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As a student, I tried to use a tablet with ebooks exclusively for a few of my university classes, and it was fairly dreadful. Not because having a tablet is dis

As a student, I tried to use a tablet with ebooks exclusively for a few of my university classes, and it was fairly dreadful. Not because having a tablet is distracting, but because it's not the best way to organize reference information. When I was trying to do homework, I wanted - the questions from page 251, the table of equations from 190, and to be able to flip through and find similar examples. Obviously e-books fail miserably if you need quick access to multiple pages. As a test-taking tool, an iPad is not terribly effective either. The maths teacher shows that she can quickly aggregate the solutions, but there's no good way for the students to express their thought process. I'm pretty sure by their age, if I had simply written the answer on the paper I wouldn't have been given full marks. It's important to teach students good mathematical form from an early age, and this definitely undermines that. Consider maths is one of the easiest classes to write tests for, I wonder how science, english etc. are getting on - likely a lot of terribly simple multiple choice. Lastly, everyone seems so smug. The school's administration thinks they've taken this gigantic problem of how to do learning electronically and they've just knocked it out of the park. I know it's a sort of fluff piece, but it'd be better to see a longer video about problems they solved, lessons they learned, etc. As it stands, it looks like a lot of off-the-shelf software cobbled together by a local Apple rep, which is hardly ground-breaking. They've just thrown a lot of money at it. The administrator featured doesn't seem to be overly technical, and the teacher seems more interested in the fact that now she doesn't have to go home and mark things in her spare time ( but, of course, she's 'dedicated', as she says herself ).

cryptoz 14y ago
Most of those problems have very simple solutions in software features. > When I was trying to do homework, I wanted - the questions from page 251, the table of equations from 190, and to be able to flip through and find similar examples. Obviously e-books fail miserably if you need quick access to multiple pages. The solution to this could be implemented in under a week, for sure. Add a little UI for temporary bookmarks. Let the reader save a set of relevant pages (questions, table of equations, examples) and then swipe between them. Simple.
- mirumirai 14y ago
  That's exactly what I did studying for the GRE with a pdf ebook. Flipping between bookmarks feels just as fast as flipping physical pages.
- alanctgardner2 14y ago
  Except for the loading times. If you've ever used a graphics-heavy textbook, especially on a high-res device like the iPad 3, rendering pages takes forever. It's not just a UI problem, it's an issue of effectively caching the bookmarked pages, and for a large book that might be a big problem.
  - mikevm 14y ago
    I read some scanned PDF files (over 150MB) and they work fine in GoodReader on my iPad 2. I'm sure that graphics heavy vector PDF files would work even faster.
- sopooneo 14y ago
  I like to have multiple books open at once all in my field of view. I think you could only replicate that with multiple tablets.
crusso 14y ago
Keep in mind that you were self-experimenting with a tablet in limited ways vs the holistic approach this school is taking. Problems that you encountered trying to use a tablet in a book-oriented environment could be solved by curriculum changes, technology improvements, UI changes, etc. While improvements to a tablet approach can resolve all of the problems you're mentioning, a regular book will never be regex searchable. A regular piece of paper will never let the teacher know your scores immediately so she can help you past problems and provide instant feedback. A regular set of class books will never decrease the need to linearly increase the number of pieces of paper needed for the amount of materials you want the students to have.
- alanctgardner2 14y ago
  I've pointed out in a couple places, I don't buy the "instant feedback" solution. If I write some maths on paper, my teacher can see where I went wrong. If I check a box on a tablet, it's a boolean. Was I right, or wrong? The teacher saves some time in marking, but now I'll have to go and show them my work (on the forbidden paper!) to see where I went wrong. As far as searching, the index at the back of a book is likely more useful than full-text search. Usually I'm not interested in a particular term, but 'that thing that we covered last week, with the Fourier Transform', or something like that. There aren't any keywords, regexes won't help - you need a well-organized textbook where the headings and sub-headings facilitate this kind of searching. Curriculum changes seem like the wrong way to go as well - if a tablet isn't good for teaching a subject, don't jam the subject into a format the tablet can understand. This is clearest in the testing case, but it's generally applicable: the tablet, as a device, exposes an interface. Paper exposes the ultimate interface: it accepts any free-form input. At best tablets can work in a similar way, but we have a hard time doing anything useful with this input. As we normalize the input to make it easier to process, we move away from a general purpose input device, and we force students to think and express themselves in the specific way we designed the interface to work.
simonh 14y ago
It's true that current software has limitations, but I'm confident these will be improved and I've found loads of workarounds. I run pan & paper RPGs and have a lot of reference material in different PDFs, many of which are compilations of pages I've put together myself with PDFtk[1]. One trick is to screenshot the pages you need to refer to frequently into a photo album. You can also photo pages from paper books for quick reference this way. I also use this trick with map screenshots for journeys where I won't have online access. I used that for a trip to the Lake District. Another trick is to have each PDF file you need to switch between open in a separate app, then four-finger swipe between them. When you learn that trick it's amazing how well it works. Many of the PDFs I keep in iBooks are also in Dropbox and Google Drive and my most used ones are pinned/starred for local storage so I can easily move back and forth between three different files. This method probably won't work as well for ebooks though. Far from ideal, sure, but I've found it a very practical and usable solution. [1] http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/
- stinos 14y ago
  all these tricks are nice and useful, but in my experience they cost more time and are less effective than just lying out all needed paper material in front of you, on your desk, so switching between them is merely a matter of moving your eyes. Of which the electronic equivalent is having lots of screen space like 3 monitors.
  - simonh 14y ago
    Fair enough, but I still think an iPad is a fantastic supplement to using paper materials. It can completely replace them in a lot of use cases, and offers capabilities (such as taking literal photo copies of printed materials, whiteboards, notice boards, etc for reference later) that paper can't compete with. It can't replace paper completely, sure, but they are very rapidly becoming indispensable tools in a lot of situations and I think that will soon include education.
mikevm 14y ago
I'm a student that uses an iPad with ebooks exclusively, and I much prefer the experience to a physical book. As others have said, you complain about software problems, and not inherent problems in the hardware device. In fact, GoodReader lets you set up bookmarks so you can flip back and forth. It also lets you open books in multiple tabs, so you can work with a few books simultaneously. Don't forget another important feature of eBooks - you can search the whole book. You can also annotate without ruining the physical copy ;-). The only problem is books that aren't well made, for example, PDFs without hyperlinks (like "Equation 2.6.1" is not clickable so you have to flip back).

cryptoz 14y ago

Most of those problems have very simple solutions in software features. > When I was trying to do homework, I wanted - the questions from page 251, the table of equations from 190, and to be able to flip through and find similar examples. Obviously e-books fail miserably if you need quick access to multiple pages. The solution to this could be implemented in under a week, for sure. Add a little UI for temporary bookmarks. Let the reader save a set of relevant pages (questions, table of equations, examples) and then swipe between them. Simple.

mirumirai 14y ago
That's exactly what I did studying for the GRE with a pdf ebook. Flipping between bookmarks feels just as fast as flipping physical pages.
alanctgardner2 14y ago
Except for the loading times. If you've ever used a graphics-heavy textbook, especially on a high-res device like the iPad 3, rendering pages takes forever. It's not just a UI problem, it's an issue of effectively caching the bookmarked pages, and for a large book that might be a big problem.
- mikevm 14y ago
  I read some scanned PDF files (over 150MB) and they work fine in GoodReader on my iPad 2. I'm sure that graphics heavy vector PDF files would work even faster.
sopooneo 14y ago
I like to have multiple books open at once all in my field of view. I think you could only replicate that with multiple tablets.

crusso 14y ago

Keep in mind that you were self-experimenting with a tablet in limited ways vs the holistic approach this school is taking. Problems that you encountered trying to use a tablet in a book-oriented environment could be solved by curriculum changes, technology improvements, UI changes, etc. While improvements to a tablet approach can resolve all of the problems you're mentioning, a regular book will never be regex searchable. A regular piece of paper will never let the teacher know your scores immediately so she can help you past problems and provide instant feedback. A regular set of class books will never decrease the need to linearly increase the number of pieces of paper needed for the amount of materials you want the students to have.

alanctgardner2 14y ago
I've pointed out in a couple places, I don't buy the "instant feedback" solution. If I write some maths on paper, my teacher can see where I went wrong. If I check a box on a tablet, it's a boolean. Was I right, or wrong? The teacher saves some time in marking, but now I'll have to go and show them my work (on the forbidden paper!) to see where I went wrong. As far as searching, the index at the back of a book is likely more useful than full-text search. Usually I'm not interested in a particular term, but 'that thing that we covered last week, with the Fourier Transform', or something like that. There aren't any keywords, regexes won't help - you need a well-organized textbook where the headings and sub-headings facilitate this kind of searching. Curriculum changes seem like the wrong way to go as well - if a tablet isn't good for teaching a subject, don't jam the subject into a format the tablet can understand. This is clearest in the testing case, but it's generally applicable: the tablet, as a device, exposes an interface. Paper exposes the ultimate interface: it accepts any free-form input. At best tablets can work in a similar way, but we have a hard time doing anything useful with this input. As we normalize the input to make it easier to process, we move away from a general purpose input device, and we force students to think and express themselves in the specific way we designed the interface to work.

simonh 14y ago

It's true that current software has limitations, but I'm confident these will be improved and I've found loads of workarounds. I run pan & paper RPGs and have a lot of reference material in different PDFs, many of which are compilations of pages I've put together myself with PDFtk[1]. One trick is to screenshot the pages you need to refer to frequently into a photo album. You can also photo pages from paper books for quick reference this way. I also use this trick with map screenshots for journeys where I won't have online access. I used that for a trip to the Lake District. Another trick is to have each PDF file you need to switch between open in a separate app, then four-finger swipe between them. When you learn that trick it's amazing how well it works. Many of the PDFs I keep in iBooks are also in Dropbox and Google Drive and my most used ones are pinned/starred for local storage so I can easily move back and forth between three different files. This method probably won't work as well for ebooks though. Far from ideal, sure, but I've found it a very practical and usable solution. [1] http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/

stinos 14y ago
all these tricks are nice and useful, but in my experience they cost more time and are less effective than just lying out all needed paper material in front of you, on your desk, so switching between them is merely a matter of moving your eyes. Of which the electronic equivalent is having lots of screen space like 3 monitors.
- simonh 14y ago
  Fair enough, but I still think an iPad is a fantastic supplement to using paper materials. It can completely replace them in a lot of use cases, and offers capabilities (such as taking literal photo copies of printed materials, whiteboards, notice boards, etc for reference later) that paper can't compete with. It can't replace paper completely, sure, but they are very rapidly becoming indispensable tools in a lot of situations and I think that will soon include education.

mikevm 14y ago

I'm a student that uses an iPad with ebooks exclusively, and I much prefer the experience to a physical book. As others have said, you complain about software problems, and not inherent problems in the hardware device. In fact, GoodReader lets you set up bookmarks so you can flip back and forth. It also lets you open books in multiple tabs, so you can work with a few books simultaneously. Don't forget another important feature of eBooks - you can search the whole book. You can also annotate without ruining the physical copy ;-). The only problem is books that aren't well made, for example, PDFs without hyperlinks (like "Equation 2.6.1" is not clickable so you have to flip back).