I watched
Apple's webcast about the upcoming iPhone 3.0 software yesterday. Lots of interesting new features in the API, but one thing in particular caused me to think about textbooks; the upcoming Within Application purchasing option for iPhone apps. Apple said many iPhone application developers had been asking for this feature. The best example they used to illustrate how this works involved a city guide application. Up till now if you were developing a city guide application you would need to sell either one guide for all cities that you think your users might be visiting, or a separate guide for each city. With the new approach you can develop one city guide application and within that application sell modules for cities of interest to individual users.
On the hardware front the evidence is quite strong that Apple is making a touch screen device with a 10" diagonal screen. (It has been confirmed by a number of sources that Apple has placed a large order with a Taiwanese company for these screens.) I would guess that this device will be running some version of the iPhone/iTouch software and with it one will be able to purchase software from the App Store.
Now think about your use of textbooks. How often do you not cover all the chapters in textbooks you are using? How often do you really only want certain chapters in a textbook? Remember buying record albums and compact disks? Remember how often you really only liked/wanted a few tracks but you had to purchase the entire album/CD?
At this point I'm guessing you may have some thoughts occurring to you.
Thoughts like:
•I could put together my own play list... oops, I mean put together my own "textbook" from the best "chapters" available in the App Store.
•These "chapters" could include audio and video files, little simulations, interactive assessments, etc..
•Our students might no longer need to be loaded down like sherpas with their textbook packed backpacks.
Now let's take this a step further. In the iPhone 3.0 software Apple has made it much easier for developers to interact with external devices; things like blood glucose readers. Communication with these devices can be done wirelessly via Bluetooth. Imagine if some sort of small EKG type device could be developed that would monitor brain activity at some level. A student settling down to do some reading from their Apple netbook ('iBook' again perhaps?) could put on this device and their computer would be monitoring them as they read. If the device picked up that their attention was wandering the netbook could suggest a break or an alternative approach to presenting the information? Imagine a dialog box like this popping up... "You appear to be drifting a bit Fred. Would you like to try the auditory learner approach to this topic?"
I'm curious what others think? Did I just have too much coffee this morning? :-)
Fred