purns:

tanya77: soupsoup: A Designer Education : The future of textbooks

I love this, in theory. I just don’t know if anyone is thinking practically here. Remember this?

The Prince (ugh):

“I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse [for] an academic tool,” said Aaron Horvath ’10, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. “It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.”

Horvath said that using the Kindle has required completely changing the way he completes his coursework.

“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”

If my UI guys at Apple don’t have an answer to this question, I don’t know that anyone does. And if no one does, these things just won’t work (at least as textbooks).

Speaking as a teacher, when you lose the physical page, you lose a number of strategies for interpreting the text. Many students have a need to approach the text with a highlighter and pencil for note taking, because that’s what has been taught.

I don’t disagree that there’s a need to adapt electronics devices for education, but let’s be honest, they’re currently better suited to supplement and not replace. At least at this point in time, and especially in this economic climate - I teach in the poorest congressional district in the country, with an average household income of $19,100 for a family of 4. How are we going to go about getting all students this technology? It’s nice that we can do so much these days, but there has to be an eye on logistics and maintaining an equality in the presentation of what the Federal government calls a “free and appropriate public education.”