Got this link from Marginal Revolutions blog. As I’ve said to some people; the iPad is perfect for me because I’ve been thinking of buying a Kindle for a long time. Now I’m still thinking what to buy; Paradox of Choice bites my behind. I love reading, look at my blog and the rePosts I post are what maybe less than 5 percent of what I read. The worst part of my day is the commute or the waiting for someone time. I’ve almost solved this by having a notebook always, having at least two books in the bag, and having printed article to read. The problem is that it’s hard to write in a moving vehicle, and I find that I’d rather read articles/essays when I only have a short time to read. I hate that I have to print reams upon reams of paper to combat boredom. If money permits I’m buying both.
Textbooks are different animals than e-book novels and business books, in ways that current e-readers can’t handle. For starters, you don’t read a textbook’s pages serially from first to last. You need to be able to jump around, skip, skim, and flip back and forth between chapter review and chapter content. A textbook’s content should ideally be dynamic from year to year, not frozen in time like a novel.
inkling3The iPad makes it possible to replace static images with interactive puzzles that MacInnis says burn important concepts in to students’ brains better and longer. He showed me a demo learning module that explained the biological concept of cellular mitosis. It starts with a real microscope image of a cell. A caption, simultaneously spoken by a voiceover (They call this karaoke mode. It turns out to help memory better than either text or speech by itself) instructs me to tap the cells nucleus three times to simulate its breakdown. Further steps in the mitosis process require me to pinch, drag or swipe components in the cell after identifying them. When I’m done, I have a memory of having walked through the process physically, rather than just scanning an illustration with my eyes.
Existing texts can be embellished with tooltips, talking text, and interactive quizzes.
wait 2 secs to reload the imageBesides the interactive color format, Inkling’s technology goes beyond the Kindle and other readers by making it possible to hop around a book, to hand out individual chapters as assignments, and to take notes in highlighter yellow right on the text. The notes are sharable among a social network of students and instructor.
But the real breakthrough is in pricing. Instead of a $180 textbook, learning modules built with Inkling will be priced individually on iTunes, just as music and TV shows are. Instead of buying all 50 chapters of a 1,200-page biology book, an instructor can create a customized bundle of only the modules students will actually use. Pricing hasn’t been determined yet, but it’s likely to be a few dollars per unit — much cheaper than current textbooks. (Apple’s cut of book sales is said to be 30 percent.)
via Inkling lets textbook makers embrace the iPad | VentureBeat.
