“A member of Notre Dame’s ePublishing Working Group, Angst is debuting the University’s first and only class taught using Apple’s new wireless tablet computer to replace traditional textbooks,” Chapra reports. “The course is part of a unique, year-long Notre Dame study of eReaders, and Angst is conducting the first phase using iPads, which just went on sale to the public in April.”
MacDailyNews Take: These students are going to be begging for their iPads back when forced to switch to craptastic monotonously monotone/mono-use Kindles.
Chapra reports, “‘One unique thing we are doing is conducting research on the iPad,’ Angst says. ‘We want to know whether students feel the iPads are useful and how they plan to use them. I want them to tell me, ‘I found this great app that does such and such.’ I want this to be organic…We have an online Wiki discussion group where students can share their ideas.””
“Members are evaluating the creation, distribution, consumption and usefulness of electronic course materials in an academic setting by examining the usefulness of the iPad as an eReader, with the broader goal of designing an ‘ePublishing ecosystem’that serves faculty, students and staff by making the creation, distribution, sharing, reading and annotation of eMaterials simple and inexpensive,” Chapra reports. “The students will not, however, get to keep their iPads. They will be used for pilots in other courses later in the academic year sponsored by the Law School, Arts and Letters, First Year of Studies and Hesburgh Libraries.”
MacDailyNews Take: Like wildfire.
Chapra continues, “For the moment, however, Angst’s 40 students are the only ones on campus walking around with University-loaned iPads and they fully intend to show them off and play games and music with them, in addition to developing brilliant ideas to improve society. And they don’t have to sneak. It’s part of the plan. ‘We asked the students to sync the iPads with their personal iTunes accounts,” Angst says, “so they feel a sense of ownership and so all of their applications will travel with them on a single device.'”
Full article here.
Angst plans to discuss his findings on the study in his new blog – recommended – here.
[Attribution: Inhabitat. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Ralph” for the heads up.]
