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Goodbye Textbooks, Hello iPad
PolygamousRanchKid writes "Students and teachers in grade school through higher education are using the iPad to augment their lessons or to replace textbooks. Jennifer Kohn's third grade class at Millstone Elementary School in Millstone, New Jersey, mastered the iPad with minimal training. For the most part, the students didn't need to be taught how to use their apps, Kohn says. College students are also turning to the iPad to do what they do instinctively well: saving themselves money. Marianne Petit, a New York University staff member, recently began taking credits in pursuit of another certification, and uses her iPad in place of textbooks. 'The price of the iPad pays for itself after a single semester,' Petit said. 'iPad books cost so much less it's a legal alternative for students who are using BitTorent [to pirate books].' Like the PC before it, Kohn noted that the iPad isn't a panacea for educators: It has its appropriate time and place. 'I don't use them with every lesson or even day. It's not always appropriate to lesson or objective of what I'm trying to teach,' Kohn noted."
s/iPad/ANY TABLET/g
Textbooks yanked from students iPads during a semester because of DRM glitch. Thousands of kids are unable to do their book work as teachers scramble to come up with alternatives while the issue gets resolved between the publisher, Apple, and anyone else.
*Whump* It may be old, it may be so yesteryear but a book works fine. Not to mention as a learning tool it also makes a great:
* Blunt object to smack the bully who's harassing you with if he tries to take it from you.
* Something to stand on to reach that higher shelf
* Foot rest when doing something other then Calculus or Physics. God those books weighed a ton!
* Something your kid could poke around in when your older and not have to deal with DRM restrictions that lock the title to you alone. Seriously I found my parents old math books in the attic one day and I was amazed going through them when I was younger.
* It works great when the batteries are dead and you have a candle to read by.
Now that I've ranted I'll get off the lawn before the guy with the stone tablets comes out and yells at me. Don't ask him how he parted the waters in his birdbath. You'll get your ear talked off.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
The case of textbooks is special for many reasons. First, students (and I am talking University Students here) MUST buy them. No choice in the matter. Second, there has long been a lively secondary market for used books. This infuriated the main line publishers, that they couldn't get fresh money for fresh books every semester/quarter/year. Third, to counter this, they collude with the authors, and have frequent revisions. Never changing much, but enough that lesson plans would be altered with the wrong edition text. Thus, it is rare that a text is god for more than 2 years between revisions.
Couple that with the fact that there is a limited run on text books (never a large production run), a captive market, and thus really high prices, and you get a very warped market. The publishers are actually happy to sell a reduced price electronic version, DRM'd, to each student, and cut out the secondary resellers.
That said, when I chased my Physics degree, for my core, I always bought new, marked them up, and keep them. Today, my two volumes of Graduate level Quantum server merely to intimidate coworkers.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
There are no discounts. The students are downloading illegal copies of books.
Funny thing...
I've deployed around two thousand iPads in our district (and another 500 or so iPod Touches). 1700 (iPads and iTouches) or so to students, another 800 or so to admin/faculty.
Theft of device:
Students: 2.
Faculty/Staff: > 15.
Physical breakage (screen, headphone jack, etc...).
Students: 3.
Faculty Staff: > 20
Students have had devices for nearly three years. Adults, for about eighteen months.
Kids take care of the devices better than the adults (at least in our environment); weird, but there you go...
#SickNotWeak
Until you get to college anyway. Then the publishers "lobby" the professors just like big corps lobby the congressmen, and get them to change what textbook they "require" for their class every few years. Books bought in the spring for $250 are bought back by the book stores that fall for $24 because they won't be used there next semester.
It would be nice if universities required the profs to list the book costs and the average resale value of books bought for their classes in the course list. Then when you had three profs teaching African History and two of them have average end costs of $100 and one has $300 because the prof keeps changing books, enrollment for that one prof plummets and his department head threatens to cut that class off the list. That's the only way to fix that problem.
Hard to say how effective it would be though - so many college students haven't learned how to manage money and are on a "spend/charge/loan now, worry about pay later when I get a lucrative job" attitude that they really don't pay as much attention to up-front costs as they should.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
...and they could have just have easily been using Netbooks or Laptops for this.
Perversely, the walled garden means management cant intentionally add spyware to them as easily as a PC. Laptops take 5+ minutes to boot and load all the inventory monitor, virus scanner and its updates, OS updates, keyloggers both management approved and downloaded accidentally off the internet, and the battery is dead by the end of the first class... then what?
If you go laptop, you need a AC power outlet at each desk, which is going to be expensive to wire, and the kids are going to stick wires in there to intentionally electrocute each other.
If you go tablet, the kid needs to carry... the tablet. Charge it at night, it'll run all day. If you forget, the old fashioned dunce chair in the corner becomes "the charger chair" to sit next to the teacher's charger and wall outlet. If you go laptop, the kid needs to carry the laptop, the power adapter which will get lost or forgotten, the power cable from outlet to adapter which will get lost, the inevitable ipod/phone USB charger cable (lets face it, its gonna happen) and probably an old fashioned ethernet cable for locations/times when wifi is not available, and probably a flash drive or two to trade music files with friends, and add a random USB cable or two to hook up to printers/scanners/etc that are not on the LAN (Printer on the lan at work is convenient, on the lan at school means the local 2600 readers are going to anonymously print goatse out on the principals office printer, therefore no printers allowed on the lan at school). The laptop PLUS accessories is going to be bulkier and heavier than all but the stoutest Calc or Physics books, negating most of the purpose.
Yes, I've read textbooks on a regular old fashioned desktop. I suppose I could on a laptop or netbook. It just makes more sense to use a tablet.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I have a son with severe autism, who uses an ipad to communicate. He's non verbal, and has a low IQ. Not only has he instinctively figured the iPad out, and used it in ways we never dreamed possible, but he's pretty rough on the thing. He's tried to eat it, he's dropped it, slept on it (he is 9, so not a tiny tot), sat on it, gotten it wet many times, (Both from the above mentioned trying to eat it, and from having it near liquids) and it is still fine. We got a great case (gumdrop) and although I don't recommend doing what he does, it's still fine once you take the beat up case off. We also paid for one of those "if you smash it under your car we'll replace it" plans, which I normally avoid. If I knew the case was going to be this good...
This is absolutely wrong. My wife's Math books last semester were $400 more for the text book over the e-book version. That paid for our new iPad.
But there are requirements to list books and prices! The federal Higher Education Opportunity Act requires colleges and universities to make public lists of books and other materials that will be required for each course by the time of students are expected to enroll in those courses. This was supposed to drive down the cost of textbooks because it will give students more time to find online prices. As a professor, I haven't noticed much of a change since this law took effect in July 2010, the prices in the bookstore are still outrageous.
How so? Part of the reason they charge so much for textbooks (not all of the reason by any means, but definitely part of it) is that they know there's a thriving market in used books. Especially for books used in non-core classes, a textbook company can expect that at best one in three students who are taking a class that uses their book will actually buy the book. A textbook is current for usually four to six semesters, but you have to figure that at least some students will buy new on principle, even in non-core classes. It's probably more like one in four, but we'll go with three. Let's also assume that production of the physical book is 15% of the cost of the book (it might be less, but text books are legitimately more expensive to print because of the higher paper quality and often having lots of color pictures).
So you have an e-book version that (thanks to DRM) you can guarantee will get sold to every single student who takes a class using it, plus you save the 15% on production costs. You can probably sell it for 1/3 of the amount you sell the dead tree version for, undercut used book prices, and still make more than you used to. On top of that, if you can get most students to use the e-book instead of the physical book, you can slow down your release cycle (since you no longer have to worry as much about students cutting into your profits by buying used) and save still more money.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
University is for learning. The idea is that you open the textbook on your own to gain a deeper understanding of the topic than you had time to cover in class.