Apple for the Teacher
Yesterday Apple launched some
new applications and services
aimed at the education market. They extended the iBooks app to include
a textbook store; they announced some deals with major textbook
publishers; and they released a free application you can use to write
textbooks, and which allows you to publish them on the
store. They made their iTunes U service a separate
application. The app replicates what’s already available on
iTunes, but also seeks to replace some or all of what’s offered by
course management systems.
Something’s Always Wrong with Education
The education market is enormous and very heterogeneous. Apple’s
initiative covers both grade schools and universities. Those are very
different settings, which themselves vary hugely. And as anyone
will tell you, the American education system has been in crisis, or
facing some central challenge, or in need of some sort of fundamental
reform, for a very long time now. Everyone has a scheme designed to
fix it.
The alleged problem this time is that in the 21st century students and
teachers are being forced to use an outmoded technology from 1950: the
textbook. To be honest I was a little disappointed that the teacher in
the video didn’t just go the whole hog and condemn the printed book
itself as an outmoded technology from 1450. The solution involves Apple
selling as many iPads as possible, and taking a cut of textbook
sales as well. The demo textbooks shown at the event of course looked
terrific, as one would expect. Dynamic transitions, animations,
high-quality photography and video, highlighting and note-taking, all
that good stuff.
Technology is Always About to Transform Education
Schools have been down the techno-salvation path before with other
kinds of hardware and software. It’s worth remembering just how many
technologies we already have that were supposed to transform education
beyond all recognition. Radio, the television, the VCR, the personal
computer, email, the Internet and the web … All of these have been
trumpeted by someone as having the power to make education What It
Really Ought To Be. The same goes for smaller developments within
larger technological shifts. Chatrooms, MUDs, bulletin boards, blogs,
FaceBook, Twitter, on and on. Sometimes things do change, in big
ways. The TV and (later) the VCR helped make the
Open University
possible in the UK, for instance. (Which in turn helped make some
good comedy possible,
as well.) Of course, having a national broadcasting corporation and a
state-financed system of faculty and tutors was helpful, too.
Just this week, Wikipedia’s blackout showed how much it has insinuated
itself into people’s lives. Of course, the horrors uncovered by
Herpderpedia remind you that
it’s perfectly possible for a technology to transform how students
seek out and use knowledge while not doing much for the basically
clueless. Along with the big shifts have come mid-range changes. The
availability of free,
high-quality software for statistical analysis,
for instance, is one of dozens of changes that are
substantial or even remarkable within their domain, but which don’t
pretend to transform “school” tout court.
As for the textbooks themselves, I’m skeptical that the dynamic bells
and whistles are all that effective. I can certainly think of
particular cases where they could be. But it’s also easy to imagine
books filled with movies or demos that are watched once and then
ignored. What Apple laid out yesterday is rooted in the 1990s and its
vision of multimedia-enhanced texts. Fine as far as it goes, but don’t
pretend it’s going to revolutionize schooling. School is an
institution, not just a mode of instruction or a state of
mind. Textbooks are not what make people hate school. iPad-based
textbooks with zoomable pictures and some embedded movies will not
make students love school.
Instapaper and the Persistence of the Textbook
Phil Schiller heavily criticized the static, text-heavy format of the
traditional texbook. Far better to present information dynamically
with graphics, supporting illustrations, movies, interactive
components and all the rest of it. Sure, why not? But—consider how
many of the most sophisticated computer users consume “content”
online, perhaps especially the ones who use iPads. Do they seek out
material that looks like this? Do they want multi-modal, multimedia
formats? Do they love jazzy Infographics? No. They use
Instapaper or some equivalent tool to
create reading lists for themselves, and to read those articles in a
format that deliberately strips out a lot of the original
presentation and replaces it with simple, clean, easy-to-read, blocks
of text that look a lot like a well-designed piece of outmoded 1950s
technology.
Why do people like Instapaper so much? It’s because they’ve chosen
to read what they save, and the app lets them keep it and read it in a
straightforward, uncluttered way. Finding the good stuff is the hard
part, along with the ability, motivation, and opportunity to read
things: once you’re there, you don’t need the dynamic illustrations or
zooming or supporting illustrations. You’ll read it because you’re
already interested in it, and you’ll even seek out and pay for a way
to make the reading and learning experience static and simple, because
you don’t want to be distracted. A similar point applies in
education. The promise of “technology in the classroom” has always
been that it will magically “engage” students with what they have to
learn. But it hardly ever does, or does only at the margin. You still
need a good teacher, an opportunity to learn, and some motivation of
your own. Having a good breakfast in your belly helps as well. More
dynamic textbooks aren’t the solution to the problems of
education—they’re not even the solution to the problem of textbooks.
It’s strange to see Apple going down this well-worn road. When the
iPad was launched, a standard criticism was to say it’s a device made
for consuming content rather than actively making or doing things. But
developers quickly found ways to make it a lot more interesting than
that. Apps like GarageBand or
Star Walk or
Leafsnap—there are loads more—take
advantage of the iPad’s computing power and portability in ways that
put it in a different class of activity from watching a video, reading
a textbook, or just passively sitting at a computer. It’s these sort
of use-cases where a device like the iPad really shines. So it’s a
pity that Apple has chosen to re-enter the education market with a
pitch about Reinventing the Textbook that, frankly, sounds pretty old
hat. The reason, I suppose, is that there’s potentially a lot of money
to be made selling the things to schools as replacements for the
books.
The College Level
I teach at one of the universities mentioned in
Schiller’s talk yesterday. At the University level, the most immediate
difference from the K-12 case is that faculty typically get to choose
which textbook (if any) to use in their courses. So there’s
essentially none of the political fighting about textbook content that
bedevils public grade schools. Students also have to buy their own
books rather than rent them from the school (or have the school buy
them).
The most familiar pathology of the textbook market is that publishers
hate used booksellers. Publishers want every student to buy a new copy
of their text, but—Phil Schiller’s claims notwithstanding—books
are annoyingly durable. To fight this, publishers (and textbook
authors) produce new editions as often as possible and try to get
faculty to require the most recent iteration. There are various
inducements on offer to do this, starting with free copies for the
instructor and any TAs. As my friend Gabriel Rossman
noted the other day,
textbook catalogs pitched at faculty often come with little or no
information about how much the book will cost students.
Image courtesy of ambrown.
Apple’s proposed model would kill the used market, dead. The
presentation emphasized that once you buy a book you always own it,
and you can download it to any new devices you buy. But a corollary is
that once you’re done with the book you can’t give or sell it to
anyone else. So, at least initially, publishers can charge much less
for their textbooks and make it up on volume. That’s fine by me if
students end up paying less, though I immediately wonder whether the
next step would be for publishers to modularize the books. Instead of
your one giant Bio or Calc or Econ book for $14.99 rather than
$129.99, you can have various shorter books available for the same
price, but have to buy all of them over the course of a year or
semester—like 19th century serial novels. This would likely be
pitched to faculty as allowing for greater flexibility in curriculum
construction, but again it’s the students who end up paying for the
books.
From my point of view, both the iBooks Author and iTunes U apps are
potentially very useful for taking sets of lecture notes and making
them available to students easily. Many faculty already post their
Keynote or PowerPoint slides so students can review them (or use them
to avoid coming to class). The iBooks Author app seems like a natural
extension of this, especially given its compatability with Keynote
presentations. As for iTunes U, here Apple may be pushing into
course-management territory currently dominated by systems like
Blackboard and
Sakai. This is an easy domain for Apple to
take over if it wishes, as these systems range from the merely clunky
to the aggressively shitty.
Finally there’s the question of getting college students to buy
iPads. This is a more difficult proposition than it might appear. Most
students now buy a computer when entering college. As far as I can see
there is essentially no compelling reason for a freshman to buy an iPad instead
of something like a Macbook Air, for the simple reason that students
are required to write too much to not have a computer with a keyboard.
Sure, it’s possible to set up a writing environment on an iPad with a
bluetooth keyboard, or even write small amounts of text using the
on-screen keyboard. But it’s hard to see it competing with an Air or
similar laptop. Anecdotally, the use-patterns in my classes bear this
out: almost all my students own a laptop, less than ten percent own an
iPad, and no-one owns only an iPad. An unrepresentative sample,
sure, but it skews towards students who are relatively early adopters
and able to afford the hardware. This makes me wonder whether the iPad
will get widespread traction on campuses without institutional support
in the form of subsidized purchasing programs or pools of iPads
available for particular classes—Duke already has some of the latter.
Encarta is not the Future
The contrast between laptops and iPads for college students brings me
back to my earlier point about textbooks. What the iPad does really
well, it seems to me, is less about being a whizzy
textbook-with-moving-pictures and more about being the sort of device
that lets you do things that neither a regular laptop, nor a
traditional textbook, nor a single-purpose bit of hardware can
do. There’s the GPS, the camera, the accelerometer, the touch
interface—the best iPad apps tend to take advantage of these
features in some novel way, allowing you to do or make something cool,
often in a participatory fashion. Ironically, the best iPad apps for
reading things—like Instapaper—work to make the iPad more like
a simple, static, easily-read book or article, not less. If the iPad
is going to make new inroads in education, let alone transform it, I
think it will be by way of specialized apps that take advantage of the
many great capabilities of the iPad, not through an augmented-textbook
model that reanimates the corpse of Microsoft Encarta.
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