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May 8, 2012 | 10:49 AM | By

Which Device Will Win the Tablet Battle?

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By Frank Catalano

The future of tablets in our schools may not be coming from Cupertino. Or even the U.S.

Despite the craze around Apple’s iPad, it’s only been two years since the device was introduced, and that may not be enough time to separate fad from trend over the long term in education. And while the iPad’s presence – and promotion by the Apple faithful since its launch in 2010 – is hard to ignore, a winning tablet trend hasn’t been clearly established on a global basis.

It’s certainly true that tablets are on the upswing in K-12 schools and higher education. There’s no shortage of U.S. numbers to cite. Going beyond statistics of tablet penetration (in one case, most recently, 25% of college students and 17% of college seniors), it’s in the composition of purchases where the data can get interesting. For example, a Harris Interactive/Pearson Foundation survey released in March gave iPads the largest share among college students (at 63%), followed by the Kindle Fire (26%) and the Samsung Galaxy Tab (15%).

As U.S. education appears to be moving toward tablets in pockets here and there, other countries’ education officials are embracing them in bulk.

Another way to read those figures: It’s roughly a 60/40 split between Apple’s iOS operating system and all flavors of Android devices (“flavors” might be the right word, as Android has named its more recent OS versions Ice Cream Sandwich and Gingerbread). These relative rankings among popular Android tablets in education mirror the broader U.S. consumer market.

But the scope of some big decisions made by international government agencies – and the price of non-U.S. devices – could upset the apple cart.

Consider India. Last fall saw the launch of the highly touted US$50 Aakash Android tablet for education (subsidized to US$35). That initiative subsequently stumbled following reports the first models built by the UK firm DataWind were sluggish and fragile. The government has since decided to press ahead with a new version with improved specifications.

Yet the overwhelming interest in what was supposed to be a first run of 100,000 tablets has spurred the growth of a handful of new education-focused competitors. They’ve developed tablets that are more expensive, but apparently more capable: the US$100 ATab, US$150 HCL MeTab, Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Tech Tools, Apple, digital textbooks, e-readers, iPad, tablet
May 7, 2012 | 10:47 AM | By

Changing Policies On Digital Books Wreak Havoc on Libraries

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By Jenny Shank

Public libraries are a major hub for Americans to gain access to e-books and other digital resources. But the nation’s recent economic troubles and the transition to digital books are creating major difficulties for these public institutions.

Last month, the American Library Association released its annual State of America’s Libraries Report, and many of its findings were grim. “Public libraries continue to be battered by a national economy whose recovery from the Great Recession is proving to be sluggish at best,” the report concluded. Twenty-three of the 49 chief officers of state libraries surveyed indicated that their library systems faced budget cuts over the past two years. “For three years in a row, more than 40 percent of participating states have reported decreased public library funding,” the report states.

While library budget cuts continue, demand for library services has soared. Lower income and unemployed patrons often turn to local libraries as their only source of Internet access.

“It will take a few years for the dust to settle.”

At the same time, libraries have sought to accommodate Americans’ ever-increasing demand for access to digital materials, a mission that has put them at odds with the publishing industry, which is struggling to retain its viability as many American readers shift toward reading books electronically and purchasing those titles from online retailers rather than traditional bookstores.

“In the end, it will be a matter of leadership and vision that will guide libraries through the current conditions,” said Jorge Martinez, director of Information Systems for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which supports libraries through grants.

SPARRING OVER E-BOOKS

One of the biggest challenges libraries face in this new digital age is the friction in their relationship with publishers, caused largely by the advent of e-books.

Publishers argue that borrowing a printed book from a library requires a patron to physically visit the building and then return a few weeks later to bring it back, which is more difficult than Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, digital textbooks, digital-divide, e-readers, library
February 10, 2012 | 11:07 AM | By

Ernest Hemingway Meets “This American Life”: the New English Lit Class

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College professors are finding creative ways to use tablets in classes.

By Stephen Chupaska

What will e-readers do to the time-honored tradition of scribbling notes in the margins and underlining passages in print books?

Remains to be seen how quickly college students will adopt e-books on a mass scale. Thorny issues over who can use the books when students rent digital versions, how the growing movement of free, online textbooks will be incorporated into college curriculum, and figuring out how to share notes online are just a few important unknowns that are still being hammered out as college students think about using ebooks.

And though students still complain about using iPads (slow, cumbersome typing, for one thing), some English literature college professors are finding creative ways of using its multi-media uses.

Scott Cohen, an English professor at Stonehill Colllege, located about 30 miles southwest of Boston, is in his second year of implementing the iPad into his lessons.

“The iPad really helps move between different kinds of texts and material, visual, cinematic, written, audio, etcetera,” Cohen said. “Students love them, beyond just being a new shiny device.”

Last year, Cohen received a grant from the college’s Center for Teacher and Learning to purchase three iPads as part of a pilot program in his Storytelling in the Age of Information class.

“The iPad really helps move between different kinds of texts and material, visual, cinematic, written, audio.”

Cohen incorporates the popular NPR public radio show This American Life in his classes, and using the iPad allows the class to move between audio clips and an annotated transcript of the story that can be projected on a screen.

Cohen said students can initiate these sequences and bookmark them, efficiently saving them for future reference or emailing them to each other.

The iPad allows Cohen and his students to capitalize on the “improvisational” nature of class, as they can call up passages more quickly or even play a clip from the radio show to counter a point Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Tech Tools, digital textbooks, e-readers, iPad
January 20, 2012 | 11:20 AM | By

With Media, Parents and Kids Learn More Together

Flickr: Andrew Shell

Kids learn with each other while playing games on the iPad.

Most of what we read about kids and screen time revolves around whether or not it’s good for them. But one aspect of media use with kids that’s worth examining closer is how co-viewing affects their experience. Whether kids are watching TV, creating digital media, reading, searching, or playing video games with parents, siblings or friends, consuming media becomes a different kind of experience than when it’s done alone.

Though TV is still the dominant media in most homes, other forms are quickly permeating daily life: video games, apps, and exploring the Internet are woven into most families’ activities. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center calls it joint media engagement (JME), and they’ve just released one of their comprehensive reports, The New CoViewing: Designing for Learning Through Joint Media Engagement, about the phenomenon and its effects. The theory goes that the better we understand how kids use media together, the better designed the media can be, to take the most advantage of how kids work, learn, think, and make things together.

HOW PARENTS RELATE

Perhaps the activity that parents love most to do with their kids — reading — has been vastly transformed by digital media. E-books can be read on Web sites, computer software, products like LeapFrog, and of course tablets and e-readers. And depending on whom you ask, e-books (or print books) are the medium of choice for reading together. The typically tech-cautious New York Times decided that “for their children, many e-book fans insist on paper.”

But the Cooney Center’s own “quick study,” which followed 24 families with kids three- to six-years old reading both print and e-books, showed that most kids preferred reading an e-book to a print book, according to Digital Book World. And maybe just as importantly, “comprehension between the two formats were the same,” though the enhanced e-readers with all the bells and whistles were distracting to young readers.

Still, “If we can encourage kids to engage in books through an iPad, that’s a win already,” said the Cooney Center’s Carly Shuler.

Raise your hand if you’ve discreetly texted your friends or shopped on your mobile phone undercover while watching “Cars 2″ with your kids.

Plenty of studies have shown that kids learn more when they’re consuming media alongside their parents — parents typically chime in and explain what’s going on or answer questions or share their opinions about what they’re seeing, hearing, and doing. In turn, parents can have a better understanding of what their kids are doing and learning and what they’re involved with during their kids’ media use.

And for a lot of parents, this kind of interaction is important. A recent national survey showed that two-thirds of nearly 1,000 parents of 12- to 17-year-olds said they talked regularly with their kids Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, digital media, e-readers, iPad, Joan Ganz Cooney Center
January 19, 2012 | 10:57 AM | By

Did Apple Just Reinvent the Textbook?

Flickr: wohnai

There’s been speculation for months now — at least since the release of the Steve Jobs biography — about Apple’s plans to take on the textbook publishing industry. And today at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, we finally got a glimpse of what the company has been planning since long before the death of its co-founder.

As Apple’s Phil Schiller noted in his opening remarks today, “Education is deep in our DNA… and has been since the very beginning.” And while that may be true, it was one of the company’s most recent inventions — the iPad — that took center stage today as the ideal learning device, with Apple touting kids’ (of all ages) love and desire for the tablets.

Apple boasted the adoption that iPads have already seen — some 1.5 million iPads already in use at educational institutions, with over 1000 schools having 1:1 iPad programs. Apple also noted the rich app ecosystem that’s been built around the iPad as a learning device — over 20,000 educational apps made specifically for the device.

While the mantra throughout the event was “iPad, iPad, iPad,” the focus of much of today’s event was on textbooks — digital textbooks — and Apple’s insistence that these are “not always the ideal learning tool.” Apple unveiled several new tools that it argued would move the “great content” found in textbooks into a new, interactive, durable, portable format — in other words, move the textbooks onto the iPad.

Reading: Apple introduced iBooks2, an update to its iOS e-book app (which sadly still isn’t accessible on Macs, let alone on Windows machines) that offers a new category specially for interactive digital textbooks. These new e-textbooks contain many of the features we’ve been more accustomed to seeing in interactive e-book apps rather than in the iBookstore — videos, photos, Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Tech Tools, Apple, apps, digital textbooks, e-readers, iPad
December 19, 2011 | 10:33 AM | By

The Trouble with Gifting an E-Book

Flickr: Muffet

By Jenny Shank

Is it possible to personalize the gift of an e-book?

I asked Arsen Kashkashian, head buyer at the Boulder Book Store, if he had any ideas, and he was as stumped as I am.

“I’m not sure what the best way to personalize an e-book would be,” he said.

His store and many other independent bookstores sell Google e-books, which are

usually the same price as e-books available for Kindle, and can be used on multiple platforms. But you can’t use a store gift certificate to purchase them because buying the e-book is a transaction with Google, and Google doesn’t accept indie bookstore gift cards. Currently, there isn’t a way to give an e-book as a gift from most independent bookstores.

It is possible to give a Kindle e-book as a present from Amazon. According to Amazon’s FAQ on the subject, you don’t need to own a Kindle to give someone a Kindle e-book gift: “Kindle books can be given and received by anyone with an e-mail address.” You can schedule the date the e-book gift is delivered to the recipient, and if the recipient isn’t happy with your selection, he or she can exchange it for another.

“Even if people have e-readers, they want to give a physical book, because it’s so impersonal giving e-books.”

As for Barnes & Noble’s Nook books, you can’t give someone a specific Nook book, but you cangive them a Barnes & Noble gift card to purchase Nook books, or you can lend a Nook book from one reader to another. Although you can give a friend specific songs from iTunes, that isn’t possible yet for iBooks — the only way to give an iBook is through an iTunes gift card or certificate. It’s all a little confusing, because each type of e-book and e-reader has its own rules. Last month, Open Road Media launched a website with instructions on how to give e-books from Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and the Sony Reader Store. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, digital textbooks, e-books, e-readers