USA Today article on iPads in college

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-08-10-ebooklearning10_CV_N.htm

This link takes you to an article in USA Today which covers iPad use in college. Several colleges have experimented with using e-readers to replace textbooks.

Here is a quote from the article: "Compared with traditional textbooks, the iPad and other devices for reading digital books have the potential to save on textbook costs in the long term, to provide students with more and better information faster, and — no small matter — to lighten the typical college student's backpack."

The iPad has caused network problems on other college campuses. That raises concerns for schools with inadequate bandwidth, my school has problems with the laptop mobile labs when entire classes are online at the same time. I think the wireless network will have to be upgraded in many schools to allow lots of iPads to connect to the Internet at the same time.

Many students interviewed for the article say that they learn better from textbooks than e-readers. They also cite that the iPad provides more distractions to learning than a textbook. This may be even more of a problem for middle and high school students.

Another interesting quote from the article says: "Even then, some evidence suggests students see a downside to 24/7 interactivity when it comes to preparing for exams or doing homework. During visits last fall to libraries, coffee shops and other campus hangouts to analyze how students study, a test-prep company noted that, when it was time to study, cellphones, laptops and Kindles were put away."

Yet another quote: "A host of research over the past decade has shown that even the option to click hyperlinks to related material can create confusion and weaken understanding. One study found reading comprehension declined as the number of clickable links increased. A 2005 review by researchers at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, of 38 studies found "very little support" for the idea that all those links to additional information enrich the reader's experience. A 2007 study published in Media Psychology raised similar concerns about add-ons such as sound and animation."

"Some of the newer devices try to mimic traditional study behavior with features such as the ability to highlight text and take notes in the margins. Still, the gee-whiz technology doesn't necessarily help students study better, suggests a study published this month in Journal of Educational Psychology. Students often highlight too much material, so building a highlighting function into the technology may simply enable students to continue an ineffective habit, the study found. "Worse, they may not even process or understand what they select," says study author Ken Kiewra, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln."

This posting has a lot of quotes that I want to keep for later review. It is great to see that a large newspaper is exploring the same Action Research Project.

Stanza e-book reader

I have been playing with a new App on my iPhone called Stanza. It is basically an e-book reader similar to Kindle and Nook. It has a "get books" button that takes you to a "catalog" which lists multiple sources for free or cheap e-books which can be downloaded to the Stanza App and stored in its library for future reading. What I really like about it is that Stanza scales the fonts and formats the e-books to fit on the iPhone screen. Many e-books that I have downloaded and dropped into the mbDrive App are not scaled to fit the iPhone screen. Therefore, I think Stanza does a very good job of making e-books easier to read on the iPhone. Another great thing is that it has a large collection of literature classics that are now in the public domain and free to download. This means that Stanza could be a great addition to the English teacher's classroom.