Software developer Mike Matas demos the first full-length interactive book for the iPad — with clever, swipeable video and graphics and some very cool data visualizations to play with. The book is “Our Choice,” Al Gore’s sequel to “An Inconvenient Truth.”
This product is a better user experience than reading a physical book. But it’s also a prime example of identifying a neat technology, and then finding a reason to use it in school, which is ass backwards.
Educators need to figure out what they want students to learn, and then find a technology that helps them learn it. Students could play forever with this book, but all they would learn is Al Gore’s view of how we solve our environmental problems. They would not learn contrary views, and they would not be taught to think critically about whose views they accept.
The successors to textbooks surely will be digital, but they won’t be a textbook at all.
They won’t be created by an education company that bends to politically driven agendas, a phenomenon that has been around long before last year’s Texas controversy;
“chapters” won’t reflect the perspective of just a few writers and editors, but rather the voices of thousands of scholars and educators;
in subjective areas, they won’t require students to memorize particular “facts” and viewpoints, but rather will encourage them to think for themselves, and form their own perspectives; and
they won’t impose a “one size fits all” approach to learning on a diverse group of students, with different interests, abilities and needs.
The successor to textbooks will be created by a group of passionate educators who collectively decide that no one should have “ownership” over what is taught in schools. It will leverage a curated collection of the best free content online, supplemented by some traditional textbook content in the sciences and math.
I was just thinking that there are already names for this sort of thing. We call them applications, interactive multimedia presentations, even websites. If someone put that in front of me and asked, “Do you know what this is?” I would confidently have several names for it, and book wouldn’t make the list. And I’m a huge fan of ebooks, I have two Kindles, so I don’t think it’s just that I’m biased towards bound material.
I’d really like to see some reading comprehension statistics on things like this versus more linear presentations of information too. I’m not just being critical, I’m genuinely curious about whether being able to interactively explore presented information leads to better, worse or the same retention as reading through it in the more traditional linear, guided way.
