| iPad Textbooks: Reality Less Revolutionary Than Hardware |
| Posted by: Susan Einhorn |
| In coming years, schools worldwide will grapple with whether to adopt tablet-based materials, on the iPad or on other platforms. They’ll consider many factors — including cost, intellectual property issues and logistics — that may ultimately prove as important as the textbooks’ contents. But as learning is the ultimate purpose, the question remains: Will kids really learn more and better on tablets than existing media? That’s far from clear now, and the reality may prove less revolutionary than the hardware. “Is there any real learning advantage from electronic textbooks? Probably not,” said Ron Owston, director of the Institute for Research in Learning Technologies at Canada’s York University. “It will just be more up-to-date learning.” Richard Mayer, a University of California, Santa Barbara educational psychologist and author of Multimedia Learning, was slightly more optimistic. “Media don’t cause learning. Instructional methods cause learning,” he said. “Given that idea, it’s possible that some media enable instructional methods more easily than others.” |
| Source: Wired (USA) | Published: January 27th, 2012 |
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