Are we headed toward a time when all textbooks will be digital? Absolutely. Will this happen soon? Define “soon.”
Several universities have been test-driving the Amazon Kindle this year to see how well it works for their students. Some thoughts from a USAToday.com article:
Now, as several major universities finish analyzing data from pilot programs involving the latest version of the Amazon Kindle, officials are learning more about what students want out of their e-reader tablets. Generally, the colleges found that students missed some of the old-fashioned note-taking tools they enjoyed before. But they also noted that the shift had some key environmental benefits. Further, a minority of students embraced the Kindle fairly quickly as highly desirable for curricular use.
Some would argue that the leap in technology is too great. I don’t think so. I think that the tool isn’t quite ready to do the required job.
For students who were given the Kindle DX and tried to use it for coursework, the inability to easily highlight text was the biggest lowlight of the experience.
If you can’t easily highlight text and, importantly, can’t highlight PDF files at all, that is a design flaw.
Indeed, highlighting and note-taking went hand in hand with another feature students on multiple campuses considered important: navigation. Students did not like being unable to have multiple texts open at the same time.
If an e-book reader is going to be at a sufficient level to attract users to use them as a research tool, they must be able to open multiple texts. Researchers and students know they must be able to compare documents.
Based on these comments, it appears that the Kindle DX is not quite ready for prime-time. While I have no doubt that an e-book reader will emerge that will work, it is unclear whether that will be a Kindle. While that may be a good option at the college level, without a significant price drop, it will not work at the K-12 level. The cost is just too staggering for schools and school districts.
Will online schools end up adapting to the use of e-book readers? Yes, because part of the benefit of online courses is being able to take it with you. While a number of online schools already use digital texts, many fewer have that text easily available for electronic books. Look for that to change.
Tags: amazon kindle, ebooks
An e-book reader that is note taking friendly, would be wonderful for public school students who generally don’t have the option to highlight or take notes in their books. I wonder if a student could have one e-book reader assigned to them for all their years in high school, and have it include all their textbooks, so that they could refer to them as needed for a refresher on key concepts.
Hi Carrie,
I do think there is some merit to your idea. Being a former school librarian, I wonder, though, about difficult it would be to keep track of those e-book readers (because they would certainly be checked out of the library). I had a hard enough time getting textbooks back. I can only imagine how hard it would be to get a cool piece of technology back.
But it absolutely is the future for both public and not-so-public students. I think the only part open for debate is how it happens.