or they can buy a printed and bound version for $20 to $40,” Ms. Allen told the Times reporter.

ETextbooks Are you the type of student who is completely at ease reading on your computer or iPad and won’t be tempted to print anything out? Then consider using eTextbooks, which are digital versions of textbooks that usually sell for about half the full retail price. Another site to visit is CourseSmart.com, which Bernard described as “a consortium of major textbook publishers that provides eTextbooks that allow students to highlight and take notes electronically.” But once again, printing options may be restricted.

Renting Some schools now rent textbooks. An outfit called Rent-A-Text “has teamed with 800 college bookstores“ to drive costs down to about half of the list price. You can even highlight if you don’t get too messy about it. There’s also Chegg.com, which Bernard says “has a reputation for being the Netflix of book rental companies.” [Note however that as of this writing we were unable to open the link to Chegg.com.] Other outfits mentioned are BookRenter.com, CampusBookRentals.com, ECampus.com (“We know you’re broke. We make you less broke.”), Textbookrentals.com and Collegebookrenter.com.

Buying Online Bernard lists Campusbooks.com and Bigwords.com for new, used, and rental textbooks. She also reminds us that international editions can be cheaper. Another tip is to look for coupon codes on such sites as PromotionalCodes.com, CouponWinner.com, and PromoCodes.com.

Selling Your Textbooks “You usually won’t get the best deal from your campus bookstore. But if the store knows it will need the same book the following semester,” says Bernard, you might have some bargaining power to recover part of your original investment. “Campusbooks.com doesn’t purchase used books,” she informs us, “but it has a neat search engine that lists who’s buying and how much they’re willing to pay.” Also, you can cut out the middle man by listing your available textbooks on Facebook, Craigslist or student PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups).

Finally, you might consider…

Donating Your Textbooks. For the charitable or green-minded student, consider donating or selling your texts to BetterWorldBooks.com. According to their website, as of this writing they have raised $8,554,339.14 to combat global illiteracy and saved 34,208,429 books from global landfills. We don’t know whether there are tax writeoffs for such donations but it’s definitely worth asking your accountant.

For details, read Bernard’s article in full: How to Find Cheaper College Textbooks

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Last spring we wrote that students at a number of universities such as Wisconsin had reported unhappy experiences using Kindles as textbooks.  (See Students Give E-Textbooks Failing Grade)

Now another school, New York City’s Pace, has reported a failed experiment. Pace is one of seven colleges trying to shift textbook use from print to digital, so Pace’s bad trip could be symptomatic of negativity among students to shifting to e-books.

“Initially, there was a lot of excitement about using digital course materials,” a Pace educator is quoted in Can the Kindle and Its Ilk Ease Textbook Inflation? by the Village Voice‘s Fahmida Y. Rashid. “Pace offered the Kindle to students in the selected classes with the appropriate course materials already preloaded on the device. Students had the option to buy the Kindle (at a discounted price) at the end of the course.”

“But By the end of the year, Rashid says, “the excitement had waned. ‘The experiment did not really go well,’ says Dr. Karen Berger, associate dean and director of undergraduate programs at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business. ‘Two students bought the [print] textbook within a month of the start of the course.’ Student complaints ranged from difficulties in taking notes to clumsy navigation controls. The electronic annotation feature was especially ‘slow and cumbersome,’ she says, requiring students to manipulate a tiny button to underline passages and type notes on the Kindle’s ergonomically unfriendly keyboard.

“Berger also feels the textbook used in her class was not as effective on the Kindle as it was in print. The photos, pictures, and diagrams in the e-textbook were all black and white, she says, and the image quality was not quite as sharp as it would have been in print.”

Navigation is a really big issue: “It’s one thing to read a mystery or novel on the Kindle” says another Pace executive, “but the way you read a textbook is different. You are flipping back and forth while reading, and navigation was cumbersome, even with bookmarks.”

Universities and students hoping to save money by dumping printed books may have to wait until educators get an advance degree in Paradigm Shift 101.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the Village Voice

Last year California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger launched an initiative to replace printed textbooks with digital versions.  His motives were purely financial, and who could blame him? His state’s economy was in the toilet, and it still is. But before going all in on e-textbooks The Terminator wanted to get some feedback from end users.

He’s getting it in spades but it’s not what he wants to hear. Students around the nation are flunking the format. They want their paper books back. It seems that e-readers are okay for reading, but textbooks are seldom read immersively like novels, and so far the e-books can’t match the functionality of good old paper. And even when it comes to reading for pleasure, gadgets like the Kindle DX tablet did not fetch high grades.

The first school to check in was the University of Wisconsin after experimenting with the DX for a history course.  As we reported last January, “Many said in response to questions of the baseline survey that they preferred printed books for sustained and serious reading…Within a few weeks after the start of the [first] class several students had opted to buy paper copies of the books for some of the readings…They immediately perceived the cumbersome note-taking features and the lack of reliable pagination… The experimental project has uncovered faults so fundamental that this particular device will never be deployed for mass use by UW–Madison students.” (See Not So Fast, Guv! Wisconsin Students Not Ready to Terminate Paper Books.)

Results are now coming in on the DX from such schools as University of Washington, University of Virginia, Princeton and Reed College, a small campus in Oregon.  Typical were these observations by some students who “complained they couldn’t scribble notes in the margins, easily highlight passages or fully appreciate color charts and graphics,” writes Seattle Times business reporter Amy Martinez. One graduate student commented that “You don’t read textbooks in the same linear way as a novel. You have to flip back and forth between pages, and the Kindle is too slow for that. Also, the bookmarking function is buggy.”

Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps was less generous. She simply declared the DX “a dud.”

Here’s one anecdote reported by Martinez:

“Wary of lugging a backpack full of textbooks on the University of Washington campus, Franzi Roesner couldn’t wait to get her hands on a new, lightweight e-reader from Amazon.com. Soon after receiving a Kindle DX, however, something unexpected happened. Roesner began to miss thumbing through the pages of a printed textbook for the answer to a homework question. She felt relieved several months later when required reading for one of her classes was unavailable on the Kindle, freeing her to use a regular textbook.”

Educators are more sanguine about Apple’s iPad, but it may just be that it’s the screen medium itself, not the device, that turns students off.

Martinez’s coverage of the story can be read here.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the Seattle Times.

Two representatives of Aptara, the digital solutions company, have offered a terrific scenario of a typical school room of the future in which everybody’s using a tablet. It’s just what we imagined when we first laid eyes on a tablet back in 2003.

Here’s the opening passage of Aptara’s scenario developed by John Ott and Eric Freese:
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Welcome to class. Take your new tablet— your only textbook this semester— out of your backpack. It’s about the same size, but lighter and thinner than your old textbooks. It’s also battery-powered, similar to a big touch-screen, like your iPhone.

Use that touch-screen and download the first chapter of your first lesson. That’s right—your lesson is an app. Plug in your earbuds and tap the screen to begin the introductory video.

Cool, the presenter is that famous scientist from the cable show…

Now the video goes into full documentary mode; scenes from real life. Major ideas from the lesson appear as text at the bottom of the screen; so do vocabulary words. Now the presenter is back and he’s working out a big idea step-by-step on the whiteboard…

Video over. Time to read…
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Has anyone figured out the flaw in this projection? Consider: with digital technology you don’t have to go to class – because there’s no class to go to. You can “attend” school in your bedroom, living room, dorm room, bathroom or car.

Digital technology is the great disintermediator. Among the things it disintermediates is place. There is no school room, at least not one with geographical coordinates. It exists in the cloud. In Gertrude Stein’s immortal phrase, there is no there there. Unfortunately, Stein used it to characterize Philadelphia, but it’s the mot juste for a virtual school room.

University trustees had better begin thinking about discounting tuition for students auditing classes from their bathrooms…

Aptara’s complete article can be seen on the Digital Book World website, and if you haven’t signed up to receive DBW’s newsletter, do log on. You’ll be at least one light year more informed than your neighbors.

Richard Curtis

“There are lots of schoolkids in the world,” writes Tyler Cowen on the Marginal Revolution website.

We were thinking the same thing. In fact, we were thinking it a decade ago when we leaped into the e-book space: the medium is perfect for textbooks. But education had to wait for hardware and software to catch up.

It’s caught up.

Hardware: Apple will lead the way. “The superior Apple graphics, colors, and fonts will support all of the textbook features which Kindle botches and destroys” says Cowen in My predictions about the iPad. “In the longer run the iPad will compete with your university, or in some ways enhance your university. It will offer homework services and instructional videos and courses, none of which can work well on the current iPhone or Kindle.”

Platform: We’ve been reading up on a San Francisco startup called Inkling. “Stacked with pedigreed veterans of Microsoft and Google, Harvard, MIT and Stanford,” writes Paul Boutin of VentureBeat, Inkling surfaced after Apple’s iPad launch with $1 million to seed development of software aimed not just at student’s learning needs but their pocketbooks as well. The company is working with a number of textbook publishers like McGraw-Hill and Pearson.”First, they’ll port their existing tomes onto Apple’s iPad as interactive, socialized objects. Then, they’ll create all-new learning modules — interactive, social, and mobile — that leave ink-on-paper textbooks in the dust.”

Inkling offers color, interactivity, highlighter capability, social network sharing features, talking text and dynamic quizzes. And all of this delivered lightning-fast. “The iPad’s A4 chip is even faster than the Android G2 that gets geeks so excited,” says Boutin, “so rich layouts and interactive illustrations run quickly.”

“But the real breakthrough,” he writes, “is in pricing. Instead of a $180 textbook, learning modules built with Inkling will be priced individually on iTunes, just as music and TV shows are. Instead of buying all 50 chapters of a 1,200-page biology book, an instructor can create a customized bundle of only the modules students will actually use. Pricing hasn’t been determined yet, but it’s likely to be a few dollars per unit — much cheaper than current textbooks.

Are you listening, students? Modular bundles so cheap they’re not worth ripping off!

Here are some details from Inkling’s “About” page:

• Interactive figures. Inkling lets you directly manipulate objects to explore them. Want to know if two molecules bond? Use your fingertips to pull them together and see what happens.
• Custom spine. Inkling organizes content based on your assignments. It shows you everything you need to do, all at once, no matter where the content is from. It’s like a custom textbook, just for you.
• Reader. When it’s time to read a traditional textbook, Inkling does an amazing job. Dog-ear your pages, skip from chapter to chapter with gestures, and jump from figure to figure with your finger.
• Quizzes. Measure your progress with interactive tests that deepen your understanding of the content.
• Note following. Ever borrow a classmate’s notes? Borrow them in realtime with Inkling NoteSync™. Annotations, highlights and comments from your friends show up alongside your own, instantly.
• Device sync. Want to finish up a reading while waiting in line? Anything you’ve got on your iPad appears right on your iPhone or iPod touch, too.

Look for iPads utilizing the Inkling platform on campuses as early as next fall.

Richard Curtis

Back in October we wrote up the design for an absolutely astounding rollup tablet PC of the future. We were so knocked out by it that we titled our blog I Want One Today! and you may too after viewing the demo. But you’ll have to wait for the Orkin rolltop, for (as far as we know), it’s pure fantasy.

Though we don’t think that Apple’s soon-to-be-announced iSlate will be nearly as cool as Orkin’s, some commentators such as David Carr of the New York Times have succumbed to iSlate frenzy. In his “Media Equation” column Carr gushes about the rumored qualities of the iSlate: “I haven’t been this excited about buying something since I was 8 years old and sent away for the tiny seahorses I saw advertised in the back of a comic book.”

The title of his article is A Savior in the Form of a Tablet, and he says that for some tabletphiles the iSlate represents “the second coming of the iPhone, a so-called Jesus tablet that can do anything, including saving some embattled print providers from doom”.

We need to keep our heads a about this. First of all, we’re not sure Apple’s product will actually be called the iSlate, and for all we know Apple has booked an auditorium at the end of January to announce that it has discovered an app for the common cold.

We certainly don’t believe that the iSlate is the path to personal salvation. We do firmly believe however that tablets will put the e-book business over the top as colleges adopt them as standard equipment for their student bodies, and we’ve been saying that for years.

Perhaps you too are developing tablet frenzy. If you haven’t yet, you may after you click on the video in our original posting below.

Richard Curtis
**********************************
Earlier today we predicted that five years from now there’ll be a tablet PC under every student’s arm. We were wrong. It won’t be under their arms. It will be suspended from their shoulders. Or at least it will be if PC manufacturers are smart enough to adopt Orkin Design’s Rolltop, astoundingly “rolled out” and then rolled back up again in the demo video below.

A writeup says, “The device of the flexible display allows a new concept in notebook design growing out of the traditional bookformed laptop into unfurling and convolving portable computer. By virtue of the OLED-Display technology and a multi touch screen the utility of a laptop computer with its weight of a mini-notebook and screen size of 13 inch easily transforms into the graphics tablet, which with its 17-inch flat screen can be also used as a primary monitor. On top of everything else all computer utilities from power supply through the holding belt to an interactive pen are integrated in Rolltop. This is really an all-in-one gadget.”

We don’t know anything about the designer, but visit Orkin’s wonderland website for exquisite futuristic household designs (check out the barstools particularly). And some beautiful sculpture, too.

RC

We’ve written about Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s initiative to convert California’s school system to e-textbooks (See Hasta La Vista, Textbooks). Before terminating paper books, though, he might want to check out what University of Wisconsin at Madison has learned about student responses to e-books as educational devices.

Students in an upper level history course were given tablet-sized Kindle DXs, Amazon’s bid to capture the educational market. They used them for one semester, then next semester passed them along to kids in a another history course. According to an article by Kenneth Frazier in UW history newsletter, “Most were initially enthusiastic about participating in the experiment though somewhat skeptical about the quality of the reading experience the readers would provide.”

The upshot? While the students appreciated the advantages of e-books,“Many said in response to questions of the baseline survey that they preferred printed books for sustained and serious reading…Within a few weeks after the start of the [first] class several students had opted to buy paper copies of the books for some of the readings…They immediately perceived the cumbersome note-taking features and the lack of reliable pagination. Perhaps most disturbing, the Kindle DX cannot be used by blind and low-vision readers, even though modest changes in the design would have made this technology accessible for the blind and other text-disabled users. The experimental project has uncovered faults so fundamental that this particular device will never be deployed for mass use by UW–Madison students.”

Okay, so Kindle is out. But new tablets are on the way, Wisconsin, such as Apple’s rumored entry later this year. A year or two from now you will begin to see students trudging up Bascom Hill with tablets slung over their shoulders. A year or two later, tablets will become standard issue.

Richard Curtis

For years we’ve been wondering when schools would figure out that any e-book smaller than a tablet would simply not be feasible for the student market. Anne Eisenberg of the New York Times writes about an effort by one company, enTourage Systems, to produce a two-screen tablet-sized device called the “eDGe”.

It’s supposed to be released in February. It will sell for $490, not bad as prices for tablets are concerned. The device’s name comes close to falling into our Dumb Names category but at least we understand we’re supposed to pronounce it “Edge”. That’s better than the Que or Cool-er, neither of which we’re sure we know how to pronounce.* We do know how to pronounce Nook but that’s another story.

In any event this two-screen e-book reader will carry text on one screen and a liquid-crystal display on the other “to render graphics like science animations in color,” explains Eisenberg. “The e-reader screen is used with a stylus that can underline or highlight text, take notes in the margin, pull up a blank piece of e-paper for solving math problems, or touch a link for a video of a chemical interaction that is then displayed on the LCD screen.” In other words, it works like a tablet is supposed to work, except it comes in two parts held together by a hinge. It’s hard to say how seriously we’re supposed to take the eDGe – Eisenberg’s column is called “Novelties”.

eDGe is definitely a step in the right direction and might be what California’s governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had in mind when he promoted replacing paper textbooks with e- books (see Hasta La Vista, Textbooks). But we’re waiting for a true one-screen tablet such as that in development by Microsoft. And if we have a choice we’ll hold out for the rolltop we demo’d in the fall, a device so radically brilliant that I lost my cool and exclaimed, “I Want One Today!” Unfortunately, it appears to be a theoretical design, not a prototype. You should check it out anyway because it shows what an innovative designer can do when he let’s his imagination soar.

Read Eisenberg’s piece here.

*Just a footnote to our harping on dumb names. An anonymous commenter had made this shrewd observation on a recent posting on the subject: “Have you every tried to get a domain name for the Internet? Every word in every language has already been taken. If you have tried this before, you know what I’m talking about.

“Now add that frustration to the trademark search space. And then add in international trademarks and the resulting intersection leaves you with dumb names.

“That’s why today’s products are using these names: Hulu, Nook, TiVo, Blio, etc. It’s marketing that takes a nonsense word like Google and makes it a household word. The winners in the eBook space will do the same.”

Good point, Anonymous. I just wish the manufacturers of devices like the Cool-er and Que would give us a clue to pronouncing them. I have it anecdotally that they are pronounced “Cool-Ee-Arr” and “Cue” respectively. How much marketing would it have taken to tell us that much?

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

In 2001 Bill Gates categorically declared that within five years tablets “will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.” It’s three years since his prediction expired, and looking back it seems preposterously quixotic. So here’s a preposterously quixotic update of our own on Gates’s prophecy: within five years tablets will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.

The reason, in one word: Education. As we wrote in 2008, the prize for the right student-friendly portable e-book is worth billions, and current models of Kindle, Sony Reader and iRex are simply inadequate for textbooks, illustrated books, schoolwork and homework. Even the much ballyhooed Plastic Logic Something or Other (we’ve dubbed it the “Teasle”) isn’t shaping up to handle tablet-sized tasks. For one thing, none of these gadgets is in color.

It appears, however, that Microsoft is ready to step into the ring for the Tablet PC Sweepstakes Round #2 in the form of something called the Courier. According to Gizmodo and PC World, this tablet has “two 7-inch, presumably color, touchmicrosoft courier tabletscreens that use a combination of multitouch and stylus inputs. From what we’ve seen so far, Courier does not have any kind of keyboard — virtual or physical — and depends completely on handwriting recognition software for entering text. Tech specs are scarce, but Courier would have Wi-Fi connectivity and a camera.”

And Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance, in Just a Touch Away, the Elusive Tablet PC published in the New York Times, report that “In June, Archos, a French consumer electronics company, began selling a small touch-screen tablet running Google’s Android software. Later this month, it will introduce another tablet that runs on Microsoft’s Windows 7, which has built-in support for touch screens.”

The iPhone? Steve Jobs has said “Never” to a tablet-sized iPhone. That could actually mean Never, Maybe Never, or Tomorrow Afternoon. The latest rumor places Apple’s rollout of a $700 tablet at early next year.

There are certainly hurdles to be overcome. The absence of a keyboard, even a virtual one, is a big drawback for any computer designed for classroom use. And touchscreens are fun but they can slow reactivity to a crawl. The ultimate in touchscreen tech, Microsoft Surface, is not ready for tablet prime time but if you’d like to see a mindblowing preview, visit the Surface website and be tantalized. Nevertheless, the time is right for Bill Gates’s prediction to come true. Okay, so he’s a few years late. Who of us has not been a few years late with something!

The key to successful prophecy is Don’t Be Too Specific. But we stand by our prognostication: five years from now there’ll be a tablet under every student’s arm.

Richard Curtis