I’ve been a proponent of open source and open educational resources for a long time and this product is neither open source nor truly an open educational resource, but it is innovative and will push the envelope. Traditional publishing companies will be forced to move in this direction or face a shrinking market. Educators in K-12 and higher education will be able to author their own content and share it with their students easily and affordably as long as those students have iPads and iPods.

I have recently been working with 7th grade students to publish their own e-book using Lulu.com and the ePub format. That has been a great learning experience and it revolutionizes opportunities for students and others to publish their content without all the hassles of traditional publishing. A middle school student equipped with a MacBook and iBooks Author could easily create content that could be sold in Apple’s iBook Store and that student could easily become an overnight sensation. It’s not unbelievable at all.  I have been encouraging my students to entertain these possibilities. Thank you Apple for providing yet another tool that revolutionizes education.

There is little doubt in my mind that e-books are here to stay but no one has come up with a really good way of disseminating them at a cost that rivals their paper predecessors. From what I read today on a couple of blogs Apple will sell your book as long as it’s less than $14.99 and they get 30% of the proceeds and you have to sign a fealty oath that you won’t sell the book anywhere else. That’s not really a good deal and especially for young publishers. I’m currently working with a small group of students to produce an e-book from our class. We don’t expect to make money. It’s primarily a keepsake and since it’s going to published in ePub format it will be viewable on the iPad or any other device that supports ePub.

Schools in New York State receive $43.25/per student/year for textbook aid. Refer to this link from the NYSED website. If you factor in New York State Aid for computer software you add about another $15/student. To make it easy let’s round that number to $60 per student for textbook and software aid. In a school with 1500 students that means you’d get about $90,000 in state aid. Assuming you need fifteen hundred iPads to make this work that will be another 1500 x $499 = $748,500.

This isn’t exactly a Gutenberg moment! I’m not anti-Apple. I purchased four iPads this year. I’m composing this post on a MacBook, but I am saying there are less expensive ways to get engaging text to students and even those using iPads.

Rigorous standards, increased testing and accountability have brought considerable strife to most schools, the children, teachers, administrators and parents associated with them. As a graduate student in educational leadership I became interested in the idea of community building and how communities can transform learning. How can we create community in institutions that have become inherently in-hospitable. In my classroom I make it a point to greet each student usually with a handshake and a verbal “welcome to class.” It has become such a habit that the students themselves welcome me when I forget to greet them. Hospitality has become an earmark of our class culture.

I believe that hospitality ought to be a part of all school cultures and that a concerted effort is needed to maintain an atmosphere of hospitality. We need less barriers in schools and more bridges to learning and each other. Hospitality is an invitation to community and never has community been more important in education whether public or private. The social fabric of our local communities has been torn asunder by the economic and cultural cataclysms of the recent past. More than ever we need schools to be communities of learning and the best way to do that is to begin by greeting our students and their parents when they come to school.

I have come here to sit in silence in a busy place that us far from silent. Sitting beside still waters always quiets my soul. Today is no different from any other day except I’m here rather than there. I like it here in a city and place I used to fear. The past two years mark a delightful transformation in my perception of the City of Buffalo and it’s parks. I find myself wishing I lived here and worked here too. I used to dread cities with the host of strangers and though I’m still an introvert I find community, acceptance and peace here. The Olmsted Parks in Buffalo, New York are beautiful works of art and this contemplative garden near the museum is just another fine example of that artistry.

I mention this not to brag but to invite a conversation about learning and what it means to be educated in the 21st century. An amazing amount of lip service is paid to 21st century skills but how much or how many of those skills are actually measured in today’s schools. It has been nearly thirty-five years since Jobs and Wozniak introduced the Apple II. It has been nearly twenty years since the graphical Internet made its way into our lives. Yet, most schools continue to operate as if we were still living in 1975. Up to this point in most of our lives technology in education has been made to fit education as it existed rather than education being forced to re-fit itself to technology and a society that has been dramatically transformed by the ubiquitous presence of technology.

It all reminds me a bit of the scene in Borat where a horse is pulling an automobile around the village as if the automobile required an external power source. What will it take to change the dynamic? How can we re-tool education to fit technology rather than the other way around?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg6C6ScevWk