Macworld - I had to check that my computer wasn't an old black-and-white television set showing blocky white text Thursday morning and that I wasn't clacking away on a 6502 computer over a 110-baud modem when I heard about Apple's announcements relating to iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and its new multimedia textbooks. That's because I've heard it all before.
When I was a snot-nosed kid in 1981 with my fancy Ohio Scientific C1P, educational software vendors were already hawking textbook complements for the Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80. Today, the object is to replace textbooks altogether while enhancing them beyond what paper can manage. As a grizzled and cynical technology veteran, I ask: What's been learned in 30 years? Apparently, that you can make the same arguments and believe that they've never been made before.
From the dawn of the concept of multimedia, firms that cater to the education market have been pushing the notion that adding animation, audio, and video (as each form of media became more readily embeddable) would engage students further, and improve achievement. Printed books are boring. They just sit there! That's one of their advantages, too.
At Apple's press event on Thursday, senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller went down the same tired path. "One thing we hear louder than anything else is student engagement, inspiring kids to want to discover and learn," he said. Kids are bored. The iPad is fun and engaging, Schiller explained. This is the same contention made for decades, and I challenge readers to find any longitudinal studies tracking students who have used or are using packaged multimedia-enhanced instruction showed measured and consistent improvement over control groups.
A 2003 meta-study by SRI International--"Effects of Using Instructional Technology in Elementary and Secondary Schools," funded by the National Science Foundation--looked at dozens of studies from the 1970s through the 1990s. The conclusion:
"It is not yet clear how much computer-based programs can contribute to the improvement of instruction in American schools. Although many researchers have carried out controlled evaluations of technology effects during the last three decades, the evaluation literature still seems patchy."
The areas in which measurable improvement was found were mostly in drills related to math and science and better reading scores. The one bright spot was in interactive science simulations, in which phenomena can be modeled and examined and variables twiddled to see real-world interactions and theoretical ones.
More recently, a New York Times article examined sustained spending and a committed approach to technology integration in an Arizona school district over several years that produced test scores that stagnated in comparison to improvements in the rest of the state. Reporter Matt Richtel wrote:
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