Christopher Dawson over at ZD Education posted today about the rumoured Apple table, he’s not the only, first or last individual to do so I would imagine. But his take on it is that it will be a non starter in Education without textbook publishers onboard to provide app versions of their content.
It seems to me that Dawson has missed part of the boat… he wants “smart” local content and he wants a reasonable price. He is saying that it is easy enough to use a $200 netbook to go after PDFs and presumably other “old skool” materials that could be based online in Flashy/AJAXy/Wavey sites that could be used anywhere. On cost, I don’t know what reality has Apple Inc making anything available at a non premium price.
The part of the boat that he does get is that the “laptop walls” may very well dissapear. Students, not school boards will be the first to bring these devices to the classroom, and if the devices prove themselves like Macbooks have in laptop initiatives in schools, schoolboards will follow. With the “textbook fees” that many students get assessed, combined with other school supplies coming out to more than a netbook, I can see many schools thinking about dumping other supplied in favour of a netbook, but that is another arguement.
After all is said and done, regardless of what the cost on the Apple device will be and how much like either the laptop or phone it is, it will be treated by many as yet another client device to hook into web services. Schools, at least in higher ed are developing an increasing array of content for the web that can be delivered in a device agnostic manner, so the thought that Apple’s tablet “needs” textbooks as local apps is a bit odd. And if the idea of “smart textbooks” was really what the publishers were after, they would have jumped on Surface and other MS tablet interfaces first – waiting for Apple and it’s cadre of design highlights seems to be odd. Perhaps one could see it as a sign of success, the publishing world is waiting on Apple to make it’s stylish and late entrance so that the party can really get started.
As I finish this off, I see that Bill Mackenty has also put up a few thoughts on this.
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