The iPad: A Revolution in Education and Textbooks?

When I was in highschool every day I had to stuff my bag with the books I'd need for that day's classes. On a bad day that meant breaking your back and replacing the bag from your left to your right hand and back again as you relocated from one classroom to the other. If you started highschool with a new bag by the time you got into your fourth or fifth year the handles might suddenly break because of the continuous strain. It was hilarious if it happened to someone else, but a major nuissance if it happend to yourself.

At the time most kids in The Netherlands used some kind of leather briefcase and if you were really cool you used a shopping bag for which, in some schools you could be banned, because it was a sign of negligence (no joking!). In Germany they had these big chunky backpacks in yellow and orange with reflectors attached to them. Nowadays backpacks and shoulder bags have become fashion items and a means to express your personality, but everybody is still carrying around all those books. Serious academic research has been done into the maximum allowable weight of schoolbags and the effect of backpacks on children's backs.

Now imagine a single electronic device that could stock all your textbooks, wouldn't that be amazing?

Imagine that this device would make it possible to watch videos, do exercises, look at a three dimensional geometric figure from all sides and do simulations so you can see for yourself how things work. Imagine that it could randomize foreign language tests, and wow, that you could hear a native speaker pronounce the words, that you could then say the words yourself and that the device would offer feedback. Imagine that you could jump from one chapter and from one textbook to another.

Imagine children in India, Kenia, Tanzania, China and so on all having such a device, now that would be a revolution in education.

The iPad is a first generation product. Its current flaws will be solved in time as user feedback trickles in. The Kindle was designed as an alternative for a book. In my view the iPad is a whole new product, because it integrates existing technologies. There is nothing new about the functionality that I described. You can find Java applets doing all of this and more, except that they don't tend to be user friendly. The key is integrating it with textbooks. This is where those apps from the iPhone app store come in. There is nothing new about the hardware either, but it's not about hardware, it's about content. Perhaps the possibility to use it in both horizontal and vertical orientation makes all the difference between the iPad and laptops, since today's books all have a vertical orientation.

It is a fact that laptops (or netbooks for that matter) are not used en masse in education and that publishers have not jumped on the opportunities offered by yesterday's technology. This would make for a good business school case study. Perhaps the iPad can change all that.

Update: One startup is already working on it.