As college campuses get lively again, professors and students are experimenting with a new piece of technology: Apple's iPad. Professors are still trying to figure out how to incorporate the tablet computer into their classes, and a group at the University of Maryland is in the vanguard, as this story in today's Baltimore Sun notes.
We've discussed the iPad's potential for changing our reading experience -- by mixing a biography of Louis Armstrong with videos of his trumpet solos, for example. So the opportunities on a college campus seem limitless. I would have loved the iPad -- especially the prospect of bypassing the chaos of the college bookstore each semester, and of eliminating all those heavy textbooks that I carried in a huge backpack.
Here's an excerpt from the Sun story: According to a survey this year by the National Association of College Stores, which represents campus bookstores, digital textbooks accounted for only 2.8 percent of $5.8 billion in sales of new, used and electronic textbooks last year, and that's expected to grow to more than 10 percent by 2012. About 15 percent of college courses offered digital textbooks last year, according to NACS.
"This is not the year of the e-textbook," said Charles Schmidt, spokesman for the association. "But we're reaching a tipping point soon."
Other challenges complicate the integration of the iPad and similar devices into university learning. Institutional budgets have been strained during the recession, for instance. And anti-technology attitudes among both older teachers — and even some younger faculty — are a hurdle, Brown said.
"There's still a pretty substantial old guard of faculty, of tenured professors who came up in a system that worked well for them, and there's no incentive to change, and that includes attitudes in use of technology," [said Gary Brown, of Washington State University's Center for Teaching, Learning & Technology.] "The tension is still there in academia: Will we use technology effectively?"