Kickin' & Screamin'

First off, I love books as yours truly is a voracious reader of the first order, I have stacks of them fairly well organized in book shelves all around the house and continue to be in a prolonged state of morning regarding the death of two Borders stores that were but a short drive from the house. Be as it may, the news Apple is doing a Garage Band number on text books is a good thing because the old way of creating and distributing textbooks that go out of date the minute they're published is an unsustainable way to do education in the connected age of the web.

Books created for iBooks 2 can have all manner of media attached, complete with multitouch capabilities. The company listed numerous ways in which iBooks 2 authors can create engaging content for students, including multiple-choice questions with immediate feedback within the text, the ability to make notes and highlights that can be found in a single location as note cards or sprinkled throughout the text, ways to explore embedded graphics and 3D animations, full-motion movies, and more.

iBooks 2 itself is an app for the iPad, but books for the application can be found within the already existing iBookstore under a new "textbook" category, with free samples available to those who want to try out the books first. Students can use codes to redeem them for books and can re-download them whenever they need to.

But how does one create a textbook for iBooks 2? Apple also announced a Mac application on Thursday called "iBooks Author," which Apple Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller described as "powerful and feature-rich." The interface, as demoed to the audience, is similar to Apple's iWork applications and allows authors to format books through WYSIWYG interaction and format the pages in a variety of ways. 

But that's not all! Apple brought out its Senior VP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue to discuss a new iTunes U app for iPad. The app will allow college and university students to download full courses from Apple's iTunes U section on iTunes and view them in an easy-to-use manner. The app lets students navigate through a course overview and outline, and professors can customize their course offerings by adding office hours and credits as well. Instructors can post notes that get sent to students' iPads and even make assignments through the app. 

The issue now is how to properly integrate Apple's offering into an under financed and often dysfunctional teaching environment as the game changing aspect of this tech introduces the issue of a "wicked problem" whereby the questions and answers pertaining on how to make this happen changes the problem itself.

No doubt, this tech will eventually come to Windows and the cloud as the educational system, as it stands today, cannot continue on the path it is in and... the market, outside of Apple, is just too big and important to ignore.

Addendum: Seems there's a prof who wants to do away with term papers and replace them with blogs, something yours truly totally agrees with since starting up BRT over four years ago. Why you may ask, because of folks like you reading and commenting on articles posted in it, something aspiring writers can relate to in the digital age in which we live.

Of all the challenges faced by college and high school students, few inspire as much angst, profanity, procrastination and caffeine consumption as the academic paper. The format — meant to force students to make a point, explain it, defend it, repeat it (whether in 20 pages or 5 paragraphs) — feels to many like an exercise in rigidity and boredom, like practicing piano scales in a minor key.

And so there may be rejoicing among legions of students who have struggled to write a lucid argument about Sherman’s March, the disputed authorship of “Romeo and Juliet,” or anything antediluvian. They have a champion: Cathy N. Davidson, an English professor at Duke, wants to eradicate the term paper and replace it with the blog.

Her provocative positions have lent kindling to an intensifying debate about how best to teach writing in the digital era.

“This mechanistic writing is a real disincentive to creative but untrained writers,” says Professor Davidson, who rails against the form in her new book, “Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.”