The Xplanation

Welcome to this morning’s Daily Research Update. Today’s themes are Higher Education, the Apple tablet, and e-books. If you want more context for this research, take a look at our Education and Technology Trends for 2010. You may also be interested in our Weekly Research Index, or you can follow our live, daily research on our Current News page.

(Click here to see a simple listing of today’s suggested reading)

The New York Times ran an article over the weekend on the reduced number of full-time professors in Higher Education, which reflects the realities of today’s teaching landscape in the U.S. “In 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or tenure-track professors; today only 27 percent are.” And the numbers aren’t going back up, either. The fact is that the teaching and the education game has changed and is evolving into something different than it used to be.

While the changing landscape of instruction is one pressure point on the Higher Education system, the move to digital content and learning is another. In his article on digitization in Higher Education, Keith Hampson points to inevitable changes caused by this evolution. “The speed with which changes in the education field will unfold is difficult to predict. Nevertheless, there are already symptoms of changes on the periphery of higher education.” Among the changes he points to are: 1) an increase in online courses; 2) the rise of corporate universities; 3) K12 homeschooling and online schooling; 4) the growth of informal learning. For different perspectives on such changes, you might be interested in Diego Leal’s great set of mini-interviews captured at the Open Education Conference in 2009. He spoke with a number of prominent thought leaders in open education and asked the following questions. First, is education relevant? Second: If so, how can we make it more relevant? On the same topic, I also liked this local news video from Dallas, Texas on the question of how we will teach and learn in a digital world is How Will We Teach? The challenge in the future, the newscaster says, “will be to identify viable careers for the future as opposed to focusing on jobs from the past.”

Naturally, there are also plenty of ideas circulating about Apple’s tablet device to be announced later this month. In particular, I liked this article on why Apple’s tablet could have a big impact. One of the key statements from the article is how Apple has a way of getting us to really love its products as opposed to simply liking them.

Many people like their e-readers (not least because they save them from having to haul around books, newspapers and magazines) but I’ve yet to meet anyone who loves them. That’s the key. If a really great e-reader appeared, the market would explode. The e-reader is waiting for a killer product, just as the MP3 player was before Apple’s iPod. Apple didn’t invent the MP3 player, it made such a sexy one that many more people wanted to buy it. That’s what it is promising to do again.

I also enjoyed this piece on the Apple tablet’s potential as a product that promotes convergence. It’s appeal, the author points out, goes way beyond entertainment. The Apple tablet and its potential – Marc Flores – Digitalia | True/Slant — The tablet is about convergence, and its potential goes beyond mere entertainment.

We spend so much time talking about entertainment, media and the Internet that it’s easy to forget about business and education. A few days ago, I was speaking with Rosa Golijan of Gizmodo and she mentioned the idea of getting textbooks on a tablet. Imagine that! Instead of purchasing heavy and enormous paper books, we could get them digitally onto a tablet. Textbooks could potentially become cheaper this way since there is no paper or printing necessary, and a “rental” option could be considered: you pay for your textbook at the beginning of the semester, and like renting a movie on iTunes, it expires after a certain amount of time. When the quarter or semester is over, your textbook vanishes from your tablet. This is also good news for the environment: books and subsequent editions and updates can easily be made electronically.

Of course, along with the explosion of e-books we are likely to see in the coming year, we’ll see increasing news about digital piracy in that industry. These concerns will make online, browser-based solutions attractive alternatives for publishers. And, speaking of browsers, take note that Internet Explorer is still losing users.

In the last quarter, Chrome, Safari and Opera all set new personal bests for browser market share with 4.63, 4.46 and 2.4 percent respectively. This period marks the first time Chrome has pipped Safari to third spot, while their collective prosperity comes at the expense of IE, which continues to hemorrhage users at a rate of 0.92 percentage points a month. Microsoft’s 62.7 percent slice might still look mighty, but projections from Net Applications suggest it could shrink to below 50 percent by May of this year.

Finally, Joshua Kim says that Facebook is becoming increasingly irrelevant for his work as an educational technology. “As I’ve started to use Twitter to connect with my learning technology community this network has started to grow and strengthen. As of now I follow 247 people/organizations on Twitter, and have 153 followers (you can find me here). Save for one or two people, all the people that I follow center around learning technology, social media, and innovation in higher education. The hashtags I follow (see this list for some great educational hashtags) are also essential for staying part of the conversation. And we all know how important Twitter has become in preparing for and participating in professional conferences.”

Suggested Reading

Strategy – Faculty – The Case of the Vanishing Full-Time Professor | NYTimes.com

Notes on Digitization in Higher Education « Higher Education Management Group

DiegoLeal.org: On the relevance of education

How Will We Teach? | NBC Dallas-Fort Worth

Blog U.: Irrelevant Facebook – Technology and Learning | Inside Higher Ed

Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning » Blog Archive » A radical definition of Open Education

Design – Apple’s Eagerly Anticipated Tablet Computer Could Have Big Impact on Design World | NYTimes.com

The Apple tablet and its potential – Marc Flores – Digitalia | True/Slant

Digital piracy hits the e-book industry | CNN.com

Google Nexus: Not Enough to Beat Apple iPhone? | ABC News

Freescale’s $199 Smartbook Tablet Design Means Tablets For Everyone (Later This Year) – Freescale smartbook | Gizmodo