Lately, a lot of hype has been surrounding tablet computers and their future role in the wide world of computing. Although tablet computers have been around for many years, new products like Apple's soon to be released iPad 2 and Motorola's new Xoom are allowing tablets to become versatile tools. Products like Apple's iPad give a sense of user friendliness that is currently unrivaled in the tablet world, whereas the new Android 3.0 honeycomb OS allows users to create at a level similar to a laptop computer would.
The portability of tablets allows users to carry them practically anywhere they travel and there is a wonderful principle that says that computing is only going to improve Moore and Moore. To me, one of the most intriguing things about tablets is their potential to significantly reduce printed text. Tablets are rapidly replacing books and newspaper, drawing publishers and news corporations into the digital world. Amazon's kindle, which has only been around for about three and a half years, already has over 800,000 books available to download directly to the device.
As far as tablet specific news publications go, The Daily, an iPad exclusive newspaper is incredibly popular, offering a newspaper style format integrated with video and interactive advertisements. It even has a daily crossword and Sudoku puzzles for readers to enjoy. However, one of the biggest draws of tablets to me is their role in the education field.
Last week at Abilene Christian University, the ACU Connected Summit was held with one of the main focuses being the future role that tablets will play in the education field. Two sessions that I attended stood out to me. The first was given by Dr. Mark Phillips, a management professor at ACU. In the fall 2010 semester, Dr. Phillips Introduction to Business class of twenty college freshmen took basic concepts found in most texts used for that course and created a free online text for future classes to use. This text (located at edge4.org) is being used in the spring 2011 intro class and will continue to be used and updated if it works well. This sort of innovation will allow devices like tablets to become a viable alternative to textbooks in the future.
App developer Inkling has taken this concept a step further and has taken actual textbooks and created a version of them specifically for the iPad. In the microeconomics class that I am currently taking, we use one of these interactive Inkling texts and if integrated properly, I feel that this may become the future of textbooks.
The atoms to bits concept of digitization is in full force here. Costs will be able to be reduced since no physical book is being used and students will not have to carry around multiple books wherever they go. All they would need is a tablet, and with prices falling (a 16 gig refurbished 1st generation iPad can be bought on apple.com for only $350) many tablets aren't much more expensive than textbooks. Books, notes, and class wide collaborative tools such as ResponseWare will be able to be included all in one device that weighs under two pounds. When Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak spoke at ACU for the Connected Summit, he also agreed that technology in the classroom was very important and even boldly predicted that within twenty years the majority of books would be digital. Although I believe that there will always be a place for printed books, I tend to agree, and with new technologies such as Google's book scanning process, which has already scanned over
12 million books, the future looks bright.
