Apple's Future of Textbooks

Recently, Apple signed a deal with textbook publishers to get textbooks delivered electronically via iPads. As with the App store, Apple will take a cut of everything sold through the iBooks interface. Many people are excited about the possibility of having new "interactive" textbooks that use the capabilities of the new interface. I am not.

Almost all of the "interactive" features designed by textbook publishers encourage students to engage in tasks individually, working by themselves. This is the wrong direction. We need ways to stimulate people to work together. Students should be challenged with questions that are too hard to solve by themselves, on their own. More importantly, students should be put in the position of figuring out for themselves what they need to know and then given access to all the information in the world to solve it, not just a book. In short, I question that we need textbooks filled with answers. Instead, we need to help the students ask the right questions.

This is antithetical to the current educational paradigm, where content is doled out to students in bite-sized chunks. Real learning isn't like that at all. Real learning is when you discover that half of what you've been told is wrong. Or that there's another side to the issue. Or that the world doesn't neatly fit into categories. Real learning is when you set out to learn one thing and you discover something else. Real learning is when it matters to you. Apple's new plan won't move us in this direction at all -- it's just the same old dogfood in a new can.

Apple, of course, is doing this mostly to make money. At the same time, they are working hard to put the genie of the Internet back into the bottle. People see it as ironic that the the company that did the infamous 1984 advertisement has become such a force for platform domination and compliance. If they have their way, you won't need a web browser: there will be an app for that. Which you had to pay for. And they'll get their cut.