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DURHAM — The iPad — the new mobile device introduced by Apple to great fanfare Wednesday — could be more than just another way to check your e-mail or play video games.
It has the potential to change the way teachers teach and students learn.
“This could be extraordinarily useful in an educational environment,” said Lynne O’Brien, director of Academic Technology & Instructional Services at Duke University. “In an educational environment, a lot of what people do is reading, but a device that lets you also work with text and visual materials, that allows you to pull up reference materials, for instance, has tremendous potential.
“This would accelerate the trend of the growing use of multimedia in teaching and learning, allowing students and researchers to, say, examine photos and maps as they’re checking texts,” O’Brien added. “This might have the potential to pull all of those things together in a really convenient way.”
The news about the iPad, which is larger but similar in design to Apple’s popular iPhone, was a major topic of conversation across local campuses Wednesday.
Paul Jones, director of the UNC Chapel Hill-based ibiblio.org digital archive, said many people were waiting to see exactly what the device would be like.
“It might be able to bring together several different kinds of activities, and be something more than just an e-book reader,” Jones said. “It’s likely to be successful because it’s something slightly different, a step up from the readers or tablets we’ve had.”
Academic circles have been abuzz over the potential prospects for some time.
An education blogger for the Inside Higher Ed Web site suggested that the device could combine course materials and collaboration tools, bringing the futuristic vision of a “cloud-based, disaggregated, open educational experience” one step closer to realization. Another expert wrote that it “could replace the conventional classroom.”
The device could also lower the cost of textbooks, said Kevin Smith, the scholarly communication officer at Duke.
“E-books are now a relatively small part of the market,” Smith said. “That’s because they have some built-in limitations and can’t really compete with print. You generally only have temporary access, unlike when you buy print and you have it forever. But in many fields students want downloads, where they could keep the material and make their annotations and be able to keep them. They could refer back to their notes, and that would be very valuable.”
Smith said he himself had been at the cusp of wanting to buy an e-book reader. “But now I am going to wait,” he said. “This sounds really cool.”
O’Brien said the iPad could be “a breakthrough technology, “much more than an e-book reader and more than a netbook.”
“On a campus, mobility is absolutely a huge, huge, trend, and this fits right in there,” she said. “This could change the paradigm.”
At the Apple store at the Southpoint mall Wednesday afternoon, Matthew Beechhold of Chapel Hill said he was ready to buy an iPad when it becomes available this spring.
“It’s supposed to be like a giant iPhone and that’s been really successful,” said Beechhold, who works in the hospital and health care industry as a consultant. “I’d be interested. I would love to see something replace our PC-based technology.”
Jones is also a fan of Apple products.
“One of my goals in life is to be rich enough so that I could have an account with Apple,” he said. “That way, whatever they develop they can just take money out of there and send me what it is.”
