Apple Education Event, January 19, 2012
What was shown.
Traditional books are losing to electronic ones today in terms of effectiveness. To help education, they made a new version of iBooks called iBooks 2.
iBooks 2 was built with a focus on interactivity: video, animation, images, and apparently something else as well. Overall, it's still just a reader. Many magazine apps can already do all of this.
Useful things like notes are there too.
iBooks 2 is available today already, and a new section with interactive books should appear in the App Store.
But what is much more interesting is the new software package for Mac OS: iBooks Author.
As the name makes clear, this app is for creating books for iBooks. The tool promises to be very simple, to work together with Keynote, and in addition to text it lets you create interactive elements, add widgets to a book, and even write them yourself in Javascript and HTML. iBooks Author is free, which is fairly rare for Apple software. And again, it is available today.
Essentially, Apple gave people a toolkit for creating interactive books, one simple enough that even an ordinary teacher can understand it. And if you want something more complex, write your own interactivity in HTML+Javascript.
Apple gets a direct benefit from this: increased iPad sales, and most likely a cut of book sales. Education is a perpetual field, and people now have more reasons to buy an iPad.
In my opinion, this is excellent, definitely not unnecessary. You can make both serious books and just some learning materials. All of it is always with you on a single iPad. Now anyone can create their own educational publication, complete with interactivity, which is way more interesting for learners (well, anyone who owns a Mac :) ). And most importantly, there is another way to distribute a book now. It is simpler and more accessible. It is also much easier to keep the information in your publication up to date, and people will receive corrections or updated information quickly and easily through an update.
And all of this under the banner of improving education. As Phil Schiller said from the stage during the event: "That is reinventing the textbook".
It looks like this year we can expect an abundance of different books, including bad ones, just like what happened with the App Store. And a lot of articles on the topic "Apple is killing printed books". Once again Apple made a major step first in some direction, even though all year different people will try to convince everyone otherwise.
The second thing was iTunes U. To be honest, until now I never really understood what it was. Now they have updated it and you can create your own educational courses, and people can subscribe to them.
They made a new iPad app: iTunes U. It gives access to courses: materials, announcements, notes, and a to-do list. From the app you can send a person directly into iBooks to the exact place in the text, for example the place they need for homework.
iTunes U is free, but you will have to pay for books and courses. And it is also available today.
I really want to try it myself and see what it is like. Distance learning in action?
So that's basically everything they showed. There was no new iPad; the focus was entirely on software.
The Apple ecosystem has expanded even further. It's cool that students today have toys like this. I still remember with hatred the lines at the university library and that idiotic bureaucracy with stamps in every building.