Next-gen textbooks? It's the ecosystem, not the device
Last week, Jason Perlow and I both wrote about the “Textbook of the future”.
Also read
Textbook of the Future: The challenges
Textbook of the Future: The hardware
An iPad for every child: Inevitable or impossible?
Jason’s articles (and the lengthy discussions we’ve had over the years, especially in the last couple of weeks following Apple’s textbook announcement) led to a couple of reference designs in semi-rugged tablets (one for younger grades, another for older students) that would have done Nicholas Negroponte proud. It actually took me a few days to figure out what was wrong with this picture. It should have been obvious from the start. Making Nicholas Negroponte feel any positive emotions has never been anything at which I have shown particular aptitude (nor, in fairness, much desire). Much the opposite, in fact. He’s had more than a few choice words for me.
High expectations meet decentralized control
Don’t get me wrong. Jason’s approach to creating an affordable, scalable hardware infrastructure could actually get a device quite sustainably into many millions of students’ hands worldwide. The problem, though, is that this isn’t Indonesia or Singapore. There is no Ministry of Education in the United States and the raging popularity of the iPad, iPhone, and smartphones in general has sensitized youth in developed countries to rich, responsive interactions on their touch devices. Colors pop, photos gleam, video is captured in HD, and apps have graphics that rival console gaming systems.
Education, perhaps more importantly, is constitutionally handled at the state and local levels, despite federal funding and programs that might suggest otherwise. There is no way to impose a single device, particularly one that represents the lowest common denominator in hardware for the sake of scalability, nationwide. The constitution doesn’t support it (for better or worse) and the consumerization of IT about which so many enterprises worry has penetrated education quite thoroughly: students and teachers will demand better, even if it is at the expense of many students not having access to a mobile computing device and next-gen textbook viewer.
Reference designs are great, but…
This hardly means that Jason’s thought experiment was wasted. On the contrary, he spec’d out a reference design that could be the basis for an entire generation of educational tablets and I think he did a great job capturing many of the most basic requirements for tablets that need to withstand the rigors of school environments. This is actually where OLPC found some of its greatest success: it wasn’t in building and distributing hardware, but defining a market segment (netbooks) that could serve educational needs at an affordable price. Their latest reference designs, though largely vaporware at this point, also stand to help define the next generation of affordable, kid-/learning-friendly devices; thankfully, they’ve abandoned the hardware business.
I would argue, though, that, while many young people in the US and beyond may very well end up with devices like Jason and OLPC have outlined in their backpacks, a far better approach (especially in developed markets) is BYOD (bring your own device). This is where the real work begins. Whether students are bring their own devices, using school iPads, using Chromebooks bought for 1:1 initiatives, or using some variation of Jason’s proposed hardware, all of these must be brought together in a strong ecosystem of content and apps that is hardware-agnostic, inherently open, and based in the cloud.
