Huh. I read on a tablet all of the time, I guess that makes me a prisoner of hype! Minority view, yes.
(This is sad, really. As I understand, e-Ink tech is patented to death, so there's little progress there.)
Still, I'm not saying iPads are useless in general. The topic is relative merit of iPad vs. other possibilities, in education. My claims are as follows:
- iPad is a bad idea in education, partly because of the low capabilities of the device, and partly because not much apps that would would make full use of the capabilities of the device in order to encourage learning (this is kind of similar to "edutainment" or "educational games" for PC - utter crap that only fools parents)
- given that, iPad looses to plethora of other tools available for teachers, most of which are low-tech
- neither of the two points above will prevent iPad from succeeding on this market, as the hype is strong enough to overcome rational obstacles
--
Incidentally, I feel like back in 2015. I thought iPads already succeeded in getting sold to schools en masse, and it already turned out to be a colossal waste of money. I'm pretty sure we already had those discussions on HN.
I gave all my nieces and nephews tablets, and they all used them, I hope I didn’t destroy their lives.
Seriously, I have a hard time believing you can quote any evidence that a paper book is much better than a tablet for everyone. Which appears to be your assertion, although it’s hard to tell.
We mostly think of paper as a poor archival medium because of a few decades, mainly at the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, when high-acid wood pulp paper was very widely used. (Newspapers are also sometimes printed on cheap acidic newsprint.) Acidic paper can become brittle within 20 years or so, or in any case much less than a century, although this also depends on many other factors. But both before and after this period, many books were printed on acid-free paper, and these are likely to survive for centuries, even with occasional use. The observations about paper's longevity in, for instance, Nicholson Baker's polemical Double Fold, tallies well with my experience as the son of a bookdealer. My father routinely sells books that are over a century old to people who fully expect to read them.
And I remember visiting an antiquarian book fair where a first folio Shakespeare was for sale for millions of dollars. It was still possible to turn the pages with no damage and all the printing was completely legible, even though the book was already 380 years old or so.
Books on low-acid paper are really a very durable technology when treated with respect.
I am suggesting that claiming that one thing is best for everything and everyone is not true.
- broken
- about to break
Even poor quality books are mostly readable after decades.
I don't know for certain a single example of any of my disks that have survived since 1990ies although I could hope.
A book can be usable even if it has a few loose pages. Also you can fix it.
Disks break more often and when they break you are lucky if you get anything out of them without paying (or being) a specialist.
I have a big shelf of books.
It includes my mothers chemistry book from before I was born as well as a few books bought second hand.
I have maybe one disk from the time I was a teenager.
Yes, fire will destroy a book (although parts will often be recoverable using low tech methods).
The same fire will certainly destroy disks and make them unrecoverable for everyone but recovery labs (if they are recoverable at all.)
Summary: books fail slower than disks. When they fail they often fail gracefully and you can still use them and even repair them using low tech tools.
Disks fail more often. In fact you rarely see working disks from last decade. They fail for a number of reasons and other times seemingly for no reasons at all. When they fail they might have tried to warn you but often they just fail with no warning and unless you work in IT you'll rarely see those warnings anyway. Also after they've actually failed you more likely than not need a recovery lab to get anything back.
I was physics/math and was lucky that my textbooks didn't change that rapidly, but still, it's a bit odd to claim that paper is the obvious choice for everyone based on widely varying circumstances.
books can't.
And you can search through the content
And you can carry thousands or millions of them in a single device
And you can add a new one to your collection without having to physically go anywhere to buy
And you can draw and make marks without damaging the content forever
And you can create bookmarks in multiple ebooks and have them all available at the same location, also with search functionallity
And the device you use to read can be lighter than an actual book, at least it will always have the same weight regardless of how many ebooks you carry
There is probably more.
I assume your family doesn't use their tablets with candycrush-like apps unlike some of my acquaintances. Which apps do they use to make it worth it?
I tend to assume that the burden of the proof of value is on the new tool, otherwise we just keep changing and nothing gets ever battle-tested. Paper, pen and other boring educational tools have drawbacks and benefits that are well-known; what about tablets?
Have we regressed to the point where the simplest statement requires third party ("scientific" references)?
A table offers 100x the functionality of a paper book.
Even just in reading mode, it can carry 1000s of books in it, one can take notes, highlight, search them, remember its position on each, it has its own light (adjustable to match ambient levels or go beyond them), increase the font size (ever though about those with no perfect eyesight? Sucks to be them with paper books huh?), even spoken to the reader through TTS.
Not to mention that the price of ebooks is much cheaper than paper books to boot (and that one can even pirate the latter, if they are so inclined). Or that there are also 100,000s of FREE ebooks (classics, and such) but seldom (if ever, except for charity or so) free paper books.
I do agree with your statement that a tablet has more functionalities than any given book. Indeed, as you point out, a tablet can contain thousands of them.
What I tried and failed to express was that, in an educational setting, these functionalities are sometimes poorly used. This obviously depends on the teacher, if there is one.
It is not clear to me how teachers are supposed to use a tablet to enhance their classes, and in my (admittedly limited) experience, they are left to their own devices or with poor guidance to say the least. It could be that teachers more familiar with technology (beyond just using it) know what to do with it while teaching, but to which extent? I would have assumed that using tablets instead of books is at least as expensive; is this cost worth it in terms of gains?
In the Alan Kay interview which has already been linked in this thread[0]:
[quote]
I said, “If we’re gonna do a personal computer”—and that’s what I wanted PARC to do and that’s what we wound up doing [with the Alto]—”the children have to be completely full-fledged users of this thing.”
Think about what this means in the context of say, a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad. They aren’t full-fledged users. They’re just television watchers of different kinds.
[/quote]
That doesn't sound so promising in terms of education, unless I am missing something. From time to time, I see parents leaving their phone or tablet to their kid, who invariably plays some game like candy crush. How do you transform a device that was made for entertainment into an educational tool?
There have also been stories in the past about big tech leaders sending their children to "boring" schools without much in terms of technology, and mostly pen and paper, which suggests that better technology is not necessarily better for education.
Regarding the more limited scope of "just reading", I read a lot on my phone, but it is easier for me to get distracted since I can do so many things with a phone or a tablet. Granted it's the user's fault, but you don't need any self-discipline when using a simple book, which is at least one advantage.
[0]: https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab...
Edit: I should have seen that TeMPOraL's comment already says it all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16836634
My assertion is in context of education. If you're going to use a tablet as an electronic version of paper books, then paper books are better, because:
- they're much faster to skim through and search through
- print has better resolution than screen
- you can actually make notes on them - I mean free-form notes, made in an efficient way
- you can pull out multiple books and compare them
- they're much nicer on your eyes
Note again, I'm talking about education. That's different from recreational reading of fiction, and more akin to reading technical books - you need the ability to skim, skip, quickly move around and cross-reference stuff separated from each other by many pages.
Now tablets could be better if electronic textbooks actually exploited the medium they're using - the way Bret Victor has been talking about for ages now. See e.g. http://worrydream.com/KillMath/ or http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt... (just got on HN frontpage, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16836530). However, I'm yet to see that happening in the wild.
Ultimately, my point isn't that tablets are bad. Hell, I'm happy user of such devices, and they definitely help me read on the go (they beat Kindle for technical books, due to color and better workflow with PDFs). My point is that tablets get dumped on schools and are used to view textbooks, which is something at which they're worse than regular textbooks. Both teachers and publishers have little clue on how to use these devices to their full potential, and there doesn't even seem to be a movement to help them get that clue.
- e-ink doesn't have color, color is helpful in educational material to make it friendly and accessible
- there are outlets everywhere, so unless you're going camping, the battery life is not that big of an advantage, more of a slight convenience thing
all of these points are why tablets aren't going anywhere
The first thing I did after trying to read on a tablet was to buy a Kindle.
Reading on a tablet, minutes, reading on a e-ink device, hours.
An e-reader has some disadvantages compared to a tablet. For example, it does not have a capacitive screen and does not have the ability to draw (low refresh rate) or use a stylus as input. It is a great tool for reading and it does that better than any other device (if you agree with its advantages over paper book which is weight vs amount of content) but not for say practice and exams.
And it would have to be a lot better to be the obvious choice for 100% of readers that some folks in this thread appear to think that it is.
But of course this is just based on my limited personal experience, I could be totally wrong.
My nieces and nephews were k12 when I gave them tablets.
Apparently I missed the news that tablets were terrible 100% of the time! Which appears to be what you're saying, but I can't really tell, what with all the names you called me. "Out of touch" or "ignorant", what a choice!