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Students At Lynn University Get iPad Minis Instead of Textbooks
Dave_Minsky writes "About 600 students will enter Lynn University's freshman class this year, the largest since 2007, and they will all be using iPad Minis instead of textbooks. The iPads will cost $475, saving students up to 50% of what a semester's worth of textbooks would cost, estimates Lynn. Students will be able to access core curriculum classes on their iPads that are 'enhanced with custom multimedia content,' and will come with 'at least 30 education, productivity, social and news-related iOS apps — some free and some paid for by the university.' This seems to be the beginning of a new era for American colleges. The Boca Raton university is not the first to give iPads to students instead of textbooks. Back in 2010, New Jersey-based Seton Hill University announced it would give students the tablets rather than books."
Yes I am. About what? Glad you asked - the fact that my apps are sold to edu at a discount and schools buy in bulk. Very glad indeed $$
Tomorrow's consumers today.
At least they're not using dead trees, right?
My first reaction is 'meh' but maybe someone will come up with something. I love my Kindle and iPad for reading but I can't imagine using one for reference materials.
I have wondered why this market hasn't been taken over by Chinese devices yet. Apple content lock-in?
This could be a good thing, but only if it reduces the price of the average content.
all prices subject to change if publisher feels he needs a bonus
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
you could read books for free at a thing called a Library.
Seton Hill University is in Pennsylvania. It's more popularly known sister school, Seton Hall University, is in New Jersey.
My interest in science and technology was sparked by the college textbooks the prior generation left lying around. I'm not really opposed to ditching dead trees for digital, but I either want my access to the content to be permanent, just like a book, or I want the price to be WAY less than 1/2 the cost of buying the books.
Richard Stallman cares http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
replaced by "someone stole my ipad"
They better have it on them at all times and not leave it in the car. The college industrial complex is overloading its classrooms, thus resulting in overcrowded parking lots. When I was a broke college student, I used to just leave my car doors unlocked intentionally because the assumption was always that if you have something in your car that thieves want badly enough, they're going to get it; even if it means breaking windows. I figured I might as well leave the doors unlocked because otherwise I'd have my stuff stolen AND broken windows to deal with. I didn't care because I had nothing of any real value anyhow, but now the parking lots will have more lure for would-be thieves ans seen as a treasure trove with the possibility of a $475 pawnable/ebayable item in every Nth parked car.
So no resale at all rather than the shitty 3% return most campus bookstores pay. No holding onto for future reference. Little ability to gloss notes. And with the money they "save", students will be able to cover almost half of the "general fee" increase this year.
For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in collegeâ"when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan...
--frank[at]unternet.org
That's a horrible choice. I don't know about the books you have to read, but that miniature screen is too freaking small for several of the textbooks I had to use.
Yes, I know you can enlarge the view, but you can't enlarge the screen, and when you need to see the whole thing at a size large enough to make out the details, a miniature screen is annoying and useless. The mini is a fail for that purpose.
Once you pay your $475 for your mandatory iPad and complete your course, do you still get to access the books, or does DRM kill the content?
Still, you'd probably make more reselling the iPad than reselling your books, so there is that.
The cost of a textbook has little to do with the cost of printing, which is the only cost mitigated by electronic distribution. Are they expecting the publishers of the textbooks to offer up their works for free? I mean, it might cut down on professors writing their own textbooks and releasing new revisions each year so that students always had to buy new books instead of used.. but.. I'm having trouble believing that the costs involved will be limited to the $475 of the iPad.
the used book market.
Colleges/Universities will ultimately be 'subscribing' classes to textbook publishers, then the college will turn around and require the student to pay (with a nice profit margin on top of course) the college for access to the content.
There will be no 'legitimate' method of obtaining the courseware; ergo, if you don't pay the college, you'll not be allowed to attend the class.
Hacking this will, of course, result in imprisonment for some DMCA violation to be sure.
Sad, but inevitable.
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Every time I look at my old engineering texts taking up shelf space I think, "I wish that someone could take all these, cut out about half of the valuable material, dice up the remainder between 30 odd sites and apps, and then tie it to a device with a 7-year shelf life."
As anyone who's dealt education-oriented online media (such as Blackboard) can tell you, the products are not always stellar. You get less text, its usually structured in such a way that it takes longer to read, the access is spotty, and it will probably not work as well as that in a year. Even the number one benefit of digitization -- search -- tends to be awkward or incomplete.
They say the iPad is about half the cost of books. I can easily believe that, but it also means you don't get to buy used books, or re-sell your used books. They've streamlined the process in a way that either offers no benefit, or benefits suppliers more than students.
It did convince the university to buy their student's books for them, provided you don't consider being forced to buy an iPad as being the same as being forced to "rent" used books. Or for that matter, so long as you don't consider going to a free library as an option. And so long as you don't consider that buying an iPad and getting electronic copies of textbooks was always an option for most books. All the ways they've streamlined the process are for the primary benefit of the supplier of the material.
Overall, it seems workable for books that you no interest in keeping beyond one semester (electives). But that is exactly the case where you can generally benefit from being flexible, buying bog-standard books from any store you please, buying a digital copy, or going to the library as needed. If you're talking about material that will actually continue to be relevant after a single semester, it sounds like a bad idea, putting a random-valued timer on your reference material.
At least then they could take proper handwritten notes in class, and be able to quickly search them later. Not much more expensive either (although I guess buying the domestic brand could have been a goal).
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
It is potentially a great concept. I just hope insurance is available, because textbooks are expensive, but nobody wants to steal them from you.
Proverbs 21:19
what if some needs a full size laptop?
can't use a touch screen?
and so on?
other schools build books into the class prices so this may just be the next part of that. The class cost has the books build into it.
When I was growing up I would read my brothers text books and reading assignments when he wasn't around, he was/is 4 year ahead of me. I'd suprise him with a quiz when he got back. I can still remember when I picked up his Kurt Vonnegut book Cat's Cradle at 8 years old and thought how crazy ice nine was. I guess future siblings will never get the chance to see what the future of there education will be. Also by the time I reached that grade they didn't use that book anymore.
It's a shame to see what everyone will be missing.
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
even a Nexus 7 would have been a much better choice
I appreciate that the university is trying to save their students money and possibly give them a better(?) education, if those are the true reasons. As noted, students often buy used books. The short article doesn't mention if that is still possible, or how long these books will be available to the student, are the textbooks going to be available when the students leave the University?? Can I get access to textbooks for classes I am not taking??
My first exposure to computers was when I was a math major at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The professor gave us extra credit if we wrote a program that would print out a quadratic equation on paper. After I learned BASIC using the free manuals at the computer lab, I decided that I didn't need to pay to take courses, I could just buy the text book. So I bought a FORTRAN WATFIV textbook from the bookstore next and learned that. Then I learned COBOL. All in the span of a few months. 30 years later, I have a 6 figure income without having to follow the college rules, and followed a different route that was more suited to me than the one the aptitude tests suggested I take. All because I had choices. (And don't say I can go to another school, at some point all colleges and universities could use this model.)
Now, I'm not suggesting that learning on your own is for everyone, some people do better with a more formal and structured education. But why should students not have a choice??? Why shouldn't they be able to 'buy' a text for another class just because they want to learn on their own?
This type of activity brings out the cynic in me, who wonders if the colleges are really interested in education, or just trying to perpetuate the lie that people have to go to college to get ahead in the world by making it more and more difficult to learn things without going and continue with the stranglehold using their overpriced methods that are returning less and less value for every dollar spent.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
I see a lot of new 28" wheels in the futures of the thugs living a few miles SE of Lynn!
Rather than using electronic textbooks, they have decided to replace the textbooks with "custom multimedia course material", which apparently is distributed for free.
This means two things:
A) The cost of writing the custom material will be built in to the course. It obviously won't be developed for free, so the cost is hidden, and can't be defrayed by purchasing a used book or renting a book. It doesn't cut down on professors writing their own textbooks, it essentially enforces a version of that scenario on every student for every class.
B) They think their custom material will be higher quality and apparently cheaper than the textbook industry can produce when the textbook industry can spread development/production costs across hundreds of universities.
Why not just get some 7-8 inch Android tablets for $100 each and save the "apple tax"?
201,0? What strange year is this. And is it really that hard to understand that Seton Hill != Seton Hall?
Now the textbook industry can join in on the rent-seeking business model for doing almost nothing.
1) This solves the problem of student access to class materials. See, with the eBook approach, licenses can be made to be enabled on the first day of class and disabled on the last day of class. This prevents students from having early access to class materials, which levels the playing field for those who, for whatever reason, do not care to start learning before the first day of class
2) This solves the problem of killing trees. Now, instead of using renewable, natural resources to print textbooks that last 50 or more years on a shelf and provide information over a person's entire career and even lifetime, we can start using non-renewable rare earth materials to make iPads, which last perhaps a few years and may or may not be able to give access to that same information depending on whether or not someone else wants you to be able to read it.
3) This solves the problem of organic learning. With the smaller form factor and lower density of information, as well as the appeal to a shorter attention span, we can stop all this organic learning stuff and resort instead to rote memorization of bulleted facts, figures, and equations, which can then simply be regurgitated on multiple-choice exams.
Hobbling more competitive students, more destruction to the environment and higher cost, and dumbing down our students. It's a hat-trick of WIN!
Seems awesome till you consider what's been going on with education in the US. Textbooks are a lot harder to change than electronic media. I know LU isn't in Texas, but Florida is almost just as bad. If you can rewrite a cultures history, or erase it, you can make up your own and a few generations later nobody will remember a thing... like the Constitution.
"Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathersâ(TM) commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light."[1]
[1] - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html
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Yea, the Nexus 7 redo is tremendously better than the Ipad Mini...
Why pay next to $500 for a locked down system with no ports to add on vs ones with no app store lock down on the desktop, full MS office, usb, sd card slots and more.
What exactly does it mean to "give" students ipads? Last I checked, the students are still charged a fee. It might be less than if they paid for textbooks, but the school is giving them an ipad as much as your insurance company gives you free meds by having you pay a reduced price for generic prescriptions. In short, nothing is free, so nothing is being given, the students are only being charged less for an ipad and ebooks than they would be for paper books.
I know that Lynn University is small (really, really small), but surely, they understand economics there, don't they?
I don't have a problem with tablets or Apple as a choice. I have a problem with the *Mini*. Far too small to take notes on and I'd never be able to comfortably read on something with a screen that small.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
back in the year 201.
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." ~Friedrich Nietzsche
DRM.
university's are to stuck in the past as well the ideas of trades / apprenticeship is put down by them.
in IT, the 4 year process doesn’t work for some, especially those who have learning disabilities, ““The older college system is not for all, and some people learn better on their own. It’s an antiquated system, especially in IT.”
Also the loans that are very hard to discharges make so that university's can jack up the prices with no real recourse as some who can't even get a home loan or even an car loan can get a 50K-100K school loans just like that.
"The Boca Raton university is not the first to give iPads to students instead of textbooks. [...] Seton Hill University announced it would give students the tablets rather than books." [emphasis added]
They keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.
I just watched my daughter spend $745 on textbooks (some used) for a semester. I doubt very much either of those places are "giving" students anything ... unless they already rolled it into the tuition.
So you pay $475 for the iPad and then how much for the individual books?
They say the iPad is about half the cost of books.
I don't know who "they" are or if that is a true statement, but it doesn't matter. Price comparisons when discussion text books are meaningless because it isn't a free market. So yes, the iPad may be 1/2 the price, but only because the textbook manufactures inflate the cost of textbooks. There is no reason to believe that once ebooks have replaced textbooks for the majority of classrooms, that the pricing of ebooks will climb just as quickly as textbook pricing has.
Textbook publishers always say it is the high cost of printing the books that is the problem and yet, I can self publish and sell at a profit a 1000 page hardcover book for less than $35 using an online service in quantities of 10. One would think with the economies of scale a real publisher would have that $100+ textbooks have a lot of profit involved. I know the authors don't recieve it, but somebody does.
No, textbook prices are high, because it is a scam and there is no real competition. Once ebooks replace textbooks, those prices will rise, too. Supply and demand only works when there is a free market, which does not exists in education.
Except for the hardware failures and malware worries!
Drexel University and others of the Apple Consortium did this in 1984 with then amazing Drexel DU computer ... which was the code name for the Apple Macintosh 128K. Yes, I was, initially, irked at having to spend $2000 on a new computer when I just spent nearly that on my IBM PC. That dismay changed shortly after landed a job developing applications for it on an Apple Lisa and cross-compiling. Nervana came when a real native compiler and, other languages were introduced.
Couldn't use them (Mac 128K) for text books - kinda hard to lug around - but, many course materials were made available to students as apps that they could run off the newly announced 3.5" floppy holding a whopping 400K of data. That being said, they made Macs available in classes and some classrooms as needed.
And, as someone who purchases a lot of books (many electronically), I question how well this work....kinda hard to highlight, scribble notes and dog ear pages for quick and easy reference. We'll see....full sized tablets might been a better form factor....but, I am also an old geezer now and need a larger display to see the text.
For what it's worth...I didn't make any money developing for Macs until recently. Made my living developing Windows and mobile apps over 30 years. Wouldn't call myself an Apple Fanboy...even if I do prefer Apple products over PC and Android....just a software engineer making a living and I do what's necessary.
At a $100 your getting unreliable junk, that would probably be why. Probably a chinese knockoff and no updates or anything for it once you have it. You get what you pay for!
Exactly. The deal isn't 50% off -- the deal is 50% off WITH the stipulation that you don't own a damn thing.
If they are instructor written, they are probably just non-DRM ePub, so you could use them on anything.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Have you used one? Its far better than anything Android has. All the Android makers are making them widescreen and feels and looks odd. The mini isn't that bad.
Hehe. I live right next to Lynn University. It is full of stuck up snobby Boca brats. It's where the rich kids who dropped out of FAU go. So it's not really surprising that they want some expensive fancy toys to pay with.
So many classic texts don't have "ebook" versions. And even if they do, who wants to flip around a grad-level math book on an ipad.
I graduated from university in the UK in 2012. Over my entire time at university I bought the following textbooks:
An organic chemistry textbook (£5)
A physiology textbook (£35)
A cell biology textbook (£25)
A BNF (£5)
Clinical Pharmacy and Therapeutics (£40)
A spectroscopic analysis textbook (£5)
This adds up to £115, or about $170. I then sold most of these books on to other students and made a lot of this back.
Some students also bought:
A law and ethics textbook (£20)
A maths for pharmacists textbook (£20)
Which gives a final total of £155, or about $225, spread over four years and assuming that students sold none of their books (in reality, almost everyone had sold most of their textbooks by the end of the course).
Any other books we needed were either provided free of charge (for example, higher years could have the university's old editions of the BNF each time they went out of date) or were available from the library/in ebook format.
Why do American students have such gigantic textbook bills?
It's tough enough reading PDFs on a full iPad *with* a retina display. On a smaller form factor like a Mini combined with its lower resolution -- fagetaboudit.
And don't believe for a minute that non-PDF textbooks are an option. Books with equations, graphics, tables, or color render quite poorly and inconsistently as ebooks.
Clearly this school plans to graduate only readers of plaintext fare like novels and poetry. And in that case, why not use cheaper B&W Kindles or Nooks?
Just because you have a new toy that you can read on doesn't mean that the eBooks or other resources they will access on these will be worth a damn. They will still need a computer to do their actual work on. Unless the books are given for free, and they are the same textbooks that the students would've bought before, this is a really bad idea. I see no problem requiring laptops for class and this just is a step from that, but the iPad is useless other than as a book, email reader, or toy.
The Nexus anything will be dead long before the iPad.
I still have perfectly good books from around 1993 - calculus, data structures, and so on. I could say I have gotten my money's worth from them. Where will these iPad books be in 20 years? Seems like you may save a few bucks in the short term, but the long-term cost to society of using disposable, temporary e-books will be huge.
my oldest just went into his freshman year at a nearby college. They *gave* him a mac book pro and an ipad. And he's not in an engineering or science school or degree. Is that unusual? My techie alma matter a loooong time ago was starting to give out then cutting-edge PCs There were options of new, used, rent and e- books. He asked me what I thought re paper vs ebooks. My thoughts were that in his 3rd or 4th year, when he gets access to the "for his major equivalents" of K&R's *C programming* or Aho and Ullmans *compilers* he can buy used versions of those as references or to carry around from move to move until he eventually tossed them. Till then he was all too happy to have his text books on the ipad.
As soon as anyone, anywhere in the world, has written a useful textbook with a free license, the whole world gains that textbook.
I hope we will start seeing graduate students writing undergrad textbooks as projects, and releasing them with open licenses. Or seeing "publish or perish" professors satisfying the "publish" requirement by writing free textbooks.
Even if the world only got one useful textbook per year for any given discipline, it wouldn't take many years before students could get a degree using nothing but free textbooks.
Also, for subjects like math, once a textbook is done, it shouldn't take much to keep it current. Even for subjects like computer science where the state of the art is evolving, it would be relatively easy to keep the books up to date, and the basics don't change that much.
Free and available textbooks would be nice to have for people living in wealthy countries, but would be a very big deal for people trying to get an education in really poor places. Etexts are the reason I got excited about the OLPC project when it was announced.
There are plenty of people and companies who like the current system, but there are also plenty of people who have no stake in the current system and could release free books.
If most or all of the books are completely free, then using a tablet is a complete win over dead trees textbooks.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I've got an iPad that a love. My issue isn't with Apple, I just think the size is going to be too small to use effectively. I used my iPad for notetaking, textbooks, internet access, email, etc. for my last semester of school and I can't imagine trying to do work on something the size of a Mini.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
it will be reported later that approximately 600 iPad mini's were stolen this year at Lynn University. Students will be responsible for replacement.
The market for stolen 1st year textbooks on the night habits of wood voles is somewhat limited, while that of an iPad is somewhat high. Bonus points for rather than having a 50$ book stolen, they can get your whole (800$) collection at once!
Why the hell are they using ipad minis instead of much cheaper, less locked-in and generally more user-friendly android pads?
I think there is an opportunity for someone to make an Android tablet with an 8" screen and a 4:3 aspect ratio.
The Nexus 7 is, IMHO, a better tablet in most ways than an iPad Mini: higher resolution screen, less expensive, more powerful hardware. The 2013 refresh makes the above even more true, but I would rather have even a 2012 Nexus 7 than an iPad Mini.
But the Nexus tablets are all widescreen; a Nexus 7 has a 16:10 aspect ratio with a 7" screen. This means that a Nexus 7 gives about 9.4 cm of width on the screen, compared with about 11.9 cm for iPad mini (calculated from official specs, as I don't have one to measure). Thus, the iPad Mini is only slightly larger than the Nexus 7, yet it has about 2.5cm of extra usable screen width!
I have used my 2012 Nexus 7 to read O'Reilly books. In many cases, the screen width isn't enough for code samples; if I make the font size large enough that my eyes can comfortably read the text, the code samples don't fit. Thus, I usually read with the screen in landscape, which means the width is fine but I scroll more to read the text.
I'm not sure if the extra 2.5cm of screen width would be enough to read code samples in portrait, but it could only help. I'd like a chance to try it.
O'Reilly books and other textbooks are one use case for the wider screen. Another one: magazines. Magazines should fit better in the wider screen.
So I see an opportunity for someone to make a 4:3 Android tablet, with better resolution than an iPad mini. I'd buy one, and use it to read O'Reilly books.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
tuition is $32K a year
For 32K a year they should hand out free motercycles to drive from class to class.
The 100 dollar tablet is a joke and only a raving fanboi would try to pass it off as a legitimate replacement for an iPad. There are good Android tablets but I have yet to meet anyone who uses a 100 tablet seriously. Hell, I don't know of anyone who's used one for more than 2 months.
Android gets a lot of market numbers from these cheap slates but all of them end up collecting dust.
I sold most of my textbooks after the semester was over. Sometimes I didn't even buy all the books, I just borrowed some from friends to do the homework. Bet you don't have a choice as to whether you want to spend the full amount on the ipad with the textbooks on it, and bet you can't sell them afterwards. Clever. Unless you're a student, in which case that's pretty awful.
That is incredibly fucked up. I don't think I paid that much in total for textbooks during my 9 semesters in the computer science program at KTH in Stockholm. I guess that's why all the textbooks I used had NOT FOR SALE IN THE US OR CANADA!!! in big letters on the cover.
Exactly. This is your cue to find a new school, preferably one that cultivates the appreciation of building a professional library in their students. Some of my $100+ textbooks are still $100+ on Amazon, and they're still worth their weight in gold. Some could be mistaken for gold bullion based on their weight, too.
I don't know who modded the parent a troll, but he's got a good point. These things have a screen only 5 inches by 7.5 or so, with a resolution (rotated) of 1024 x 768. That's pathetic for reading something like a textbook that you're studying from.
I surf the web on my phone, but I wouldn't want to study calculus or read caselaw on it.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
until I looked at the receipt of $5613, I didn't believe that...my... cousin woz like actualy taking home money in their spare time at their computer.. there brothers friend has been doing this less than 11 months and a short time ago paid the morgage on their mini mansion and bought a brand new Chevrolet Corvette. we looked here,WWW.bay92.COM
Exactly. This is your cue to find a new school, preferably one that cultivates the appreciation of building a professional library in their students. Some of my $100+ textbooks are still $100+ on Amazon, and they're still worth their weight in gold. Some could be mistaken for gold bullion based on their weight, too.
Your $100 new book is still worth $100 used? Lucky you, most places come out with new editions every other year so my $100 new book could be worth about $0 next year. Oh and I love the classes where the professor wrote the book so you have to buy that edition, making it nearly impossible to find it used online. I still have $200 books I'll never use again and they're worthless, at least these students will still be able to sell their iPads in a few years.
Your cue to find a new school is if your school is still wasting student's money on $1,000 a semester dead tree paper books when we have wonderful tablets and high speed wifi at our disposal. Not to mention the bonus of just carrying a 8 ounce iPad instead of 15 lbs worth of books around
Now let's just hope the $100 books do not become $100 apps
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Because really, if the books aren't substantially cheaper, there's not really much of a financial incentive when the students are sill going to need textbooks anyways, even if they are entirely electronic.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Now let's just hope the $100 books do not become $100 apps
Didn't bother to RTFA, because really who does, but that's exactly my thought. If you're a professor, why the hell are you going to give up thousands and thousands of dollars every year or two by making people purchase the new version of your textbook? why wouldn't you just require they purchase the new version of your ebook instead? Now elephant in the room, we're probably looking at piracy rates upwards of 80% or 90% there, but "free or nearly free pirated textbooks" can't be built into the argument for why a $500 ipad is "cheaper" than $1000 in textbooks... unless the have a custom library app where they're all sharing one officially licensed college library copy of the textbook... in which case we're back to "how will the professors find a way to get around that to wring more money out of students and their parents?"
I will say I'm totally on board with carrying around an 8oz ipad vs 25lbs of books though.
I'm long out of college, and the books that remain on my shelf instead of the ones I resold are the ones that are still worth $100 to me. You can be a cheapskate, but there's a cost of entry if you want to play the game. People griping about paying too much for books are the ones that will gripe later about having to pay all this money for computer upgrades because didn't we just buy new computers for everyone 5 years ago? Penny wise and pound foolish.
You think textbooks are worth retail value!
How cute!
iPad Mini is a very foolish choice. It's only 768x1024. Should be a retina iPad instead, which is 1536x2048.
The 1536x2048 resolution of the iPad 3/4 is miles better than the 768x1024 resolution of the old iPad and the iPad Mini. Frankly, 768x1024 is insufficient for reading anything but pure text like novels. You need 1536x2048 for technical material or anything serious at all.
Isn't there any e ink device out there that's fit for the job? I have an amazon kindle with e ink screen, and even though it's 100% properitary and don't support epub, I still love the fact that I can read for hours without my eyes being sore.
But how does that help Apple indoctrinate the students?
The iPads will cost $475, saving students up to 50% of what a semester's worth of textbooks would cost
i wonder how they magically get the same texts, in digital form, for so much cheaper? last time i checked, publishers weren't offering discounts on digital media.
My wife was a non-traditional student recently. We bought an iPad because one term of books cost more than the iPad. Nobody told us the e-books were gonna be just as expensive as the physical books, and they expired to boot. Not the iPad's fault, but iPad-as-cost-savings is a pretty short sighted strategy.
She did like not having to carry 25 lbs. of books around in 100+ temps though.
Really? These will all be obsolete by the time the students graduate. Students always have to continue learning how to use technology after graduation, and the decades old parental fear that their children will remain jobless if they don't use the currently fashionable tech in school has been unfounded.
Personally, I'd rather have a book. It will last longer. Soon enough all the data on the books will be unreadable because the formats will have changed, the device crashes without a backup, some DRM scheme invalidates it all, no one can figure out how to transfer the data anymore, etc. Whereas I can still read 60 year old text books. Sure if the students are very diligent and every year convert all their data to the lastest formats it works, but if you wait 5 years you will screw up and lose something.
"...saving students up to 50% of what a semester's worth of textbooks would cost"
The devil is in the details, isn't it?
(1) Compared to the price of new, rather than used, textbooks.
(2) Access to the books will be time limited, and books can not be loaned or resold.
Please "save" me from having a permanent, loanable, non time-limited paper copy of Halliday and Resnik, which I have occasionally referred back to from time to time, including when doing patent filings, over the last 30 years.
What is it they say these days? Was it "Do. Not. Want.", or was it "Get off my lawn!".
That's a pretty gross generalization. I have 0 books from college, and am gainfully employed as a professional programmer/administrator, overseeing other progression administrators and programmers.
Summary: What you keep on your shelf is not required for all of us to be productive/paid/educated.
Promising. Yes. Can the teachers make text assignments engaging? Unknown? I fully agree with the advantages of PDF files in grad school classes. I like Mr. Jellomizer I just did grad school and loved having both printed PDF and PDF files in my google drive. I wish I could have had all 3 on my laptop screen ( and sometimes paper ) My own papers, PDF readings assigned by Professors, and Textbooks used by most similar grad programs. The search feature alone was awesome. My work was done faster and at higher quality than many classmates. My concluding work and thesis was so easy with everything on screen.
I also teach K-12 and I am the IT guy at a school using ipads one-one. We had limited success with textbooks. We have students with disabilities.
Book or ebook? What can improve learning is the way assignments incorporate text.
If a teacher wishes to have 50 pages digested by 50 students have each of 50 students summarize one page and skim 49 pages of text and 49 summaries of fellow students. Give 25 keywords to 50 students and have them read all 50 pages but extract the best quotes related to their keyword. School should not be about reading x number of pages.
Technology is neither sedation nor salvation. That's my thesis title. We've got very little conclusive research about technology in education.
I leave you with a good quote from experts on research of student success in college. ...
>>>>quote >>>
"the degree of net change that students experience at the various categories of institutions is essentially the same. That is not to say that any one institution resembles any other institution in its power to affect learning.
What matters is.....
===================
the nature of the experiences students have after matriculation (admittance) :
the courses (content) they take,
the instructional methods their teachers use,
the interactions they have with their peers and faculty members outside the classroom,
the variety (diversity) of people and ideas they encounter, and
the extent of their active involvement in the academic and social systems of their institutions."
http://books.google.com/books/about/How_College_Affects_Students.html?id=Wn8kAQAAMAAJ
well said Anonymous. Let the students pick the device to read the PDF or content. The content should be universal.
This does seem like a dirty trick to sell iPads. The mini screen is too small if reading lots of text is the goal. The college should have simply given students a mandatory fee and chance to pick from 2 large screen tablets and 2 laptops or prove that you can bring your Own fully compatible device.
The college has a concern and that's validated by the reader comments here. A lot of students try to go the cheap route and avoid full time access to their own book. I've taught community college and by the 3rd week most students with performance problems had limited access to a textbook. Some students can pull off great work without full textbook access, but that is rare.
again, nice point. A key point here is Universal access to content without restrictions on time, location or license. I still have some awesome JSTOR PDF research files in my google drive, because i had rights to keep the paper too. Aaron Swartz RIP. He would love to chime in here.
I can see you don't have a dictionary on there, either.
Wow, just think how much more they'd be saving if it was a lower grade tablet that cost 1/4th the price like the Galaxy Tab 2 or Avatar Sirius or AGPTek anything or basically anything else that's at least better than Kocaso quality. Giving them a fragile, easily shattered, lucury premium overpriced tablet like an ipad is ridiculous. Plus, have you ever tried running itunes on a domain? It's basically a boat anchor.
Who cares about Richard Stallman apart from Linux zealots?
No Thanks
um.. where are these schools that give you books in the first place?
Just another second banana
Who cares about Richard Stallman apart from Linux zealots?
Clever Troll, you know the answer is GNU/Linux zealots.
But that won't change his opinion of Jobs or Apple. He'd probably want students to be given Lemote Yeedongs preloaded w/ gNewSense so that it will be completely free, and that the students can study the OS and change it, as long as they share their changes freely w/ everybody else.
I don't know what text books you have that are still worth $100 but my tech books went out of style and pricing within a yr or 2.
CLRS Algorithms, Aho et al Compilers, Patternson and Hennesy Computer Organization and Design, and Tennenbaum's Modern Operating Systems are the gems of the collection and will always be extremely valuable even as old and out of print editions.
I've switched from an iPad 2 to a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1" (in retrospect, a questionable side-grade, but I got out of the Apple walled garden ecosystem and away from that shitbeast iTunes). I found that doing any kind of non-casual reading on either device is gruesome for my eyes and wears me out quickly, not to mention it takes a lot of tinkering and positioning to avoid reflexes. In my experience, reading outside or in bright light is nigh on impossible, a problem made worse by (some?) screen protectors.
Being fed up with these glossmachines, I bought a Kobo Aura HD and it has been a revelation. My only gripe with it is the sculpted back, which honestly doesn't feel anything like a hardcover.
Admittedly, I don't think the Kobo or any other e-ink reader would be suitable for University-level studies; the screen is too small (despite the Aura HD being the biggest high resolution e-ink device I know of), it's grey-scale only, the ghosting refresh would be annoying, can't do multimedia etc. I know there's a colour e-ink tablet from Onyx in the works (it's still fairly small), and Sony is making a 13.3" grey-scale e-ink tablet aimed at students (currently in Japan only, also leave it to Sony to fuck that up), I wonder why other companies haven't considered the educational marked.
Good way to achieve lock-in at a pivotal point in young adults lives, I guess. I'd shun that deal like one made with the devil, personally.
You will never open those books, because anything you need to look up you can find much faster online then thumbing through a 1,000 page book you read XX years ago
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Trolling a week old necro'd comment for +1 internet points.