iBooks and the future of publishing

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Yesterday Apple Computer announced the iBooks Author software and a program that invites content creators to create books that can be viewed in Apple’s iBook 2 software app on iPads everywhere. If you want to use this new tool you have to have OSX Lion installed on your Macintosh computer. Luckily for me I bought Lion and Lion Server in August of last year. I was eager to try out the new software and downloaded it from the App Store on my MacBook Pro.  The software is easy to use and books can easily be created and published to Apple’s iBook Store or shared locally with colleagues and classmates in your own school. There are even templates in the software that make content creation very easy.  I created a demonstration book last night after some reading and shared it with two colleagues who loaded it onto their iPads from link I sent them.

I’ve been a proponent of open source and open educational resources for a long time and this product is neither open source nor truly an open educational resource, but it is innovative and will push the envelope. Traditional publishing companies will be forced to move in this direction or face a shrinking market. Educators in K-12 and higher education will be able to author their own content and share it with their students easily and affordably as long as those students have iPads and iPods.

I have recently been working with 7th grade students to publish their own e-book using Lulu.com and the ePub format. That has been a great learning experience and it revolutionizes opportunities for students and others to publish their content without all the hassles of traditional publishing. A middle school student equipped with a MacBook and iBooks Author could easily create content that could be sold in Apple’s iBook Store and that student could easily become an overnight sensation. It’s not unbelievable at all.  I have been encouraging my students to entertain these possibilities. Thank you Apple for providing yet another tool that revolutionizes education.

Moodle & iPad

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I’m a Moodle using educator and for the last couple of years the idea of interacting with Moodle using both iPad and Android has provided me food for thought. Both Android and IPad using their native browsers can support forums, chats, & quizzes but when it comes to uploading files from mine or any other iPad I get stumped. One of my colleagues has used MoodlEZ to download Microsoft Word documents but is unable to edit them and then re-upload them. I’ve also done some searching on Google but without any real success. Since Safari and iOS are not open source there is really no way to address the issue. I’m interested in solutions if you have one.

Apple text books

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There is no doubt that e-books have revolutionized my own reading experience. I own nearly forty e-books. Most are from Amazon, a few from Barnes & Noble, one from Google and although I own an iPad I don’t think I have ever purchased books from Apple.  Apple made a major announcement today about their new textbooks for the iPad. I’m wondering how many schools are going to go out and purchase iPads to get books that are available elsewhere for a fraction of the total cost of ownership. My bet is that many schools will purchase iPads and get these new e-books but will save no money in the process and will instead waste thousands of dollars at a time when money is tight in education.

There is little doubt in my mind that e-books are here to stay but no one has come up with a really good way of disseminating them at a cost that rivals their paper predecessors. From what I read today on a couple of blogs Apple will sell your book as long as it’s less than $14.99 and they get 30% of the proceeds and you have to sign a fealty oath that you won’t sell the book anywhere else. That’s not really a good deal and especially for young publishers. I’m currently working with a small group of students to produce an e-book from our class. We don’t expect to make money. It’s primarily a keepsake and since it’s going to published in ePub format it will be viewable on the iPad or any other device that supports ePub.

Schools in New York State receive $43.25/per student/year for textbook aid. Refer to this link from the NYSED website. If you factor in New York State Aid for computer software you add about another $15/student. To make it easy let’s round that number to $60 per student for textbook and software aid. In a school with 1500 students that means you’d get about $90,000 in state aid. Assuming you need fifteen hundred iPads to make this work that will be another 1500 x $499 = $748,500.

This isn’t exactly a Gutenberg moment! I’m not anti-Apple. I purchased four iPads this year. I’m composing this post on a MacBook, but I am saying there are less expensive ways to get engaging text to students and even those using iPads.

A new model

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We need a new model in education. Instead of top-down, we need bottom-up leadership. We need a paradigm change. K-12 education is just about the only place in America or the world where we still support the industrial age model of leadership. We need flatter organizations where everyone has leadership capacity and it gets utilized. We need more transformational leaders and less managers. We need people who empower each other and their students. I’ve read a great deal in the past couple of years about those models, but seen very implementation in practice. What will it take to change the direction. I’d love to have a chance to find out.

Hospitality

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For the last dozen years I’ve been a member of the Mount Irenaeus community. My affiliation with “the Mountain” as we call it has provided me with a laboratory as it were to observe the behavior of all who come there. Everything about Mt. Irenaeus bespeaks hospitality and most visitors return. Some like me come regularly because I live nearby while others who live at some distance return less regularly. How often do educators and especially educational leaders realize the importance of hospitality. Schools have become increasingly less hospitable at a time when it is most counter-productive to be so.

Rigorous standards, increased testing and accountability have brought considerable strife to most schools, the children, teachers, administrators and parents associated with them. As a graduate student in educational leadership I became interested in the idea of community building and how communities can transform learning. How can we create community in institutions that have become inherently in-hospitable. In my classroom I make it a point to greet each student usually with a handshake and a verbal “welcome to class.” It has become such a habit that the students themselves welcome me when I forget to greet them. Hospitality has become an earmark of our class culture.

I believe that hospitality ought to be a part of all school cultures and that a concerted effort is needed to maintain an atmosphere of hospitality. We need less barriers in schools and more bridges to learning and each other. Hospitality is an invitation to community and never has community been more important in education whether public or private. The social fabric of our local communities has been torn asunder by the economic and cultural cataclysms of the recent past. More than ever we need schools to be communities of learning and the best way to do that is to begin by greeting our students and their parents when they come to school.

Still waters

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I have come here to sit in silence in a busy place that us far from silent. Sitting beside still waters always quiets my soul. Today is no different from any other day except I’m here rather than there. I like it here in a city and place I used to fear. The past two years mark a delightful transformation in my perception of the City of Buffalo and it’s parks. I find myself wishing I lived here and worked here too. I used to dread cities with the host of strangers and though I’m still an introvert I find community, acceptance and peace here. The Olmsted Parks in Buffalo, New York are beautiful works of art and this contemplative garden near the museum is just another fine example of that artistry.

Learning

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I’m 59 and delighted to be actively learning new things every day. Everyone in my family own an iPad. I gave two of them as Christmas presents this year. The other two were purchased earlier in the year. I own a MacBook Pro and each of our children own MacBooks. Our daughter, daughter-in-law and I have iPhones. My son has a Blackberry and my wife a feature phone. I think it’s safe to say that we are tech savvy. Four of the five of us earn our living as teachers. Our daughter is beginning to use Edmodo. I use Moodle. Four of us use Twitter. We are all Facebookers. We all have read ebooks. We all have bachelors degrees and four of us hold masters degrees. We’re educated in other words and the one masters free member of the family holds the equivalent of a masters in sales. We are well read and much of our content comes from the Internet.

I mention this not to brag but to invite a conversation about learning and what it means to be educated in the 21st century. An amazing amount of lip service is paid to 21st century skills but how much or how many of those skills are actually measured in today’s schools. It has been nearly thirty-five years since Jobs and Wozniak introduced the Apple II. It has been nearly twenty years since the graphical Internet made its way into our lives. Yet, most schools continue to operate as if we were still living in 1975. Up to this point in most of our lives technology in education has been made to fit education as it existed rather than education being forced to re-fit itself to technology and a society that has been dramatically transformed by the ubiquitous presence of technology.

It all reminds me a bit of the scene in Borat where a horse is pulling an automobile around the village as if the automobile required an external power source. What will it take to change the dynamic? How can we re-tool education to fit technology rather than the other way around?

What is transformational leadership?

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It’s leadership that invites authentic participation by all parties. It’s excludes no one and invites everyone to be a part of the process. It invites authentic community as a result of wholehearted participation in an event or series of events that are much more a journey than a process.