Thoughts on the Apple education event
I’m not sure if all this has confused a lot of people or that they just didn’t catch the topic of the event, but at any rate I have seen a lot of commentary suggesting that people have seen iBooks Author as a general book-writing tool/layout tool. I would say it is most definitely not. Not yet, anyway. Down the road I see Apple could add more functionality to iBooks Author, really making it the ultimate tool you need for publishing your book to the iBook Store. Yes, read that again if you have to! This tool is specially geared towards Apple’s services and ecosystem. Shocking, right? A company doing something like this? What audacity! (Seriously, is there a high horse store somewhere? Some people appear to have a whole stable full of them!)
The focus was on textbooks and learning materials, not novels and things you read for your own pleasure. As such, I wish people would apply the proper thinking to what they saw, not to mention that I above all wished people had set their expectations appropriately. But most people seem to never do that when it comes to technology in general and Apple in particular, so I’m not too surprised.
But enough about the comments in the wake of the even, and on to what I thought about what Apple showed off.
The event as a whole was rather US-centric, as it tends to be with Apple. It does make sense, since they are a US company, but I would love to see a bit more international focus. Still, I guess it’ll trickle down to other markets in one way or another. I will say that they did highlight some very accurate problems that are common throughout most of the western world in terms of education and how education works.
Rather clever functions, even though many of them are just digital replacements for the paper equivalents. While I am not always in the favor of the paper practices they showed off, I’m fairly sure they will work for a lot of students, not to mention that after some feedback I think Apple will include more ways and expand the offering of tools available.
iBooks Author is a nifty little app, but of course we have to remember a few things about it. As Phil mentioned, in its current incarnation iBook Author is focused on making it easy to create interactive books, like the textbooks showed at the event. As it stands today this is not a tool you use for laying out your text-only novel and pushing it to the iBooks Store, that’s just not the use-case. You can do it, I’m sure, but I seriously don’t see that being what the tool is designed for, nor will you get any benefit from doing it.
Just like a lot of others out there I don’t agree with the EULA-imposed limitations on what you can do with the outcome of iBooks Author, but I do see where Apple is coming from when they put that clause there. It’s not pretty and I would prefer if iBooks Author were to spit out standard ePub files that you have the right to use anywhere, as you see fit.
Then again, if you can’t see the rather obvious connection between iBooks Author and the iBooks Store, you really need to go visit your optician or possibly go back to school yourself. You’re not seeing the whole picture or you are just ignoring facts to fit your view of the world, which isn’t all that great might I add. Apple has now effectively released a tool tailored to making material for their store in a very easy way, not some universal book-binding service equivalent for the ebook age.
I hate to have to remind people about this, but Apple is a company, not a charity.
From my perspective iBooks Author is a part of iBooks and the iBooks Store. Yes, you can still export and save what you make in iBooks Author and distribute it elsewhere, but you loose on all the benefits that the app enables and the file format produces. Seeing as the end result is very much tailored for use on only the iPad and only if you use the book in iBooks 2, I consider the point moot. Even if you were to take the file to any other place to be sold online, it wouldn’t work as well anyway.
The new iTunes U app looks pretty solid too, skeuomorphic GUI aside. An integrated solution that doesn’t rely on any other special backbone technology or servers in the basement, everything is supplied by Apple. It has a whole lot of functions that I have always wanted to see in any application or tool for managing your courses and days in school, as well as communication between teachers and students. All the books for each course, everything available and again, integrated. Sure, you need to buy into the whole Apple deal to get the true benefit of it, but if you do, this is a pretty kick-ass collection of tools.
It’s taking a good idea, the one of iTunes U, and expanding upon it, making it even more education on demand, both for the students in colleges and universities all over the world, as well as anyone who just wants to learn more.
As far as getting good tools for education into the hands of teachers and students, this looks like a very promising affair on the whole. From my perspective it feels like more than the tired old mentality of just putting a device into a classroom and assume that it will somehow magically make the kids smarter or the teaching any easier. No, I see this as more akin to the interweaving of technology and education, as I have said before would be the logical and most beneficial way of doing it. We have just, for some bizarre reason, not done it yet.
This is, of course, still not the solution to the problems in education. Phil Schiller said something really good: “No one person or company can fix it all” and I completely agree with it. What Apple showed is not the future, but rather their suggestion of how to best remedy the current situation in what they can do as a company. Take it for what it is and hope that parents stimulate kids throughout their early life, so that they can grow into curious and inspired young people. Technology will help them along the way, but kids still need a lot of other things to be great!
