Image via CrunchBase

Okay, so this is just yet another blog post written as a result of Apple’s announcement of their new system for creating and selling eBooks (eTextbooks) into education. What I want to do, however, is take a slightly different look at the announcement; instead of looking at the hardware or software that has been announced, I simply want to ask who is going to buy the ebooks?

It seems to me that there may be an issue which needs to be addressed. In Higher Education, it is common and expected that each student will buy (beg borrow or steal) their own textbooks. That is to say it is seen as the responsibility of the individual student to have their own copy of the textbook.

In mainstream schooling, the situation appears to be different. It is the school, or class teacher, which decides which textbooks are to be used and it is the school which takes on the responsibility of purchasing and supplying the relevant textbooks.

Apple’s new iBooks2 as a system for purchasing and displaying ebooks on the iPad, works well for those student in Higher Education. Does it fit as well with pupils in mainstream education schools?

Or are we seeing yet further evidence of a shift in mainstream education away from centralised institutions toward individualised learning? In which case, does Apple’s initiative merely provide yet further impetus in this direction? Should our mainstream pupils take more responsibility for their learning and should that responsibility stretch down as far as selecting and purchasing their own textbooks?

Related articles

• Apple’s new vision of education (macworld.com)
• High schools weigh in on iPads in the classroom (macworld.com)
• Overhyping Apple’s iBooks Textbooks (kumardeepak.wordpress.com)
• “Reinventing” Textbooks, I don’t think so! (elearningstuff.net)
• 350,000 textbooks downloaded from new iBooks in just three days (geek.com)

Possibly Related Posts:

• Why Teachers Should Learn to Love Comic Sans
• iPads in the Classroom
• mLearning: It’s Not About Delivering Content to Mobile Phones
• Microsoft’s Stealthy Strategy for Taking Over Education Technology?
• The Teacher and The Prostitute

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2012 at 07:57 and is filed under education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.