Apple’s Un-Revolutionary iBooks: Using tomorrow’s technology to teach yesterday’s curriculum

Elliot: Are you ready for the storm of protest that will rain upon us when we critique the un-revolutionary Apple announcement about textbooks?

Cathie: We were called iPad haters (even though we each have one and we develop apps for it), now we will be called iBook haters. Elliot, this is not a good reputation to have.

Elliot: But we are not haters! The Age of Mobilism empowers the world's youth as never before.

Cathie: Flowery, very flowery. But, let's talk about the iBook; bring it on.

Elliot (with his best boyish grin): Yup, let's gird our loins.

Cathie (shaking her head): Please... Gird OUR loins? I don't think so.

Elliot: If you identify THE problems in K-12 education today...

Cathie: ...Apple's iBook announcement would not be an answer to any of them.

Elliot: Providing "better content," given the plethora of resources already available, doesn't help to address the critical challenges facing K-12.

Cathie: The problem is not content; the problem is curriculum. Teachers need roadmaps for what they should do in a classroom.

Elliot: After working with hundreds of teachers all around the world -- don't we know! The early adopters...

Cathie: ...the artisan teachers, using Tom Carroll's term...

Elliot: ...yes, they can take a BYOD classroom and have it humming along. But the everyday teachers...

Cathie: ...the ones who have a life, who see teaching as a profession, not as a mission, need curriculum to direct them. Apple's iBook textbooks focus on making the content "better" through interactivity and such. But teachers need curriculum – especially as BYOD explodes.

Elliot: But BYOD is ok as long as it is iPads.

Cathie: Pretty narrow definition of Bring Your Own Device... as long as it is an iPad. But, let's really take the gloves off -- If "reading" an interactive textbook is what teachers are supposed to do in a classroom with their kids, then "direct instruction pedagogy" – continues to win the day. Just tell the kids the stuff – but tell it to them with pretty pictures.

Elliot: I can see John Dewey rolling over in his grave.

Cathie (eyes rolling...and trying to hide a smile): ELLIOT!!!

Elliot (grinning like Alice's Cheshire cat): Sorry... ha ha ha.... OOPS! But check out this quote that is pure Dewey; thank you Jim Rosso for sending this epiphany-making snippet to me:

"They [teachers] give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking, or the intentional noting of connections; learning naturally results."

Cathie: The challenge that teachers face throughout the school day is absolutely identified in that great quote: giving each and every student something that he or she can do, that stretches them as Vygotsky would recommend, something for which they have the tools at their disposal, something that will also serve as a way to assess their growth, something...

Elliot: Apple's iBook not only doesn't help the teacher with those "somethings", it reduces learning to consuming, not doing, yet again. Look at screen captures from the Apple website.

Cathie: Excuse me, but for Apple to say that their iBooks have "nothing textbook about them" is totally disingenuous.

Elliot: You actually used "disingenuous" in a conversation? OHMYGAWD. Who talks like that? Ha Ha Ha...

Cathie: ... moving right along, if iBooks are the "next chapter in learning"

Elliot (beaming): Apple is using tomorrow's technology to teach yesterday's curriculum. How "next" is that?

Cathie: That wins the best rhetorical question of the day prize.

Elliot: Yeah? And what do I get?

Cathie (smiling): You get to say, "Goodbye folks."

Elliot (ditto): Goodbye folks.