Apple and education and the poor reporting that came with the announcement
Information moves very quickly in the information age. People are reporters every snippet, quote, fact, spec sheet, and everything else they can if it deal with technology. It is super saturated. Only the biggest names get exclusives interviews, hands-on product times and invites to the announcement events going on. One thing that everyone seems to have taken to is reposting tech stories without fact-checking or even spell checking.
This morning, Apple did what Apple does best and turned an indusry on its ear. They've done it with computres, music, movies and phones. Education has always been in their DNA, but that became another focus today. iBooks is now also for textbooks. I wouldn't be surprised if United Airlines putting iPads in the hands of pilots and removing the 20 pound bag of charts, maps, flight plans, etc from the cockpit didn't help inspire Apple to further their green efforts and sell more iPads in the process.
Anyone with a Mac running OS X Lion can now download, for free, the iBooks Author app and put their textbooks in the iTunes store. From here students can download digital textbooks. The author can make them free or paid. The magic of it is that they are dynamic in more than one way. They can be updated immediately so information is never out of date (I suppose history books don't suffer from that). Old prints, old editions, things moving to different pages, and scrambling to even find the right copy all go away immediately.
The more important way that they are dynamic is in the content the student is viewing. It's interactive so questions and exercises can be built right into it. Videos and keynote presentations play as part of the text. It is almost like a Harry Potter newspaper in some respects. While it may seem like it's just flashy (no pun intended) and not useful, imagine a chemistry student looking at constant moving atoms as they exist instead of a static image on the page.
It is not the biggest consumer announcement, but for people in education (as I am), this changes the way we reach our students and keep them engaged. Engagement is what makes this a truly special way of doing things. The ease of use is the feather in the cap.
Speaking of engagement, it would seem that reporters are so engaged in getting the news out that they don't care if it is correct. Many of them just repost, reblog, reuse the original source story. That happened today. Everyone was commenting on and quoting Apple's Peter Schiller. Here's the rub. Peter Schiller doesn't work at Apple. At least not in an executive position that announces new products. However, Phillip W. Schiller does. He is the Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Apple and prominent enough at all the events that people know him by face. You know what he does. You know what kind of talk will happen when he comes out on stage. But the tech news community doesn't know his name. They probably do but what may be even worse. It is not important enough to check it and get it right. I bet Phil Schiller would disagree.
The source story was wrong. The reporter made a mistake. That happens. None of the people out there that reblogged the story managed to find it either. That is a problem. In this world of technology news, where things can be so technical and difficult to understand for the average consumer, having mistakes pop up and then propagate across the web will only make it more difficult for the consumer to keep up and understand. And this happened with brands people have come to trust, Mashable being the very first one I saw it on this morning.
As more journalism tools arise, the art and craft of journalism is dying. It's easy to write, but not everyone is a journalist. Mistakes like this prove it. Blogging helped enable it. We will see if this announcement from Apple today doesn't make everyone a textbook author and turns the educational book into a Wikipedia like repository for bad information. It is an excellent idea, if the ideas are vetted somehow or students don't download free (wrong) versions of a similar book to save a few bucks. If it stays professional and high quality, this will be an amazing advance for education.
