Eric Baber's blog

Earlier this week I gave a talk at a UK university. The audience was made up of lecturers from a variety of disciplines, and the theme was "Learners in the 21st century". My opening gambit was to poll the audience on a number of issues - "How many social networking channels do you use", "How much of the assigned reading do you think your students do", things like that. The polling itself I did via polls set up at http://www.smspoll.net, a neat website that lets you set up polls that allow people to vote via SMS from their mobile phones. So, the first thing I did was pull up the first poll, ask the audience to get their mobile phones out, and to vote via SMS. The purpose of the whole exercise was 3-fold - 1) so I could get a feel for the audience, 2), to prime them on a number of issues I'd be discussing, and 3) to show them that mobiles can be used meaningfully for teaching and learning.

After the session, one of the delegates came up to me and said that she and a number of her colleagues had felt excluded (her word) because they didn't have mobiles, or that their mobiles didn't have the necessary functionality. I accepted her feedback, but also pointed out that it was almost certainly the case that any mobile would be able to send SMS messages, and that maybe they just weren't familiar with doing so. She was, however, clearly still somewhat upset at having been excluded. (Turns out that the polls received 24 votes out of about 80 people in the audience).

I must say I was taken aback. I hadn't anticipated that there would be anyone in the room who didn't own a mobile (though I anticipated that some of them may have left theirs in the staff room or whatever), but this is clearly the case. I've been pondering ever since whether I was unreasonable to expect all members of my audience - university lecturers - to have a mobile. So there's a question for you - was I being unreasonable?

In terms of a bigger picture, even if I personally was unreasonable to have that expectation, what should we (society as a whole) expect from our educators? The theme of the conference overall was "Designing Learning in the twenty-first century". So there's clearly a theme here: we know that our learners learn/live their lives differently from those in the 20th century, and we need to keep up with developments. So there seems to be an acknowledgement here that we need to understand our learners better in order to serve them better. If this is the case, then isn't it our duty as educators to farmiliarise ourselves with our learners' lifestyles? I'm not saying that all teachers should go out and buy themselves every games console under the sun along with all of the most popular games, but isn't mobile-phone literacy nowadays as much of a 21st-century skill as computer literacy? And how can we as educators prepare the next generation of the workforce if we're not comfortable with the major trends of today ourselves?

So, over to you - was I unreasonable in my first expectation (that all lecturers would have mobile phones), and do you think it's fair to expect educators to be familiar with current "currency" if they're the ones educating the next generation?

Over the past few months rumours about a new Apple device – variously dubbed the iSlate, the iTablet, and the iPad – have abounded. The wait is finally over; on 27 January Apple announced its new device, the iPad. Here are some thoughts of mine about the iPad, in particular from the point of view of publishing.

If I had to summarise the iPad in one word, it would be this: convergence. It brings together a multitude of features and functionalities that are already available on the market: a screen not too big and not too small (9.7 inches – nearly the same as most netbooks); wireless access and, in some versions, 3G access; a touch-screen (“virtual”) keyboard roughly the same size as that on a netbook; and multimedia, web-browsing, e-mail and general computing capabilities. So what’s new?

Well, not much really – at least not in terms of general functionality. But then the same could be said about the iPhone when that came out (all it really did was converge disparate functions which were already available in different devices), and that proved a groundbreaking formula which other mobile phone manufacturers have yet to rival. Is the iPad therefore likely to revolutionise the consumer market yet again? Let’s see.

First, some facts. The iPad has a 9.7 inch screen (nearly the same size as the Kindle DX – that’s the large one). It’s 0.5 inches thin and weighs 1.5lb, which is very thin and fairly light. It doesn’t have a physical keyboard; instead the screen can be used as a keyboard for inputting text. A final figure is the price: starting at $499 that’s half the price of what many people were predicting. If you want 3G in addition to wireless connectivity the price goes up, as it does as well for more memory.

Steve Jobs in his launch presentation went to great lengths to outline that what they were trying to build was a third type of device, between the mobile phone and the laptop. He more or less acknowledged that that space is currently being filled by netbooks, but stated that they were just “small, cheap laptops”. The iPad, meanwhile, is “the best”: “the best way to experience the web, email, photos and videos”. A tall order. So will it garner some market-share from the netbook market? Almost certainly, since it is lighter and even more compact since the keyboard is effectively integrated into the screen, and because the screen quality may well be better than that of most netbooks. For some, though, the absence of a physical keyboard will prove uncomfortable, so this feature is unlikely to allow Apple to entirely corner this market.

Another of the main device-genres it is going head-to-head with is the dedicated ebook reader such as the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader. And it will almost certainly steal some of its market share since those two devices are fairly limited in what they can do (allow you to read books, and, in the case of the Kindle, also do some limited websurfing and emailing), and are black-and-white only. The iPad offers significantly more at an only slightly higher price. However, dedicated ebook readers will still have one over the iPad in terms of ease of reading. Ebook readers typically deploy a technology called e-ink; this makes reading off their screens nearly as comfortable on the eyes as reading off paper. The screen on the iPad meanwhile, like those on computer monitors and mobile phones, is backlit, making it tougher on the eyes to do extensive reading (and, incidentally, draining the battery much more quickly). So for some consumers the added functionalities of the iPad will be attractive, while others will prefer a device which does less, but does that better.

Apart from the hardware, though, the other big selling point for the iPad is the expansion of its iTunes store to not only offer music and apps (which, incidentally, also work on the iPad – a huge bonus), but also “ebooks” in epub format. I put “ebooks” into quotation marks because the epub format does not just support text, but also embedded audio and video, animations and more. This will allow publishers to create much richer content, and distribute it easily and directly to the consumer. Whether this will constitute a complete revolution is questionable though. iTunes really was the first of its kind when it first came out – the first mechanism for buying music in pretty much any way a customer might want to buy it – on a song-by-song basis, the entire album, the entire album plus a video, etc. In the case of educational content, though, this isn’t the case: there are already a multitude of channels available through which customers can buy digital content: http://www.ebooks.com , http://shop.ebrary.com , http://waterstones.com/ebooks , publishers’ own websites and so on. Apple will no doubt point towards its new media-rich format, but again that’s not new; companies such as http://www.blankpage.ch already provide this on a range of platforms, meaning consumers don’t have to buy yet another piece of hardware. So this will make it a bit more of a challenge to Apple to convince customers that their offering is unique.

What it almost certainly will do, though, is drive the market towards devices of a similar size with colour, multimedia capabilities, ultimately on a screen which will become better and easier on the eyes than the current one. This in turn will push the market towards content that is multi-media rich: instead of just plain text, consumers (I hesitate to call them “readers”) will be more interested in content that mixes the written word, audio, video and more – much like CD-ROMs have been affording us for nearly two decades now.

So what does all of this mean for publishers?

• For some publishing areas such as the school- and textbook markets, publishers need to expand the type of products they offer. Many already offer multimedia-rich content; at the moment this is distributed on CD-ROMs and online. They will almost certainly need to repackage these types of product in the form of self-contained ebooks in iBook or other formats as users expect to be able to download one chunk of content which contains all the relevant multimedia elements. Also, much of the current content is aimed at the teachers, for use in the classroom; new content aimed specifically at learners will need to be developed as entire classes of students kit themselves out with iPad- or netbook-like devices
• Publishers need to keep a close eye on both entrants to the market and ones coming into the educational market from other angles. Companies specialising in producing educational films, for example, have a skillset and experience vital for this new type of product. In the same way that traditional paper-based publishers will need to branch into these areas new to them, some of those film companies will expand their skillset to embrace text and other multimedia. The smart money is likely to be on collaborations, partnerships, mergers and the like – constellations of entities that complement each other and are able to bring new products to market quickly.
• Another group of entrants will be users themselves as it is likely that making content for sale through the iBook Store will be similar to selling content through the app store, i.e. open to virtually anyone (upon approval from Apple), not just large publishing houses. This can be seen either as a challenge or an opportunity: publishers can either look purely at the content model and see user-generated content as competition, or else take a wider view, and think about what services they might be able to offer content-generating users.
• Probably the most complex piece will prove to be the sales and distribution model. Publishers utilise different distribution channels - local retailers, direct-to-institution sales, direct-to-consumer via their own websites etc. Apple’s new infrastructure will make the relationship of publishers with their distributors potentially more complex than in the past as geography becomes less of an issue and tracking of sales and marketing activities will become more complicated.

All in all therefore a mixed bag with regards to whether the iPad will herald a revolution or merely an evolution. Of course, what may just make the day for Apple is the iPad’s form factor – the look and feel which Apple is so good at, and which has made millions of people hold the iPhone in their hands and say “wow”. As they say, watch this space.

The New York Times came out with an article about how the traditional, paper-based textbook is going the way of the dodo and how it'll ultimately be replaced by teachers putting together their own learning paths for their students based on materials that are available online for free. This predictably has caused the various camps who have strong opinions one way or the other over how the educational sector should operate to jump on this as being the ultimate truth, or as being complete nonsense. Personally, I think neither of these points of view are particularly helpful, and that we need to look at the realities of how teachers and the educational establishment actually works. Here are some of my predictions and opinions.

• For students to be able to access core material digitally, all students in a particular school need to have their own electronic reading/working devices (laptops, netbooks, ebook readers, whatever). Percentage-wise globally speaking, especially in the parts of the world that ELT reaches, this isn't going to be particularly widespread anytime soon. In those areas, paper-based textbooks will persist for some time yet.
• Like it or not, many teachers aren't hugely interested in putting together a bespoke set of materials for each class every day. They've got 20+ teaching hours per week, grading of assignments to do, homework to mark, their own families to look after... They like having a clear learning path with related materials mapped out for them and their students from the beginning to the end of the term/semester/schoolyear. This means that even in classes where all learners have their own devices, most teachers will prefer it if they can work with one piece of content which will see them through the entire schoolyear. Sure they'll supplement it here and there along the way, but they'll still want one core set of materials they can work through linearly.
• Let's not forget that it's rarely actually the teachers who decide what happens in the bigger picture; instead, that's done by Directors of Studies, principals etc. Concerns that they have include overall quality control (we like to think) - i.e. they want to be able to tell parents/educational authorities/school inspectors that all learners come out having had the same learning opportunities. This - unfortunately, perhaps - is one of the largest things against learning personalisation. Schools nowadays have to protect themselves from being sued, and one easy way of doing that is assigning the same textbook/coursebook/set of materials to all learners of a certain level/age/whatever. It also protects the school from less-good teachers in that they can argue that if the materials at least are good, that can make up for shortcomings of individual teachers. Yes this may straightjacket the better and more enthusiastic teachers, but that's the way it is.
• Following on from that, in many parts of the world, teachers have only received very basic training, may only be fresh out of schools themselves, may have ongoing health issues which stop them from being able to teach regularly etc; so having a set of linear materials which they can rely on is vital both for them as teachers and for the learners.

So: death of the fixed-beginning-fixed-end-work-through-linearly coursebook? No. Neither on paper, nor in electronic format (but a shift from paper to electronic core materials will happen gradually as individual markets become more high-tech). And designing materials that build on each other and achieve an externally imposed set of learning objectives (i.e. exams) takes time and professional input. Yes there will be open courseware initiatives, some of which will no doubt produce excellent results. Is it likely that many educational establishments will adopt these though? Not many, I personally don't think. There are too many entities along the line - parents, principals, school boards, even the learners - who want some form of guarantee that the materials have been put together by a well-known brand and a set of people who know what they're doing. This will, of course, come with a price tag. While some educational entities or even entire authorities will consider that price tag too high and go for an open source alternative, I really think these will be few and far between.

None of this is meant to be a value judgement in favour of the book, in favour of a particular form of delivery mechanism or whatever. These are just my interpretations of own observations about how things actually are, and how I think they will continue to be, rather than what some enthusiasts one way or another think should happen.

What with all of the recent hoopla regarding the recently-announced new Kindle DX I've had various conversations about eBooks and eBook readers. There are a number of things that I find so obvious I'm surprised nobody else has addressed them (though maybe they have and I haven't noticed). Here are some of them:

• The concept of eBooks is great (convenience of transport, ability to annotate etc) but the implementation of dedicated eBook Reader devices just isn't there yet. Page turning is too slow, annotation clumsy because the input capabilities are limited and first-generation etc.

• The dedicated eBook Reader device (of whatever manufacturer) is a very transient phenomenon, or at best a niche one in the long run. Everything is heading towards convergence: instead of having to carry around more, we all want to carry around less, but while being able to do more. At the moment we have to carry around a laptop or netbook for web browsing, e-mailing, working on files etc; a mobile phone for making phone calls and listening to music; and now we're supposed to buy an eBook Reader device as well which only lets us read text (well, some let us listen to music as well, but.) And the prices of eBook Readers given their functionality is far too high. What I foresee in the next 3 - 7 years is this: laptops and netbooks with dual screens - one backlit one like they have now for fancy graphics in full colour, and a second one with e-ink technology that is far better on the eyes, for extensive reading. A side benefit of that would be that if you use the e-ink screen battery life is significantly longer - always a good thing on a netbook or laptop. The limitation on those at the moment is that they only do black, white and shades thereof - but that's going to change in, at most, 5 - 10 years when we'll have full-colour e-ink screens. At that point we'll go back to having one screen. In any event, the sole USP of eBook Readers - screens that are better on the eyes - will be wiped out as soon as there are netbooks on the market that do everything we want to do on the move.

  Refinements will be in there too - making the screen foldable and unfoldable, meaning the device will get smaller while the viewable screen size will get larger; being able to switch the device from read-only to full-input mode, for prolonged battery life; accelerometer and touchscreen capabilities; integrating mobile telephony into the devices; etc.

I guess the main thing that I'm surprised about is the amount of hype that is generated around devices that I consider limiting, transient, and vastly over-priced.

A good article on electronic books and the devices available to read them. There aren't yet any dedicated readers on the UK market but the first one to arrive will be the Sony Reader, in September 2008. Some interesting quotes from the article:

"While in the US there are an increasing number of new books available online, publishers in the UK have been slow to release their books in an electronic format. "

""The younger generation have spent their formative years reading from screens. We don't really know how they are going to react," says Goss. "

(I can hazard a guess though - they won't think twice about using an e-reader, and won't miss traditional books.)

And, funnily enough I was thinking exactly the following this morning:

"It is perfectly conceivable that in the future we could have something that looks like a book, feels like a book, reads like a book and with separate paper-thin pages like a book, but which uses e-ink instead of the normal kind."

Much of what people seem to think they will miss in an e-reader is the tactile aspect of it - the turning of the page, the feeling of closing it etc. An answer to this is what is described here - an e-reader that consists of, say, 100 electronic pages which display 100 pages of a book. When you get to the end of those and the book is, say, 300 pages long, you go back to the beginning and tell the reader to start displaying from page 101 - 200, and so on.

Having said that, I would see that as being an interim device - something to please that generation which still values the page-turning feeling. For the next generation this is likely to be a quaint concept, much like turning over LPs or cassettes to play side B. Why would you want to do that if there is an easier way?