Ebook Readers vs. Ipad for Education?

By Tom Preskett

I’m doing a project on ebook readers at the moment, and it’s led me to follow closely the advent of the iPad. My interest is the potential impact on education. At the moment, the contest is in the commercial/entertainment market. Once things settle down, education will be looked at.

From what I’ve been learning, you can’t just give students and educators an ebook reader as is right now and expect it to transfer to education successfully. Looking at it just from a book replication point of view, I feel it has to, at least, perform certain tasks well and efficiently.

Principle amongst these is taking notes and flicking back and forth through the pages. It seems that, at the moment, Kindle and company don’t do the annotation and navigation well enough for the devices to sell themselves in an educational context. This is crucial because, for learning, you have to be able to personalise the resource in some way, and for the classic textbook, this is done by scribbling in the margin, underlining, highlighting. A recent pilot programme using ebook readers showing these issues is discussed by Steve Kolowich in Highlighting E-Readers.

Alongside this issue, you have the easy sell of storage and the longterm cost saving together with the environmental plus point. This last issue is a complicated one, but I come down on the plus side largely because of Martin LaMonica’s Ebook Readers Greener Than Books, Study Says. However, I’ve heard some awful things about the black market that exists around the disposal of old hardware.

When the time comes for educational use, the selling point is with the textbook. The classic ebook reader will not challenge the didactic pedagogy and therefore has a chance of success – as long as it can be seen to do what is already done better. The biggest obstacle will be publishers jockeying for position to control this market. It’s annoying but inevitable.

Now to the iPad. One impact will be making Kindle look horribly out of date. Even though they are not doing exactly the same things, they look and seem comparable and the ebook reader pales by comparison. I suggest that Kindle sort out its web browsing features and lack of colour pretty damn quickly! Looking out of date shouldn’t matter, but this is always a valid bullet point when you approach the whole issue of e-learning and “connecting with the kids.” Still, this is the important point – the impact it will have on mobile learning in general. Yes, e-reading can occur, but being a suitable, valid, legitimate device for house-to-house mobile learning could be its biggest legacy. It’s far too early to say, but my instinct tells me so.

When it comes to pedagogy, whereas the ebook reader will reinforce the didactic, the iPad would challenge it by offering such a vast array of features and media options that any educator who teaches with one would be foolish not to explore what’s available.

Now I know none of this will happen any time soon. But the potential is there. Still, potential isn’t the same as actual, but you know that, right.

Harry Keller on 9 April 2010 said:

I have heard that the e-ink options (Kindle, et al.) are easy to read in daylight. Not so for the iPad. Not sure how that fact will affect usability in education environments.

While eBooks are strictly for reading, well, books, the iPad is really more for browsing, listening, etc. Unless Steve Jobs has a huge epiphany soon, the iPad will not run all of those Flash apps for education. It won’t run the Java apps either. In fact, Jobs just released the new iPhone OS with strict limits on third-party apps: no Flash — period!

Without color, the e-books will languish as far as education is concerned, at least in K-12. Despite all of the commotion in education circles, the iPad just is not targeted to that market — yet.

The bottom line on all of this, as Tom suggests, is wait and see.