Education, Textbooks | featured news

Educators from nine universities are testing technology from a Silicon Valley start-up, CourseSmart, that allows them to track their students’ progress with digital textbooks.

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that textbooks and other goods made and sold abroad can be re-sold online and in discount stores without violating U.S. copyright law.

Five years ago, South Korea mapped out a plan to transform its education system into the world’s most cutting-edge. The country would turn itself into a “knowledge powerhouse,” one government report declared, breeding students “equipped for the future.” These students would have little use for the bulky textbooks familiar to their parents. Their textbooks would be digital, accessible on any screen of their choosing. Their backpacks would be much lighter.

Apple on Thursday lifted the veil on its plans to remake the educational landscape in a way that centers on its best-selling tablet computer, the iPad. "Education is deep in Apple's DNA and iPad may be our most exciting education product yet," Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of marketing, said in a statement.

Apple is slated to announce the fruits of its labor on improving the use of technology in education at its special media event on Thursday, January 19. While speculation has so far centered on digital textbooks, sources close to the matter have confirmed to Ars that Apple will announce tools to help create interactive e-books—the “GarageBand for e-books,” so to speak—and expand its current platform to distribute them to iPhone and iPad users.

South Korea, one of the world's highest-rated education systems, aims to consolidate its position by digitising its entire curriculum. By 2015, it wants to be able to deliver all its curriculum materials in a digital form through computers. The information that would once have been in paper textbooks will be delivered on screen.

Seventh-grade history teacher Mark Stevens bellowed a set of 21st-century instructions as students streamed into class one recent Friday at Fairfax County’s Glasgow Middle School. “Get a computer, please! Log on,” he said, “and go to your textbook.”

Many public secondary schools this fall will move away from textbooks in favor of the lightweight tablet computers.

Jeremy Short's students read comic books in class. Then they take exams, do well, and finish the semester with an understanding of the fundamentals ...