Rumor has it that Apple is going to announce a tablet com­puter, which may well become a rev­o­lu­tion­ary new way for users to read and expe­ri­ence all kinds of edu­ca­tional content.

Will it sup­port or hin­der our Cog­ni­tive  Fitness?

In this arti­cle, I describe the cri­te­ria that a tablet com­puter and its tech­no­log­i­cal ecosys­tem must meet in order for the solu­tion to make users more knowl­edge­able and smarter. To achieve these lofty goals, the tablet must be much more than an reader. The offer­ing must be an inte­grated learn­ing envi­ron­ment with which users trans­form the infor­ma­tion that they read, hear and view on the tablet into their own knowledge.

The key con­sid­er­a­tion in design­ing such a sys­tem is that pro­duc­tive read­ing is active read­ing. In other words, learn­ing involves a lot of think­ing, writ­ing, draw­ing and com­mu­ni­cat­ing. Learn­ing involves antic­i­pat­ing what the author will say, set­ting learn­ing objec­tives, detect­ing knowl­edge gaps, writ­ing com­ments on the doc­u­ment, draw­ing diagrams.

Unfor­tu­nately, today’s com­put­ers do not make this an easy task. Most browsers, for exam­ple, do not inher­ently allow you to anno­tate text (e.g., to make a note of what is impor­tant or you don’t under­stand). Anno­tat­ing requires an add-on, and the anno­ta­tions are usu­ally just text or high­lights that are trapped in soft­ware; they can­not be linked to other doc­u­ments, email or diagrams.

In order to be a suc­cess­ful learn­ing envi­ron­ment, the Apple tablet must match the incum­bent (paper) and also address the cri­te­ria listed below.

Beat The Incum­bent Com­peti­tor — Paper

First, Apple must take into account the major strengths of a tablet’s main com­peti­tor: paper. Despite its many draw­backs com­pared to com­put­ers, paper cur­rently has many advan­tages. Spencer (2006), for exam­ple, has found that her dis­tance edu­ca­tion stu­dents find paper to be more depend­able, flex­i­ble, and ergonomic. Spencer’s stu­dents pre­ferred to print com­plex arti­cles than to read them online.

Paper has a pre­dictable struc­ture and lay­out. It is easy to use and it has a def­i­nite start and end point. Most read­ers can very rapidly access any page of a book, use the table of con­tents, index to quickly nav­i­gate. Read­ers don’t have to wait for a page to load, they can turn it. Also, paper is less busy and less dis­tract­ing: it does not beep while you are concentrating.

More­over, users can write on their own paper to their heart’s content.

These fea­tures present chal­lenges to read­ing and learn­ing technology.

Check­list for a Tablet Com­puter to Make us Smarter

In this sec­tion I focus on some of the fea­tures that can make a tablet a use­ful learn­ing envi­ron­ment. This goes beyond hard­ware, and deals with cog­ni­tive soft­ware and services.

1. The tablet should have a per­sonal task man­ager. Peo­ple are most pro­duc­tive when they set goals for them­selves that are SMART (spe­cific, mea­sur­able, achiev­able, real­is­tic and timely). Learn­ing is an activ­ity like any other, and would ben­e­fit from such a sys­tem so that when learn­ers approach a chap­ter, for exam­ple, they can set their learn­ing objectives.
2. The tablet should have a detailed user-activity mon­i­tor. The sys­tem should be able to quan­ti­ta­tively mon­i­tor the amount of time the user spends on each learn­ing resource (each book, each chap­ter, each page) and each type of activ­ity. It should be able to report such facts as: how much time have I spent surf­ing the web as opposed to read­ing? How much time have I spent read­ing actively (tak­ing notes, etc.) vs. read­ing pas­sively (skim­ming)? How much time have I spent draw­ing dia­grams vs. watch­ing youtube? What is my read­ing rate? This can allow the user to set new goals to be more pro­duc­tive in how they learn and use their tablet.
3. The tablet should have an exten­sive anno­ta­tion sys­tem. This would enable active read­ing. Users should be able to make notes about all kinds of infor­ma­tion: e.g., to select some text in the browser doc­u­ment and then make a com­ment about it. The notes should be attached to the con­tent. Users should also be able to anno­tate PDFs, edi­tor doc­u­ments, dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tions, dia­grams basi­cally any­thing. Wouldn’t it be use­ful to be able to pause a movie and make a note that is anchored to a spe­cific frame or seg­ment? One could then jump to the parts of the movie or pod­cast describ­ing impor­tant mate­r­ial, and skip the rest. Or make a note in a spe­cific part of a physics dia­gram to indi­cate what you don’t under­stand some­thing that can be done on paper. Users should be able to tag not only entire web pages, but any item (such as part of a sen­tence), and they should be able to re-use com­mon tags (e.g., Don’t under­stand, Impor­tant), and eas­ily link items to new or exist­ing tasks (Review this). Users should even be able to over­lay their own links from exist­ing con­tent to exist­ing content.
4. The tablet should con­tain a rich graphic orga­nizer, so that users can cre­ate con­cepts maps, doo­dles or struc­tured draw­ings. This will allow users to lever­age their visual motor capa­bil­i­ties as they learn. The reader could sum­ma­rize a page with a draw­ing linked to that page.
5. The tablet should con­tain a pow­er­ful out­liner. An out­liner allows users to orga­nize their thoughts in a hier­ar­chi­cal fash­ion. Users can col­lapse, pro­mote, demote and move entire sec­tions of a doc­u­ment very eas­ily. An out­liner sup­ports think­ing, writ­ing and cre­at­ing sum­maries of lec­tures, books and videos. The anno­ta­tion sys­tem should also embed the out­liner, and allow out­lines to be linked to any content.
6. The tablet should con­tain a spaced learn­ing (self-testing) sys­tem. We remem­ber much bet­ter when we prac­tice recall­ing from mem­ory. Beyond rote recall, ques­tions can require com­pre­hen­sion. Users (and con­tent providers) should be able to asso­ciate ques­tions with each chap­ter (or page). And users should be able to gauge for each resource what their degree of learn­ing is as mea­sured by the space learn­ing sys­tem (com­bined with the other mon­i­tors men­tioned above). Ques­tions should be link­able to exactly where the answers are found in text, mul­ti­me­dia, etc. And why not allow users to directly add dic­tio­nary entries to their self-testing data­base, so that they never have to look up the same word twice? After cre­at­ing ques­tions, users should be able to enter a review mode to inter­act with their ques­tions and link back to the appro­pri­ate con­tent when desired.
7. The tablet should be part of a larger sys­tem beyond the tablet. Apple should pro­vide sync­ing ser­vices to allow users to move back and forth between the tablet, an iPod and a note­book or desk­top. Nei­ther the con­tent one pur­chases nor the anno­ta­tions and con­tent one cre­ates should be trapped on the tablet. The dig­i­tal rights man­age­ment should allow for the same book pur­chase (license) to be avail­able on a num­ber (e.g., 3) of dif­fer­ent devices. If one’s tablet is lost or bro­ken, one can still pre­pare for that pre­sen­ta­tion or exam by switch­ing to another machine, with­out los­ing a beat. Sim­i­larly, the sta­tus of the tasks one sets on the tablet should be updated when one moves back to one’s tra­di­tional com­puter. This could lever­age MobileMe and iTunes.
8. The larger sys­tem should also sup­port col­lab­o­ra­tion. For exam­ple, users should be able to share their anno­ta­tions and other con­tent they develop, so that they can review doc­u­ments and other resources together and learn from each other.
9. Con­tent should be very afford­able, easy to obtain, and served with an intel­li­gent rat­ing sys­tem so that qual­ity con­tent can dis­tin­guish itself from the rest.
10. There needs to be a mute func­tion, so that with one action, all dis­tract­ing noti­fi­ca­tions can be silenced, allow­ing one to con­cen­trate on one’s cur­rent task.

The impor­tance of a com­plete solu­tion can­not be ­overstated. It is essen­tial that users should be able to seam­lessly move from their tablets to their lap­tops with all their con­tent intact. This way they will be able to flex­i­bly lever­age the strengths of each platform.

I believe such an inte­grated learn­ing envi­ron­ment can ulti­mately make users smarter and more cog­ni­tively pro­duc­tive. Once Apple releases more infor­ma­tion on its new tablet, I will eval­u­ate it accord­ing to these cri­te­ria to help answer the key ques­tion, Will the Apple Tablet Sup­port or Hin­der Users Cog­ni­tive Fitness?

 

Ref­er­ences:

Adler, M. J. (1927) How to read a book. New York: Touchstone.

Ban­dura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exer­cise of con­trol. New York, NY: W.H. Freeman.

Ban­dura, A. (2001). Social cog­ni­tive the­ory: An agen­tic per­spec­tive. Annual Review of Psy­chol­ogy, 52(1), 1–26. doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.52.1.1

Beau­doin, L., & Winne, P. (2009). nStudy: An Inter­net tool to sup­port learn­ing, col­lab­o­ra­tion and research­ing learn­ing strate­gies. Pre­sented at the CELC-2009 Cana­dian e-Learning Con­fer­ence, Van­cou­ver, BC.

Eric­s­son, K., & Kintsch, W. (1995). Long-term work­ing mem­ory, 102(2), 211–245.

Nes­bit, J. C., & Ades­ope, O. O. (2006). Learn­ing with con­cept and knowl­edge maps: A meta-analysis. Review of Edu­ca­tional Research, 76(3), 413–448. doi: 10.3102/00346543076003413

Nis­bett, R. E. (2009). Intel­li­gence and how to get it: Why schools and cul­tures count. New York, NY: W. W. Nor­ton & Company.

Perkins, D. (1995). Out­smart­ing IQ: The emerg­ing sci­ence of learn­able intel­li­gence. New York, NY: Free Press.

Ren­ear, A., DeRose, S., Mylonas, E., & van Dam, A. (1999). An out­line for a func­tional tax­on­omy of anno­ta­tion (p. 30). Prov­i­dence, RI: Brown Uni­ver­sity Schol­arly Tech­nol­ogy Group.

Roedi­ger III, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). The power of test­ing mem­ory. Per­spec­tives on Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence, 1(3), 181–210.

Simp­son, M. L., & Nist, S. L. (1990). Text­book anno­ta­tion: An effec­tive and effi­cient study strat­egy for col­lege stu­dents. Jour­nal of Read­ing, 34(2), 122–129.

Spencer, C. (2006). Research on learn­ers pref­er­ences for read­ing from a printed text or from a com­puter screen. Jour­nal of Dis­tance Edu­ca­tion, 22(1), 33–50.

Van­Lehn, K. (1996). Cog­ni­tive skill acqui­si­tion. Annual Review of Psy­chol­ogy, 47(1), 513–539. doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.47.1.513

Winne, P. (2006). How soft­ware tech­nolo­gies can improve research on learn­ing and bol­ster school reform. Edu­ca­tional Psy­chol­o­gist, 41(1), 5–17.

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Next up, a copy of my Second Article on the Apple tablet: Feb 11, 2010. The expression “Brain Fitness” should be replaced by “cognitive fitness”. The key concept is actually cognitive productivity.

 

In a pre­vi­ous arti­cle for Sharp­Brains, I asked whether the Apple tablet (the iPad) would hin­der or sup­port cog­ni­tive fit­ness. Here, I assess the iPad against the cri­te­ria I laid out pre­vi­ously. I then assess its poten­tial for brain fit­ness in gen­eral. I am rely­ing on Apple’s infor­ma­tion; I have not yet used the iPad.

The iPad has been cov­ered all over the net, and Apple has much infor­ma­tion on its web­site, so I will not repeat that here, except to say that the iPad looks like a 9.7 inch iPod with a multi-touch LED-backlit IPS screen. It can run all iPod appli­ca­tions and more. It is a rather spec­tac­u­lar, attrac­tive plat­form for doing all of what you can do with an iPod but with com­pelling pos­si­bil­i­ties that a larger screen presents. It is also an eBook reader and an extremely impres­sive gam­ing machine. It is priced very com­pet­i­tively ($500 and up). I imag­ine that many peo­ple will forgo pur­chas­ing an iPod, a game sta­tion, a net­book and an e-reader and apply their sav­ings to this device.

The iPad itself, and as part of a tech­no­log­i­cal ecosys­tem of prod­ucts that work together, is some­thing which has major impli­ca­tions for the brain fit­ness market.

The fol­low­ing table sum­ma­rizes the check-list from my pre­vi­ous article.

Table 1 iPad Eval­u­a­tion Check-List

1. Appli­ca­tions Checklist

Apple has enabled much of what is needed for the iPad to meet the appli­ca­tion cri­te­ria I laid out. The iPad is not just an e-reader, it is an appli­ca­tion plat­form for cog­ni­tive pro­duc­tiv­ity, brain fit­ness and learn­ing. It will run all exist­ing (140,000 and count­ing) iPod appli­ca­tions. Some of the appli­ca­tions I called for are already on the Apple App Store, though they will require (forth­com­ing) enhancements.

I pre­vi­ously noted the need for a task man­ager, a graphic orga­nizer, an out­liner, and a spaced learn­ing sys­tem. These appli­ca­tions will not be pre-installed on the iPad. How­ever, many ven­dors have already announced that their Mac OS X cog­ni­tive pro­duc­tiv­ity appli­ca­tions (includ­ing graphic orga­niz­ers, out­lin­ers and task man­agers) are being ported to the iPad. So, we can tick those cri­te­ria off.

Apple has devel­oped specif­i­cally for the iPad inex­pen­sive iWorks pro­duc­tiv­ity appli­ca­tions for com­pos­ing doc­u­ments, spread­sheets and pre­sen­ta­tions. This is implicit sup­port for active learn­ing on the iPad. In addi­tion, Apple’s exist­ing iPod appli­ca­tions are also avail­able for the iPad.

I was puz­zled by the absence of a dic­tio­nary on the iPad home page. Users should not have to research and down­load dic­tio­nar­ies them­selves, par­tic­u­larly since a use­ful dic­tio­nary is avail­able on OS X (its ecosys­tem rel­a­tive).

2. User Monitoring

I expressed the need for a user activ­ity mon­i­tor, which was not pro­vided. What I mean here is that the Apple should include oper­at­ing sys­tem, MobileMe and appli­ca­tion sup­port for mon­i­tor­ing and report­ing on how the user is spend­ing their time across the Apple ecosys­tem. This sup­port should securely and con­fig­urably be use­able by third party appli­ca­tions so that they can report activ­ity and con­sume sta­tis­tics (sub­ject to pri­vacy set­tings). This presents many sig­nif­i­cant sci­en­tific, usabil­ity and tech­ni­cal chal­lenges; but the func­tion­al­ity could be deliv­ered over time in an incre­men­tal, user-friendly fashion.

Why dwell on this? First, user activ­ity mon­i­tor­ing would allow the user to gauge and redi­rect the use of their most pre­cious resource: their brains. The over­abun­dance of infor­ma­tion and activ­i­ties we can per­form on com­put­ers is a major brain chal­lenge. Task switch­ing with com­put­ers is so easy that hard­ware and soft­ware sup­port is required to report on how we are spend­ing our time. Who amongst us pre­cisely knows how much time they really spend writ­ing email, read­ing, etc.?

Sec­ond, user activ­ity mon­i­tor­ing would pro­vide very inno­v­a­tive sup­port for the brain fit­ness needs expressed at the 2010 Sharp­Brains Vir­tual Sum­mit and in the Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness:

1. Assess­ment is a key com­po­nent of brain fitness.
2. Inde­pen­dent mea­sures of per­for­mance are required.
3. Brain fit­ness soft­ware must increas­ingly chal­lenge one’s devel­op­ing abilities.
4. Brain fit­ness soft­ware needs to keep users moti­vated and engaged.
5. Some soft­ware should tell us what part of one’s brain one is using.

All those propo­si­tions require sup­port for mon­i­tor­ing the user’s activities.

Apple’s user activ­ity mon­i­tor could con­ceiv­ably pro­vide chart sum­maries of one’s time on YouTube, mail, safari, the phone, tex­ting, etc., across its entire ecosys­tem (iPad, iPhone, OS X). This could allow one to tell one how much time one spends skim­ming con­tent, actively read­ing, writ­ing, draw­ing, etc. One’s read­ing rate could be mea­sured and tracked. The iBooks appli­ca­tion could reflect how much time one has spent inter­act­ing with any given book, chap­ter or page (ditto for other applications).

Apple pro­vides Activ­ity Mon­i­tor for its Macs, but that merely reports com­puter met­rics. There is more to gain in mea­sur­ing how our cog­ni­tive time is spent than the processor’s time.

A user mon­i­tor­ing tool could pro­vide inde­pen­dent mea­sures of per­for­mance so that we can assess the impact of using brain fit­ness prod­ucts on users. Is the user now goal-setting more reg­u­larly with a per­sonal task man­ager than before? Is the user skim­ming much con­tent (and con­se­quently not learn­ing much in depth)? This could be related by third party soft­ware to brain areas: How much time is the user spend­ing lever­ag­ing his or her visual cor­tex (using a draw­ing appli­ca­tion, anno­tat­ing images, watch­ing physics demos)? And what part of the user’s audi­tory cor­tex is he or she lever­ag­ing (pod­casts vs. music)? Is the user tak­ing notes dur­ing the pod­casts? While reading?

Apple prefers sim­plic­ity whereas user mon­i­tor­ing is com­plex. How­ever, Apple has been known to deliver sophis­ti­cated inno­va­tion, e.g., with iPhoto’s face recog­ni­tion. Ulti­mately, Apple could lever­age embed­ded cam­eras for eye track­ing (to detect when one is read­ing vs. away from the com­puter), var­i­ous iPad sen­sors, its oper­at­ing sys­tems, MobileMe or sync ser­vices to inte­grate and report user activ­ity data. This would open huge doors to brain fit­ness soft­ware ven­dors. Only a com­pany like Apple, which con­trols a large part of the ecosys­tem, can deliver a com­pre­hen­sive user-activity mon­i­tor­ing solution.

3. Rich Anno­ta­tion Framework

I noted pre­vi­ously that active learn­ing on a tablet requires a rich anno­ta­tion sys­tem. This would, for exam­ple, allow users to high­light resources, attach notes to them, and browse their anno­ta­tions. Apple has not yet demon­strated anno­ta­tion for the iPad. Granted, anno­ta­tion is a dif­fi­cult nut to crack. It is unfor­tu­nate that many years after the advent of the web, users still do not have a stan­dard way to mark up what they read. Anno­ta­tion capa­bil­i­ties would greatly facil­i­tate active read­ing on the iPad and Macs. There­fore, I will describe anno­ta­tion require­ments in more detail so that indus­try and con­sumers alike real­ize what is needed for the iPad, com­put­ers and e-book read­ers to become more cog­ni­tively use­ful devices.

A large num­ber of anno­ta­tion prod­ucts have been intro­duced in the past (I have led the devel­op­ment of three large ones myself.) Yet anno­ta­tion can­not be ade­quately sup­ported on a piece­meal, application-by-application basis. Anno­ta­tion ulti­mately requires oper­at­ing sys­tem and ecosys­tem ser­vices. Briefly, this is the crux of what is needed:

• a set of cross-device, oper­at­ing sys­tem ser­vices and appli­ca­tion ser­vices that allow users to eas­ily index (link) and anno­tate arbi­trary, fine-grained resources with a con­sis­tent, sim­ple, yet pow­er­ful user-interface involv­ing high­light­ing, rich text edit­ing, tag­ging, draw­ing, doo­dling, voice record­ing, etc.
• All types of resources need to be anno­tat­able (web pages, e-books, Mail, pho­tos, PDFs, images, videos, files, third-party resources, etc)
• an anno­ta­tion browser that allows users to review their anno­ta­tions and quickly access the spe­cific con­tent that they have anno­tated (e.g., as they review for an exam, pre­pare a pre­sen­ta­tion, or write a document).
• IP sync­ing of user anno­ta­tions to a web ser­vice (e.g., MobileMe) so that users can access their anno­ta­tions and their anno­tated con­tent on mul­ti­ple devices.

Apple is a very con­trolled com­pany, so I imag­ine that if they have not yet pro­vided anno­ta­tion sup­port in its ecosys­tem, it is because they are still work­ing on the prob­lem and want to tackle it in a com­pre­hen­sive and user-friendly man­ner. That is accept­able. How­ever, this being 2010, it is now time for Apple to begin to pro­vide more ade­quate sup­port for active learn­ing. I find it dif­fi­cult to imag­ine how any e-reader com­peti­tor can defeat Apple if Apple were to deliver a proper anno­ta­tion solu­tion. Apple is uniquely posi­tioned to deliver on this, because Apple con­trols the entire ecosys­tem and is usability-oriented. Apple could deliver the func­tion­al­ity in a series of soft­ware updates. Not all anno­ta­tion fea­tures need to be avail­able on the iPad itself, some are more suit­able to Macs.

Until anno­ta­tion func­tion­al­ity is pro­vided, much of the poten­tial of tech­nol­ogy to sup­port active-learning will remain untapped.

4. Sync­ing Ser­vices and Collaboration

Apple seems to have deliv­ered some of the major cri­te­ria I men­tioned regard­ing sync­ing both pur­chased and user-created iPad con­tent, across the ecosys­tem. Pur­chased books, and user-content will be synced through the new iBooks appli­ca­tion (same con­cept as iTunes, but for books). My ecosys­tem cri­te­rion requires that the iBooks appli­ca­tion be avail­able on OS X so that one can read the same book on mul­ti­ple plat­forms (as one can lis­ten to music on a Mac or an iPod). This will be some­thing to watch out for.

One of the poten­tially col­lab­o­ra­tive fea­tures for the iPad is the pro­vi­sion of WIFI shared fold­ers. Also, the iPod has many col­lab­o­ra­tive fea­tures and appli­ca­tions which will trans­late to the iPad. And we can look to third party ven­dors to inno­vate here.

5. Mute Func­tion (Atten­tion Filter)

I called for an eas­ily acces­si­ble mute func­tion for the iPad. It is not yet pro­vided by Apple but the device does have a related design fea­ture, and they do have the tech­nol­ogy to deliver what is needed. The ratio­nale for the mute func­tion is that per­form­ing cog­ni­tively demand­ing tasks, such as active learn­ing and prob­lem solv­ing, involves exec­u­tive brain mech­a­nisms whose per­for­mance degrades sig­nif­i­cantly when they are inter­rupted. As John Med­ina argued inBrain Rules (pp. 84–88), it is a myth that humans are good at multi-tasking. Being bom­barded with noti­fi­ca­tions from email, instant mes­sag­ing, iPhone calls, text mes­sages, Skype/iChat invi­ta­tions, adver­tise­ments, lyri­cal music, etc., inter­feres with pro­duc­tive think­ing and read­ing due to the archi­tec­ture of the brain and mind. In this respect, con­trary to pop­u­lar crit­i­cism, the iPad’s appar­ent lack of multi-tasking may be a very sig­nif­i­cant cog­ni­tive advan­tage.

Apple holds a ven­er­a­ble posi­tion with respect to the poten­tial for automat­ing atten­tion fil­ter­ing. Because Apple pro­vides an ecosys­tem of prod­ucts and ser­vices, it could actu­ally pro­vide an ecosystem-wide mute func­tion. This would allow the user to send a sig­nal to glob­ally sup­press all but the most urgent inter­rupts. This atten­tion fil­ter could pro­vide an unin­ter­rupted block of pro­duc­tive learn­ing, think­ing, etc. Some par­ents might see value in their chil­dren being seduced by a won­drous gad­get that actu­ally encour­ages undis­turbed, active read­ing. Parental con­trols might even allow par­ents to press the global mute but­ton them­selves dur­ing their kids’ (or their own!) home­work time.

6. Afford­abil­ity and Rat­ing of Content

The avail­abil­ity and per­co­la­tion of qual­ity con­tent is a major unher­alded fac­tor for brain fitness.

Abun­dance of con­tent will be a strong point for iPad. Major pub­lish­ers are on board. Oth­ers will need to fol­low to remain com­pet­i­tive. The entire Ama­zon offer­ing will be avail­able with the Kin­dle appli­ca­tion (which seems to remove the need to pur­chase a Kin­dle). Also, the iBooks appli­ca­tion allows con­tent to be down­loaded very intuitively.

Pric­ing will need to evolve with mar­ket pres­sures that are not in Apple’s con­trol. E-book prices ought to be a much smaller frac­tion of a phys­i­cal book than Apple has men­tioned so far. I sus­pect the solu­tion to this lies in the upcom­ing emer­gence of a new breed of pub­lish­ers who will bet on Apple’s iBooks Store. These new, savvy pub­lish­ers will need to com­pete by pro­vid­ing high qual­ity con­tent at low prices. The largest pub­lisher of books 5 years from now might be a com­pany that is as unknown to most of us today as eBay or Google ini­tially was.

When con­sid­er­ing the cost of pur­chas­ing books for an iPad, we need to con­sider the sur­pris­ingly low-cost of the iPad and how much value it pro­vides to users. The iPad is a con­ver­gence device. This sin­gle fact will allow many cus­tomers to forgo the pur­chase of either a net­book, a gam­ing sta­tion, a portable video player, an iPod or other MP3 player. Also, the soft­ware on the App store tends to be afford­able and is abun­dant. It will also give par­ents an addi­tional option to pro­vide a com­puter to their families.

Finally, there is the issue of intel­li­gent rat­ing and per­co­la­tion of qual­ity e-books. Brain fit­ness requires that we read the best con­tent and not be dis­tracted by the rest. Ide­ally, we should spend time read­ing pow­er­ful ideas that “stretch” our minds. Cur­rent rat­ing sys­tems are not up to this chal­lenge; this is an area for inno­va­tion. An intel­li­gent con­tent rat­ing sys­tem would reflect rel­e­vance, orig­i­nal­ity, dif­fi­culty, com­plex­ity, anno­ta­tion den­sity and coher­ence of con­tent, along with other data includ­ing the user’s pro­file. Such a sys­tem could lever­age (future) mon­i­tor­ing and anno­ta­tion data (depend­ing on pri­vacy settings).

In sum, it looks like there will be an abun­dance of con­tent, though pric­ing and rat­ing sys­tems are to be deter­mined.

7. iPad vs. Paper

To deter­mine how the iPad will com­pare with paper will require usabil­ity stud­ies. Hav­ing care­fully ana­lyzed Apple’s iPad keynote address and worked on pro­duc­tive e-reading solu­tions for sev­eral years, the iPad seems very impres­sive to me, even at a distance.

• The form fac­tor and phys­i­cal han­dling seem right.
• The multi-touch tech­nol­ogy has over 1,000 sen­sors; it seems very responsive.
• It uses a pre­mium in-plane switch­ing liq­uid crys­tal dis­play for view­ing from mul­ti­ple angles, which is impor­tant for comfort.
• Con­tent nav­i­ga­tion is my major con­cern with e-readers. iPad and iBooks have some very impres­sive tricks to match and improve on paper. The tac­tile flip­ping of pages seems very intu­itive. Nav­i­ga­tion to and with the table of con­tents is effi­cient. There is a sub­tle but cru­cial nav­i­ga­tion bar at the bot­tom of the page which reflects one’s place in the book and allows one to nav­i­gate quickly to a par­tic­u­lar page. There are other (fade-out) nav­i­ga­tion controls.
• The iPad’s anno­ta­tion sys­tem is lack­ing (though there seems to be book­mark­ing), but this is within Apple’s grasp with a soft­ware update.

Reader’s whose eyes can­not han­dle LCD may need to use an alter­na­tive to this inte­grated envi­ron­ment with e-pub for­mat­ted books that sup­port video, ani­ma­tion and so much more.

8. Lack of Adobe Flash: Impli­ca­tions for Brain Games

Adobe Flash is soft­ware made by Adobe that allows users to play videos and run pro­grams within most of their web browsers. Apple refuses to allow Adobe Flash to be installed on iPad, iPods or the iPhone.

This presents a chal­lenge for many brain fit­ness web sites, because they tend to imple­ment their soft­ware using Flash. Should the indus­try be clam­or­ing for Apple to sup­port Flash? I per­son­ally think not, but this is per­haps the source of most frus­tra­tion with the iPad. It is a suf­fi­ciently impor­tant and com­plex issue for me to elab­o­rate on.

Apple’s exclu­sion of Flash is not a mat­ter of com­mer­cial rivalry. (Cred­its to Steve Leach for elu­ci­dat­ing some of the fol­low­ing rea­sons behind Apple’s posi­tion.) In sum, Flash has been plagued by seri­ous secu­rity, sta­bil­ity, per­for­mance and other prob­lems. Here is how that relates to brain fitness:

• Secu­rity. If the iPad is to be a major brain fit­ness plat­form on which sen­si­tive user and pro­duc­tiv­ity data will be stored (e.g., one’s neu­ropsy­cho­log­i­cal pro­file, one’s IQ rat­ings, etc.), then the absence of some major secu­rity vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in an era of increas­ing mal­ware may be advantageous.
• Sta­bil­ity and per­for­mance. A tablet that slows down, loses bat­tery power too fast, or crashes while one is try­ing to work is not always as use­ful as one that does not.
• Speed of inno­va­tion. Apple’s not hav­ing to con­tend with third-party ven­dors of vir­tual machines like Flash and Java means that it can more quickly inno­vate and resolve prob­lems with fewer risks. The brain fit­ness mar­ket, which is leading-edge, stands to ben­e­fit from this speed.
• Flash is a major vec­tor for pornog­ra­phy (though there are other means).
• Apple and Google sup­port HTML 5 includ­ing open stan­dard alter­na­tives to Flash videos (but not run­ning arbi­trary applications).

The iPad offers a large num­ber of very inter­est­ing hard­ware and soft­ware fea­tures that can­not be lever­aged in a browser via Flash (e.g., accelerom­e­ter, dig­i­tal com­pass, multi-touch dis­play, and a cam­era enclo­sure for future devel­op­ment). Hence, more sophis­ti­cated brain fit­ness appli­ca­tions ought to be writ­ten directly for the iPad. An alter­na­tive for brain fit­ness com­pa­nies that do not want to write a native iPad or OS X appli­ca­tion is to part­ner with thin-client gam­ing com­pa­nies such as onlive.com.

I encour­age read­ers to have a very care­ful look at the Apple iPad keynote presentation’s sec­tion on the app store (and gam­ing), which starts 29 min­utes 48 sec­onds into that video. The iPad seems to be a sur­pris­ingly pow­er­ful gam­ing plat­form that will attract many chil­dren and young adults, given its com­pelling value propo­si­tion (not to men­tion the Apple brand itself).

Cus­tomers who pre­fer the advan­tages and cur­rent ubiq­uity of Flash will vote with their dol­lars and have recourse to devices run­ning Google and Microsoft oper­at­ing sys­tems.

Con­clud­ing Remarks

The iPad seems poised to be a com­mer­cial suc­cess. It ful­fills many of the require­ments that it sets out to ful­fill. And it meets many of the require­ments that I called for in my arti­cle. And what it doesn’t do it can poten­tially do with updates. The iPad rep­re­sents a com­pelling new class of con­ver­gence devices. It has a pow­er­ful soft­ware devel­op­ment kit that will be very attrac­tive to devel­op­ers of brain fit­ness appli­ca­tions. The Mac oper­at­ing sys­tem (on which iPad appli­ca­tions are writ­ten) is a ver­sa­tile and increas­ingly pop­u­lar soft­ware devel­op­ment plat­form. So at a min­i­mum, the iPad is a plat­form which the brain fit­ness mar­ket will need to pre­pare for.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Carl Forde, Car­rie Spencer and Stephen K. Leach for review­ing and com­ment­ing on drafts this arti­cle.
Related arti­cle

Will the Apple Tablet Sup­port or Hin­der Cog­ni­tive Fitness?

Ref­er­ences

• Deb­o­rah But­ler, & Phil Winne. (1995). Feed­back and self-regulated learn­ing: a the­o­ret­i­cal syn­the­sis. Review of Edu­ca­tional Research. 65(3), 245–281.
• Fer­nan­dez, A., & Gold­bert, E. (2009). The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness. San Fran­cisco, CA: SharpBrains.
• Slo­man, A. (1984). Begin­ners need pow­er­ful sys­tems. In New Hori­zons in Edu­ca­tional Com­put­ing (pp. 220–235). Ellis Horwood.
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