The mobile Scientist

A short review of Apple’s iBooks 2 and the iBooks Author tool. Whereas many functions are available, some important ones are missing: Logging & Author Feedback, Social Interactivity, Teacher Feedback, Outliner, Didactic Guidance & Collaborative Creation of Textbooks, Empirical Research/Evaluation, and Analysis of Other Effects.

So, Apple had its big education event and introduced iBooks 2 and iBooks Author. Frankly, it was about time, but it still only realized a tiny bit of the potential that mobile media (here: the iPad) have.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of interactive textbooks with beautiful layout and excellent interactive graphics/features. But looking at the presentation of Phil Schiller, while much is realized much is also missing.

What is realized?

Apple allows you to create and distribute textbooks with interactive elements via their “free” iBooks Author tool. As long as you agree that you may only offer them via Apple’s iBooks (meaning you essentially require your readers to have an iPad, thus it is not really “free”), you can easily create and distribute textbooks. Having some experience with Keynote, Pages and InDesign, the new iBooks Author looks easy to use and very, very powerful. You can create books, set intros, import text, add interactive elements (HTML5, Keynote Slides), review questions, etc. Frankly, I like it. And it offers some nice features for students — they can highlight text (thus creating review questions), do quizzes, etc.

What is missing?

Apple got support from ACU. If you look at the webpage of the Abilene Christian University, they have some experience with iPhones and iPads. However, as a psychologist and author, some things are sadly missing:

Logging & Author Feedback: Let’s be serious. If you were a textbook author, wouldn’t you want to know which aspects of the textbook were too difficult, too confusing, or just plain boring? Digital books could easily provide this information on a much larger scale than usually possible — great for evaluation. Feedback could also be provided explicitly via a short questionnaire or “mark-what-you-find-confusing-function”, adding to the implicit feedback by logging the amount of times a user looks at a certain page, or tasks where the majority of users spend more than the usual amount of time. Apple highlighted the possibility of updating the books and keeping them up to date, why don’t they allow authors (and teachers!) to track where students have difficulties (with their knowledge!)? As a scientist you want to cry here — the way to provide feedback would be … invaluable!
Note: Perhaps using HTML5 widgets it would be possible to include some direct feedback.

Social Interactivity: Look for a moment at the conceptually similar approach by Inkling.com (the company that designed books for the iPad). Their products look (strangely?) similar to the books that can be designed by iBooks Author, yet they offer more: Social Interactivity. Apple will undoubtedly offer it too, in some future version, but Inkling got it right first. One of the great advantages of mobile media is social interactivity (cf. Klopfer, Squire, and Jenkins, 2002 — the authors list the main advantages of mobile media as: portability, social interactivity, context sensitivity, connectivity, and individuality). Using the book metaphor it can mean sharing margins within the same class or among study buddies, they can chat, ask questions, etc. Inkling offers it, iBooks does not, missing a huge opportunity for (collaborative) learning.

Teacher Feedback: I get the idea of review questions. I really do, but it smells to much of drill and practice. Frankly, similar to the social interactivity, I would have expected a student-teacher-communication channel. Students write free text answers to questions and the teacher comments and grades theses questions. The iPad has WiFi, iTunes U has a lot of just-in-time features. Why not use them to do some more serious exam questions? It would require the creation of some learning groups — technically easily possible, but perhaps too much for the first run.

Outliner: I admit that I am a big fan of outlines. Frankly I think that I could not have done my diploma thesis or my dissertation thesis without Circus Ponies Notebook. As much as I like the idea of highlighting sentences and producing study cards, I think that without a good notebook software it becomes very hard to actually learn with the information. I want to make notes and export these notes in my favorite outliner. Apple’s strategy is more-or-less to produce a data island and keep you in the happy Apple world. Frankly, as a user I expect more (there is something that looks like an export button, but I doubt that it will be formatted right).

Didactic Guidance & Collaborative Creation of Textbooks: There’s an old saying that “He who can does. He who can’t teaches.” (but see here), with the addition that “He who can’t teach builds learning systems.” Frankly, it’s hard to make a good book. It’s even harder to make a good text book. There’s more to it than layout and Apple’s templates actually make it more difficult to distinguish between good and bad textbooks. I guess it’s only a matter of time until the first creationism biology textbook makes it into the iBook Store, and it will look and feel like any other textbook. If you look at Apple’s Education Event, it seems that the software alone will make sure that the textbook is any good. It takes a lot more than iBooks Author to make a good textbook. And as far as I see Apple tries to convey the idea that using iBooks Author will ensure good quality, but it does not provide didactic guidance. Sad, there is a lot of research. Neither do they support the collaborative creation of textbooks. It looks like they want a new market similar to the App store, instead of using the software to bring together the best (amateur) textbook authors and allow them within the software to jointly develop a good textbook.

Empirical Research/Evaluation: Frankly, a lot of the things that were mentioned at the Apple Education Event were assertions, warranting empirical examination. Something I found really problematic was the “it has never been so easy to be a good student” assertion (because the study cards are created automatically). Really? Doesn’t the student learn a lot by writing the cards him- or herself? Or from the website: “Add widgets. Add interest.” — is interest (I guess they mean situational interest here) really that easy to create? Sorry, but in the museum world they have a saying regarding interactive exhibits — they must be meaningful; the visitor must be able to focus, recapitulate, review, and exercise not only the fingers but also the mind (Allen, 2004). Same here, playing around with different views of insects or areas is pointless unless you also get the key message. And do textbook authors really ask questions to assess whether the reader got the key message?

Analysis of Other Effects: Sure, the iTextbooks are interesting and impressive, but what else changes. The Apple Education Event stresses that students own the books. Does that mean that students can also sell they copies? Or is the used book marked essentially dead in the Apple world (as sxephil mentions). And what else changes? Doesn’t the affordances of the tool press the learner in specific modes? Or the way questions can be assessed?

Frankly, I am worried of a world in which Apple determines the digital textbook market. Not because I do not like Apple, quite the contrary. But because Apple was always more a “proof-of-concept” company but never a “the majority of users profit from it”. It was more focused on marketing that on empirical research. And frankly, the future of our world — i.e., the learning of children and students — is too important to leave it to marketing. It should be grounded in research on teaching. The results should be made available in easy format for the (amateur and professional) designers of textbooks.

Students do not only deserve digital, interactive, beautiful designed textbooks. They deserve textbooks that actually help them learn.

Sources

Allen, S. (2004). Designs for learning: Studying science museum exhibits that do more than entertain. Science Education, 88, 17–33

Klopfer, E., Squire, K., & Jenkins, H. (2002). Environmental Detectives: PDAs as a Window into a Virtual Simulated World. Proceedings of the IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education (WMTE’02).

Tags: Apple, iBooks, iBooks Author, iPad, learning

This entry was posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2012 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Reality Check. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.