Mr. Helprin’s double sentiment is a compelling one.  While I would certainly fall short of accusing our clients of “greed, vanity, and corruption”, it is widely said that current business logic and product models are at least in need of appraisal and, at most, outmoded and unsustainable.

I do agree completely, however, with Helprin’s assertion that neither view necessitates “pulling down the whole temple”.  What Helprin is specifically decrying is rampant scanning and illegal sharing of textbooks online – a clear violation of copyright and, by extension, of the entire utility of intellectual property and the economic foundation of the creative professions – the temple indeed.

However,  ’The Temple’ can expand to include not just copyright and intellectual property issues but also the entire endeavor of academic and creative professionals producing quality pedagogical materials.  You may have read this article in last Sunday’s NYT.  The article essentially presents, as a replacement for textbooks, Curriki – a nonprofit that states its mission thus: “to provide free, high-quality curricula and education resources to teachers, students and parents around the world.”  Curikki leverages the crowd; volunteering educators generate and disseminate, via the Curikki site, lessons and curricula.

But why should educators be doing this for free?  Don’t they do enough?  And what is the real utility of providing educators on the receiving end with a vast collection of unvetted content?   While the current textbook scene may be unpopular, perhaps it is not yet time to abandon the entire model.  I hope there is still room for remunerated professional content providers, instructional designers, and interaction designers to create powerful pedagogical experiences for a variety of platforms.

While involving professionals may incur a cost to consumers, new business models can greatly reduce that cost. Perhaps “high-quality curricula and education resources [for] teachers, students and parents around the world”  can be achieved more effectively by the textbook publishers themselves.  They do have the resources to achieve this efficiently and now.  We can appeal to these businesses to formulate a solution.  Maybe we should not be so eager to throw out the baby with the bathwater, or with the temple for that matter.

Consider:

“Africans are buying mobile phones at a world record rate, with take-up soaring by 550% in five years…” from The Guardian.

“Markets in developing countries have continued to grow at double digit rates -some as high as 100% per year- and have penetration rates ranging from low double digits to 50%” according to wikinvest.

According to this source 57% of the population in developing nations have mobile devices.

Can textbook publishers localize their content and interactive experiences and inexpensively deliver world-class education to the world? With mobile delivery strategies in place, can we expedite the addition of ‘social justice’ and ‘global access’ to the mission statements of textbook publishers?

In his excellent book New Physical Ideas Are Here Needed, Art Bardige posits a view of textbooks and pedagogical media that deeply resonates with our mission at Exprima Media.

“Obesity in both people and in textbooks is an insidious thing…and getting rid of that weight is very, very difficult.”

Our obese textbooks are overeating at an all-you-can eat buffet of competitive market forces and ever diversifying instructor and institutional demands. The result – overlarge and very expensive disposable books. From my experience as a college instructor, we routinely could not cover at least 30% of what was in the anthropology textbooks that were available. Students were rightly incensed (or at least cynical) – they spent $80+ on a bundle of content they did not entirely need and that had low resale value and no lasting authority.

So, can we build a better textbook? Art Bardige’s response is most compelling: No. For the style of teaching and learning required in today’s colleges and universities, the 20th century method of pedagogical content delivery – textbook – is essentially insufficient. In Mr. Bardige’s words:

“The textbook cannot be significantly improved upon. [It] cannot be rewritten or reshaped into a better form. New curriculum ideas…cannot be done in this old technology. They will not work with the broad spectrum of students we have today. The textbook cannot be changed, and it does not work today. We need a new technology of education if we are to significantly improve what we do.” [emphasis added].

The large textbook publishers are in possession of the greatest collection of pedagogical content ever assembled. And this is their opportunity to use these assets to craft compelling, effective, and joyful educational experiences. Delivering content via web and native mobile applications can actually liberate these publishers from simply ‘delivering content’. They can now graduate to providing powerful, outcomes-based, interactive and assessable contexts for teaching and learning. The 200 year old textbook content delivery method is facing an evolutionary moment. The technology is ready and so are the students.

We strongly advocate that these publishers partner with experienced user-centered interaction designers to make this happen. Interaction designers have tried-and-true methods and protocols for generating effective experiences. These methods, combined with educational publisher’s content and subject matter experts, will usher in the future of education.

I’ll give the final word to Mr. Bardige:

“We have a great and exciting educational future ahead of us, one that can enable our children and our children’s children to achieve their dreams…We have for so long lived with such a limited technology of education that it may be hard for many of us to imagine the capability of a new educational technology to achieve what may seem like an impossible dream. When Star Trek first appeared on TV 40 years ago, the handheld communicator may well have been the most interesting and indeed exciting 23rd century invention. Imagine carrying a small object in your pocket that enabled you to communicate with anyone, to take sensor readings of all kinds of things, to know where you were at all times, and to connect you to a “central computer” which contained all of human knowledge. Today, our children carry around such devices. They enable them to talk to anyone, to know where they are, to play games, to take pictures, to record voices, and even to connect to the great Web of almost all human knowledge. Let your imagination see in our new technology of education the potential for this great new educational future to actually happen.”

With excellent design, useful functionality, and world-class content, Exprima Media is developing apps to help make learning more ubiquitous, accessible, and fun.

This seems like the very definition of the one place where we often find we must “continue in our pursuit” despite the presence of invisible, real, and threatening monsters: the public restroom. So what magic have we prepared to protect us in this place? One of our most cutting-edge technologies arose in the public restroom: interactive gesture. Where was the fist place you encountered a technological interface that responded to physical movement without direct touch? The bathroom.

For a while now, our public restrooms have been slowly populated with magical devices which allow us to pee, flush, and wash without ever touching anything. A magical wave of the hand, a gesture once only effective for evil magicians and Jedi Knights, can flush toilets, turn on sinks, and dispense towels; this is a veritable Disney Fantasia performance right here in the Texaco bathroom.

So next time you play with your Wii, whether it be tennis or hoola hooping, remember that this technology was brought to you by the war against those invisible monsters that lurk in public restrooms…

The transition from hand-scribed manuscripts to printed books was marked by a quarter-century interaction design lag. This stretch of the 15th century is known for the production of incunabula – printed books lacking the interface design advancements that have since become standard navigational features of book user experience such as page numbering, the table of contents, punctuation, and footnotes.

This lag my be attributed to market expectations – early book consumers wanted books that navigated like the manuscripts that preceded these moveable type facsimiles. Just as early book buyers expected books to work like manuscripts, modern ebook consumers expect ebooks to work like printed books. This has resulted in a wave of electronic incunabula – new platforms lacking interaction design innovations that exploit platform-specific opportunities.

There are a few famous papers by scientists, like the 1945 Atlantic article ‘As We May Think’ by Vannevar Bush. In this article, Bush imagines a complex microfilm device, a “memex’ – a desk topped with “slanting translucent screens” and a keyboard. Within one’s memex desk, an individual
“stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility… Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them… There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.”

There’s also this remarkable video from 1967 meant to show life in 1999:

Far out. Although it seems they saw technology progressing more quickly than gender equity…

Going further back, there’s a Ladies Home Journal piece entitled ‘What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years’ published in December 1900. In addition to a few dreary predictions like “There will be no wild animals except in menageries,” there are fascinatingly accurate predictions such as “Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today.”

Then there’s this one, which gives me geek-chills:

Man will see around the world. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span… The instrument bringing these distant scenes to the very doors of people will be connected with a giant telephone apparatus transmitting each incidental sound in its appropriate place.

I love living in the future, finding delight in blazing new trails to distant scenes in a polyester shirt…

Corey

But aside from these recently popular cyborgian devices, what other compelling emergent hardware might we be designing for? As I’ve blogged here in the past, I personally can’t wait to design for a wider application of epaper.

The folks at Lunar Design are conceiving interactive clothing constructed from an epaper-like material. Soon, interface designers and fashion designers will be sharing studio space…

The fashion universe has been putting holographic technology to use as well. This holographic Kate Moss is breathtaking (although I keep expecting her to lean over and say “Help me Obi Wan Kenobe, you’re my only hope!”) and the implications for the fine arts and cinema are readily apparent.

What might be some more utilitarian applications? Certainly, the educational world could benefit from this – imagine your e-textbooks coming with accurate holographic maps of the moon. Nice.

Then there’s MIT’s ‘Siftables‘ – little blocks that have a video display and audio capabilities. The creators of siftables describe them thusly:

Siftables are cookie-sized computers with motion sensing, neighbor detection, graphical display, and wireless communication. They act in concert to form a single interface: users physically manipulate them – piling, grouping, sorting – to interact with digital information and media. Siftables provides a new platform on which to implement tangible, visual and mobile applications.

Something about this is intriguing, but I don’t know what, exactly. It is cool and obviously could make a great toy or game, but I sense there’s a wider application I’m just not getting. Watch this video and reply if you have any ideas…

One thing I am certain of – I’m looking forward to designing an interface for a siftable-generated holographic teaching tool while wearing my interactive jacket.

- Corey

eTextbook iBooks on the iPad?

I see some real potential for textbooks and students. It’s hard to tell at this point, but it looks like the actual iBook app on the just-announced iPad is not particularly geared toward research-type reading – annotation, notes, integrated multimedia – but then again, maybe it is. Either way, a well-made eTextbook app could take care of that. A big question I have is the whole ‘eye-strain’ issue that e-paper solves. Will the illuminated screen of the iPad prohibit long-session reading? If not, is e-paper and e-ink dead? So soon?

With excellent design, useful functionality, and world-class content, Quizr is just one in a line of educational apps Exprima is developing to help make learning more ubiquitous, accessible, and fun.