iBooks Textbooks

Posted by Lynn Ramey on Friday, January 20, 2012 in Digital Humanities: General.

As though in (some kind of) response to Cory’s post on HASTAC, apple launched yesterday iBooks Textbooks, basically interactive textbooks that one may purchase and use on their ipad. I find the interactive aspect of this idea potentially intriguing. I’m not sure to what extent students think of textbooks as something to interact with. Workbooks maybe, but textbooks are more of a top-down, one-way monologue. In middle school I remember we were not allowed to write in textbooks or really engage with them in any way beyond passively absorbing the information.

I’m playing around with a biology textbook now as I type (the only free one I could find) and it reminds me a lot of the Encarta Encyclopedia CD I used to use way back in the day. The textbook basically incorporates videos so you can see and hear the author talking about ants, you can zoom in on drawings of DNA helices and move them around etc. It’s certainly more fun, and the fact that this particular textbook is free says something about open/free access.

 

This article suggests caution: http://techland.time.com/2012/01/20/apples-ibooks-textbooks-4-reasons-to-be-skeptical/ but I’m not quite convinced that apple’s initiative is not a good thing for education.

The question of money and ownership with textbook publishing companies (similar to the questions we raised about the music industry in class) is very much at the forefront of the discussion. But from a student’s perspective, I think the novelty of it all, and the idea of interacting closely and even meaningfully with a textbook draws me in and changes the one-way model of knowledge transmission that has been my experience so far with textbooks.