“Join us for an education announcement in the Big Apple.”According to the Mashable article Apple is partnering with textbook publishers. It all makes sense to me. After all, why not utilize the now mainstream distribution channel of iTunes and iBooks, and start selling iTextbooks.
I think the bigger question for instructional designers and developers is how can WE publish into this system? We also want to know if there will be interactive components to the textbooks. At the very least I hope we're able to embed hyperlinks to YouTube videos, blog posts, etc. I think some bonus functionality would be something like selecting some text within a textbook and posting it to social networks like twitter, or facebook, or google+. This increases the factor of engagement significantly which is what students really need. It's one thing to just sit and read a book. But it's a significantly better experience if what is read can be shared and discussed with others.
Apple is not very good at the social thing yet. Ping is lame and iCloud is still clunky and frustrating for many users. However, they do understand the desire to publish content to other social systems and they have embraced that capability. So, I'm hopeful they will continue along that path until they can get their own social network functioning...if they ever intend too.
2 comments:
The flood of stories today has been awesome. A bit distracting, but that's only because I'm checking my RSS feed during the day. It seems like the technology now can handle almost anything that we can dream up...we just have to do the dreaming first. Based on this post, I am going to have a meeting with my boss to just come up with a wish list, and then as we develop new trainings or strategies going forward, see how many of those wishes can be accommodated.
I'm not surprised to see Apple getting in the game with textbooks. Very smart. With online learning becoming very hot this is a great industry to get into early. Smart move Apple.
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