Apple's Education Event: On the Road to Vendor Lock-in
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 19th Jan 2012 17:41 UTC
Apple Apple's education event just ended, and just as Ars Technica said, Apple announced better support for textbooks, as well as a textbook authoring tool. The textbook authoring tool is heavily inspired by Keynote and Pages, and hence, I already know it's going to be top-notch and very pleasant to use. In addition, the company also repositioned iTunes U as a Blackboard competitor. As great as all these new tools are, several large red flags went up in my mind: I remember what it was like being the only student who didn't use Windows. Update: "Any e-textbook author that wants access to the iPad-toting masses must make his or her work an exclusive to iBooks 2."
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lucas_maximus
Member since:
2009-08-18

The textbook industry is really really obsolete. We should let teachers write wikibooks about the subjects they teach and they should be able to share and improve those. Maybe the government should buy the rights to some textbooks as a starting point, but I think for basic education there are decent ones on the net already.(like this http://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/)
Education should be as free as possible and all this expensive/closed textbook nonsense needs to be a thing of the past PERIOD. We really can do better than that.


Yeah because governments can be trusted making the correct decisions.

If you have obtained a high level of knowledge on a subject, if you write about it you should be paid. It is no mean feat writing a book, and a good one ..

Why do you hate people getting paid for hard work?

Edited 2012-01-20 20:41 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 1

zima Member since:
2005-07-06

Oh come on, large part of the textbook business is a farce; knowledge, info, tutoring materials in many fields don't change that much (few physics textbooks I consider as "the greatest" are mostly half a century old or so), revisions (of, too often, quite poor books anyway but still pushed on students) are superficial.

My high school nicely freed itself from the artificial publishing cycles - all books owned by the school, distributed in the first week of the year, to be returned at the end; all for what amounted to 10 GBP yearly, now maybe 20 (but that's fine - great, actually, since it still ends up much cheaper than "individual" approach of the primary schools in the city), for partial replacement of the "stock"; also some materials custom-tailored by the teachers, some of them even conducting lessons according to a individual plan grafted by themselves (and approved by the ministry of education).

I guess you would call it a school which "hates" people who make textbooks...

Edited 2012-01-27 00:18 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 2