Sunday, January 22, 2012

My next research project

...will be entitled, "A comparison of remediation strategies to behavioristic barriers in the linguistic transfer from L2 input to L2 intake."

The subtitle will be, "Why won't Spanish students just LISTEN?!?"

In slightly less silly news, Apple had their big "education" reveal on Thursday.  They revealed a new, upgraded iBooks, which will allow multi-touch digital textbooks.  This brings us one step closer to a world in which our textbooks talk back to us.  They also revealed a program called iBooks Authors, which allows anyone to turn anything into a multi-touch digital textbook.  This brings us one step closer to a world in which textbook companies are merely the biggest of the publishers, and not the only sources of organized material.  Hopefully, this will cause them to a) critically re-examine their business model and reorganize into smaller, more flexible publishing companies with increased focus on high-quality, variable-use peripherals, and less focus on giving students pre-chewed information and "higher-order thinking" questions that don't actually relate to anything in the textbooks, or b.) collapse underneath their own weight.

I look forward to playing with Authors, but I need the next generation of the Mac OS before I can download and play with it.  It's on the to-do list, though, possibly for the afternoon.

1 comment:

World Famous said...
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