"A Teacher’s Take on iBooks 2.0" - Rebuttal

My friend and inThirty co-host, Haim Cohen, has a new post up on his blog that rails against Apple’s new iBooks/eTextbooks/iTunes U initiatives.

He writes:

Remember the teacher teachers [sic], nothing else.  A good teacher can teach without a book (I’ve done that enough times).  A book, a computer, calculators, projectors, ipads, etc… are just teaching tools.  If they were better than the teacher, than teachers would have been replaced with a book.

No one, including Apple, insinuated they were trying to replace teachers. Actually, according to the video shown towards the end of the announcement, it was quite the opposite. Apple is trying to empower teachers to engage students across a vast range of learning styles by using these new texts.

The fact is, if students could just read a book, then schools would be obsolete.

If students would read the books, we wouldn’t need to change them in the first place.

I teach computer programming.  A course that is inherently a holding tank requiring you to practice.  Do you think I can do a better job than any O’Reilly book.  The reason I have a job is because you need someone to explain and force you to produce.

So, you do more than teach, no? You guide a student by reinforcing what’s inside the book. Like you said, the book is simply the tool - the teacher is what makes the difference.

I also teach, but not it a proper school setting. I teach bass and guitar in a music studio.

For example, kids come in to me with tablature printed off the Internet put together by some high schooler who thought he knew what he was doing. Chords are wrong, notes are off, different tunings are used in place of a capo - these sheets are a mess.

Without a teacher to guide them, these kids would be playing their favorite songs improperly. Even with the right sheet music, they need instruction on how to play it - where to put their fingers, which strings to strum, proper picking techniques. The guitar is the tool. It’s my job to instruct them on how to properly use it.

The reason we have textbooks is because there hasn’t been anything better yet to replace it.  How do you go about replacing a textbook?   The natural progression is putting it online, but nobody can figure out to do it.  When you figure it out, I’ll buy the idea off you.

You don’t replace the textbook, you change it based on how the culture changes. Today’s kids have minute attention spans and when they do focus, it’s on their cellphones, their computers, or their video games. The only way kids actually read these days is if someone makes a movie based on a book about a wizard.

There is no “one size fits all” method for teaching (yes, I know one of the educators in the Apple video used that terminology, but it’s a good description of current texts). The new iBooks textbooks still include the same text you’d find in print versions of the books, but now they also include slideshows, 3D models, movies and other multimedia to engage children who need more than just words. They need to see how a cell reproduces, or how a snake’s digestive system works.

Putting it online isn’t replacing a textbook - that makes reading and learning even more difficult. You’re adding an extra layer of complication to the situation - the iBook lives locally on the iPad. An online-based textbook requires a consistent Web connection to be read.

The first obstacle is convenience.  The kindle is succeeding only because reading a novel is easy to do.

The Kindle is succeeding for a variety of reasons, mainly because the books tend to be cheaper and the hardware is much more portable than most Stephen King novels.

A calculus text is a foundational work, where you constantly have to go back and relearn material. Hard math problems and simulations are hard, and to have to remember which bookmark and which gesture is which, makes life much more difficult.  Adding a layer of obscurity in flipping virtually back and forth doesn’t help.

Don’t you think publishers would have thought about this and made the act of going back-and-forth in a printed text work on a touchscreen device? In fact, nowhere in Haim’s piece does he give any evidence that he’s used these new textbooks personally or professionally.

I downloaded a few sample chapters from various texts and found the interfaces to be well suited for the iPad. Apple has made the act of bookmarking specific sections and navigating back to previous content as easy as tapping a link or brining up the table of contents.

The McGraw-Hill Algebra I book (since Haim brought up the problem with math textbooks) has a great balance of touchable content and descriptive text. I read how slope-intercept is calculated, then went through a series of interactive exercises to help drive the concept home. I’m still horrible at math, but I think I’d be a lot better at it if I had these kinds of books when I was in high school.

Non educators think that iBooks solved the above problem.

No intelligent human being thinks iBooks solve the problem. They’re merely a Band-Aid for a much larger wound.

By digitizing the book, adding some interactive simulations, making a digital flash card app, and packaging nicely,  made life slightly easier, but doesn’t do anything other than appease the people who can’t see beyond the problem.  Teaching correctly is the problem, and technology isn’t the solution.

The problem goes deeper than that. According to an excerpt from Teachers Schools, and Society: A Brief Introduction to Education over at Education.com, a New York City middle school English and Italian teacher was asked to spend 15 minutes a day practicing math questions for an upcoming standardized test. The results were less than satisfactory:

Students learned that test scores mattered more than English or Italian, and that teachers did not make the key instructional decisions. In fact once the test was over, one-third of the students in her class stopped attending school, skipping the last five weeks of the school year.

The solution to education’s problem lies in overcoming the bureaucracy and politics that live inside it like a cancer, rotting it from the inside out. Kids aren’t eager to learn anymore because they’re not learning - they’re filling in bubbles.

What’s the harm in introducing a brilliant, versatile piece of technology kids are excited about into the classroom if it will both help them and make them want to learn?

Haim continues:

The first problem is that even at $14.99 the book is still expensive.

Since when is $14.99 more expensive than a $75 printed text?

In this model, you MUST buy the book every single year.

New content is pushed to books automatically for free. However, I don’t know how budgets work for schools, nor do I know how schools with iPad programs pass on hardware. Do students keep their iPads for the years they’re in one school and hand it back at graduation, or do they hand in their iPads at the end of the year and get new ones next year? If anyone has insight into this, I’d love to hear it and update this post accordingly.

Every time you buy a book, you are giving 30% to apple.  Not only that, Apple if [sic] forcing you to use their hardware.  You must create a book on an apple computer, and you must use it on an Apple device.  Apple has literally found a way to advertise in the last place advertisement is still banned.

Books made in iBooks Author do not necessarily have to be used only on iPads - it’s only if you intend to make money with them. Gabe at Macdrifter makes a great analogy to illustrate what Apple is really doing:

If we think of Apple as the publisher and iBooks Author as the tool that they supply to their authors, then I think the EULA looks consistent with the current model…Apple is providing a tool to someone to publish through the iTunes store. They are being generous by allowing free iBooks to be distributed outside of iTunes.

Read his piece (it’s short) and then try to say Apple’s being “greedy and evil”.

Back to Haim:

Even if there is a worthy competitor you have to buy the whole system.  Tablets / computers / hardwares are expensive.  So even if you change the hardware, the software is still necessary.  You just don’t change them (unlike books) whenever you need it to work.  By keeping the prices high and (slightly discounting) when necessary, you force people to stay with you.

Apple is a business. Businesses make money. Apple’s just really good at making people feel better about spending it.

The book manufacturers just found a way to prevent copying.  I am guilty of borrowing content from my one copy, and giving it to my students.  For most cases I fall under the fair use in education clauses, but sometimes I don’t.  All teachers have copied a whole textbook because they were short a copy or two.  This prevents copies.

You’re upset because Apple made it so you can’t steal from publishers? You said good teachers could teach without a book, but glibness aside, the cheaper prices should make those budgetary constraints a bit more relaxed, right? You shouldn’t have to copy a book because every student in class would already have an iPad with the course material on it.

By preventing printing, there will be no way to store things “for later” other than to bookmark them.

True, but you can save your notes in iTunes U and I’m sure a combination of screenshots and OCR software would help you save interesting content. I do agree, however that Apple could make saving things a bit easier.

How does a school get each student an ipad?  If a student moves away, what happens to the book?  Who controls the ipad sync?  Who owns the content when the tax payers pay for the school budget?  All these questions need to be worked out a head of time.

Exactly - talk to an Apple educational sales rep and see what’s needed to get this going in your school. I feel this whole rant has been based in ignorance of what really goes on when a school signs up to deploy iPads.

The last complaint is size.  Each book is between 1 and 2 GigaBytes.  A 16 GB ipad will hold 8 books with nothing else.

A student shouldn’t need more than 5-6 books at a time per year (if they do, WHY ARE YOU GIVING THEM SO MUCH WORK?). After they move on, the students can delete those books and replace them with the ones for their new courses, while the old ones are stored in the cloud.

While I do think iBooks 2 is a step in the right direction, it will be marred by the complete money grab that the textbook manufacturers and apple are going to compete for.

Wait’ll they start making college textbooks. I’d go back to school just to feel the thrill of spending $14.99 on a $300 Psych 101 book.

There are still a lot of questions to be answered about iBooks and eTextbooks, but dropping 2,000 words on something you haven’t done research on seems hasty.

Haim is a smart guy and a good friend, but I expected better here. Without him having actually used iPads in class, it’s hard to defend his claim that they don’t help education.

Anything that gets a child to want to learn can only make things better, not worse.