Class in a Pad

In today’s TED Talk Mike Matas describes the first full-length interactive book that has been designed for the iPad. Users can scroll through the contents or the pages of the book, fold out pictures and videos or engage with some of the interactive features e.g. location mapping or application of the books materials. It is a pretty impressive demonstration.

At the end of the talk Matas mentions that they hope to make this available to publishers who can then produce beautiful and complex digital books. I wonder why they don’t also make it available to educators. I think this could be a powerful tool for “online” classes. The professor can create the entire class on this format (rather than on Blackboard). Instead of chapters they create sections for different parts of the course. Then they embed outside readings, their own notes, videos and pictures. Since the iPad can connect to the Internet all the students can collaborate together within the “book.” With the addition of some sort of discussion board, blogging tool or wiki feature students (or anyone with access to the book) could comment and connect to all the different parts of the course, add their own thoughts and explore a new medium for education. I’m sure there are many other possibilities that I am missing too.

I would love to see something like this experimented with within LIS education. There are so many “meta” elements about this that overlap with a lot of the things the LIS profession is confronted with. Not to mention that just experimenting with learning in this new way would be an education in and of itself. Sure, there are plenty of barriers to attempting this and we could find out that and interactive digital book actually is not a good way to organize an online classroom – but we will never know until we try. I’ll be first in line to volunteer for a class attempted this way.

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