Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Not everyone ready for the digital textbook revolution

Nine out of 10 Darden School of Business students said they would recommend the Kindle as a "personal reading device," though only 2 of 10 would recommend it for class readings.
Nine out of 10 Darden School of Business students said they would recommend the Kindle as a "personal reading device," though only 2 of 10 would recommend it for class readings.

Don’t let the iPhones and BlackBerries fool you: Research and a recent pilot program that put eReaders in college students’ hands suggest that most students aren’t ready to read their textbooks electronically, despite the proliferation of internet-ready mobile devices on campuses nationwide.

In fact, 74 percent of students surveyed by the National Association of College Stores (NACS), a nonprofit trade organization representing 3,000 campus retailers, preferred printed textbooks for their college classes.

The study, released May 25, also found that more than half of college students surveyed on 19 campuses said they “were unsure about purchasing digital textbooks or would not consider buying them even if they were available.”…Read More

Dual-screen tablet maker hopes to reinvent the textbook

A new dual-screen tablet from California startup Kno aims to make electronic textbooks into a viable business, Wired reports. It’ll need some luck: Tech giants like Amazon and Apple haven’t yet cracked the e-textbook market, despite multiple attempts. “If you look at why e-textbooks have failed in the last ten years, the biggest problem is the size of the screen,” says Osman Rashid, co-founder and CEO of Kno. “Textbooks won’t fit into a 10-inch or 12-inch screen, so you have to scroll up and down and right and left. It makes for a poor learning experience.” Kno’s founders say they can fix that. The device has two 14-inch LCD touch screens that fold in like a book. The idea is to make textbook pages fit perfectly across the screen and flow from one digital page to another. Kno made its public debut at the D8 technology conference June 2. The device will include a stylus for handwriting recognition, have a full browser, support Flash, and offer six to eight hours of battery life. The Kno will offer 16 GB or 32 GB of storage—enough to store 10 semesters’ worth of files, documents, and books, says Rashid…

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