> Inevitably these approaches to learning will get hindered by myopic interpretation of this metric I really don't understand this attitude. Of course this wil

> Inevitably these approaches to learning will get hindered by myopic interpretation of this metric I really don't understand this attitude. Of course this will not work if it is used incorrectly. Why would you expect any different? However, the same can be said for normal course work. What if the teacher gets the students to read only the first word of each sentence? This shows books will never work, and lecturing is the only way to teach. Putting that aside, the point is that as you say, there are many ways to learn a topic. Asking children how they best learn things is not going to get useful answers most of the time, but analysis of reading and research patterns using sophisticated data mining or ML software will allow teachers to segment their students into groups that all learn in a similar way. So everyone benefits. As I suggest above, I'd go further than instrumenting the ebooks. If they are on a tablet device using the Internet, then instrument the browser too, and you can correlate Wikipedia and Google searches with whatever page of the textbook they were on, and see what topics are unclear and always need additional research. You would also find out which students are deeply interested in the topic, as they read on past the end of the assignment, and download extra information or search for related topics. And you can discipline those who never open the book a all, and spend all their time looking at amusing cat pictures. With such power there is also a responsibility to manage the student's privacy appropriately, bout with a school-provided device, similar to a work laptop, they should have no expectation of absolute privacy anyway. I think any worries about monitoring pale into insignificance against the powerful augmented learning regimes that can be created, and a suitable auditing and management routine will prevent any abuse.