I'm proud of my fellow educators today for their entirely reasonable reactions to Apple's education announcement. Richard Byrne as per usual, sums up the vibe well:
The iBooks textbooks look very nice and have some interactive elements. But, I can't help but wonder why Apple choose to make the, "iBooks will make kids' backpacks lighter" as their second marketing point. It seems to me that if iBook textbooks are going to "revolutionize" education that something other than "lighter backpacks" would be Apple's second marketing point for iBooks.
My hunch is that institutions of higher education are going to be fast adopters. These are very competitive prices for books and with the device amoritized over four years the convenience and costs of the books are going to be big winners with college students. Apple also has a ton of room to cut prices for college students because they have, by far, the largest margins in the consumer electronics industry. I suspect many independent schools will go the same way. If you buy your own books every year, this is a good deal.
Will textbooks with images, videos, and dynamic features revolutionize teaching and learning? No. Will they make a marginal improvement in student engagement and learning-- in the right schools they probably can. If Apple wants to spend a few million dollars in randomly assigning iPads (free) to schools in a lottery to find out for sure the impact, I'd be happy to design and implement the student. Didn't someone say they were sitting on $40 billion or so in cash?
Of course, the much more interesting questions are in public education. The Superintendent of LAUSD was in the marketing video, and it's exciting that Apple is partnering with a major urban school district. Folks who know my work (which I'll post more about tomorrow, no sense competing with Apple today) can probably guess my predictions for this latest innovation-- without systematic professional learning supports and without targeted initiatives to learners with the greatest needs-- teachers will adopt e-textbooks to continue existing practices and pockets of real innovation and benefit will predominantly be in wealthy environments.
To me, one of the most important open questions has to do with the unbelievably exciting question of textbook adoption policies. As states develop textbook adoption policies that increasingly approve of or even require textbooks to have digital options, will a proprietary option be suitable? And actually, it really doesn't matter what about 40 or so states do, it mostly matters what Texas, California, Florida, New York and a few other large states do. If these big states refine their adoption policies in such a way that publishers can produce textbooks with a iBooks option, call that the "digital version," and win adoption contests, than that is a huge winfor Apple. If the big states create adoption policies that require that digital alternative be platform independent, then that might force Apple to back off of their "you can come to our all-you-can eat buffet, as long as you agree to be chained to the table" policy (thank you emasters).
So I have a bunch of questions now that some enterprising, edtech journalists (I'm talking to you Katie Ash and Audry Watters) or ed tech policy researchers should track down. What is the current state of play in digital requirements in textbook adoption policies in the big adoption states? Does Apple intend to do any lobbying in regards to these policies? Do state education commissioners and superintendents have stated positions on these issues? Is anyone in the OER community developing an advocacy position around this? (One place to start learning is with this video from the Open Education Conference about Utah's experience with digital textbook adoption)
Totally boring stuff compared to DNA helixs that you can spin with your fingers, but probably more important.
I'll give the last word to Jim Hersch, asst. Superintendent in Plano Texas, as quoted in Katie Ash's 2010 article on digital textbook adoption:
"I'm continually saying you need to produce for the open standard," says Hirsch. "Don't produce for a closed proprietary standard," or you run the risk of creating a digital resource that only a segment of students can access.