iPad 3G and the vacancy of the connected textbook

Last Friday was iPad 3G day and, at my house, the FedEx truck barely made it out of the driveway before the iconic Apple-designed packaging was discarded on the floor and my iPad was busily synching it’s pre-purchased apps.

For the past couple of years I’ve been pulling out my iPhone and my Kindle in meetings, laying them on top of each other and saying, “There -- something like that” when asked what the digital textbook would be like. It was an attempt to convey a fuzzy, absent space in my thinking where a tool should be that could serve as a window to the Internet, to an engaging world of content that invites exploration, and to communities of peers and others that enrich learning. Friday, I finally got to hold a beautifully designed piece of hardware with equally beautifully crafted digital books and learn a little more about the shape and structure of that fuzzy space.

The Elements, Alice, and Jack have been reviewed extensively elsewhere. My personal experience? Delightful. Engaging. Fresh. In an earlier post, I characterized the 21st-century textbook as, among other things, living, interactive, and connected. The artful books I enjoyed on my iPad brought home just how well authors can deliver engaging books that are living and interactive using the technologies of today. The fuzzy vacancy in my mind is filled up in places by rotating images of Boron and Ytterbium, or by a jar of Orange Marmalade falling down the rabbit hole. In other places, the fuzziness persists.

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The 21st-century textbook

Future textbooks could improve update cycles and create feedback loops

With new technologies constantly coming on-line, and with states like California, Texas, and Oregon allowing digital curriculum to replace printed curriculum, the question arises: what will textbooks look like in the coming years?

Dale’s post, "A hunger for good learning," featured a fantastic video about teaching math. In a few brief minutes, Dan Meyer showed us a photo of a math problem involving filling a tank of water and calculating how long that would take, then showed us why traditional approaches to teaching this problem stifled student learning. The picture showed a traditional math problem with a line drawing of the tank, a problem set-up written in text (octagonal tank, straight sides, 27oz per second, etc.) followed by short sub-steps that are needed to solve the problem (calculate the surface area of the base, calculate the volume). Then, finally, it asks the question “how long will it take to fill the tank?” Dan’s view is that this spoon-feeding of problem solving in little steps trains students not to think like mathematicians and not to have the patience for solving complex problems. Instead, Dan prefers to show his students a video of the tank filling up, agonizingly slowly, until the students are eager to know “How long until that tank fills up, anyway?” And then they’re off -- discussing, questioning, and, most importantly, formulating the problem on their own, just as good mathematicians do.

It seems that what the textbook looks like in the 21st century is a lot more like Dan's presentation than the bound paper tomes we grew up with. If the 21st century textbook is delivered digitally to students, we can expect it to be far more than a .pdf representation of a traditional text. For example, let's say the textbook publisher chose to experiment with findings from the research community that kids learn better from authentic and difficult problems than they do from bite-sized steps laid out one after the other. The publisher does what Dan Meyer did, recreates the tank problem and updates a version of the textbook for a handful of beta testers. The next morning, Dan’s students walk into class and open the book to chapter 5. The old problem is gone, instead there is just a video of a tank and instructions that say “watch me fill up -- when you know how long it takes, please enter the answer.” Sure, a student might choose to watch the video for seven-plus hours and finally write down the time it took. But when boredom sets in, a more engaging option is to just play with the problem. By staying up to date with new information and practices, this textbook is living.

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Cell phones in the classroom

Surprising field studies suggest cell phones could be effective learning tools

Guest blogger Marie Bjerede is Vice President of Wireless Education Technology at Qualcomm, Inc., where she focuses on addressing the technical, economic, social, and systemic challenges to enabling every student to gain the advantages afforded those who have 24/7 mobile broadband access.

In most schools, cell phones are checked at the door -- or at best powered off during school hours in a tacit "don't ask, don't tell" understanding between students and administrators. This wide-spread technology ban is a response to real concerns: if kids have unfettered instant access to the Internet at school, how do we keep them safe, how do we keep out inappropriate content, how do we prevent real-time cyberbullying, how do we even keep their attention in class when competing with messaging, gaming, and surfing?

At the same time, though, there is a growing sense among education thought leaders and policy leaders that not only are cell phones here to stay but there seems to be interesting potential to use these small, connected computers that so many students already have. I've been insanely fortunate over the past year to work closely with Wireless Reach (Qualcomm's strategic social initiative) and real innovators in education who are finding that cell phones in classrooms don't have to be a danger or a distraction but, in fact, can help kids learn in some surprising ways.

During the 2007-2008 school year, Wireless Reach began funding Project K-Nect, a pilot project in rural North Carolina where high school students received supplemental algebra problem sets on smartphones (the phones were provided by the project). The outcomes are promising -- classes using the smartphones have consistently achieved significantly higher proficiency rates on their end of course exams.

Now, the population is small (on the order of 150 kids) and the make-up is essentially what researchers call a "convenience sample." It was selected from a population of kids that: largely qualified for free and reduced lunch; didn't have home Internet; and had low math proficiency. It was not balanced with a formally designed control group. There was self-selection on the part of the participating teachers -- they are extremely motivated -- but the results are consistent and startling. Overall, proficiency rates increased by 30 percent. In the best case, one class using the devices had 50 percent more kids finishing the year proficient than a class learning the same material from the same teacher during the same school year, but without the cell phones.

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