Ouch!  Ouch!  Ouch!  The 27 January 2010 announcement of the new iPad by Apple rocked our research effort.

Here's why.

The iPad does nearly everything better than the Kindle as a learning device.

That's quite an advantage and the iPad (literally) is not yet out of the box.

To be fair, the Kindle, in its several current versions, were designed to be primarily mobile information devices, not mobile educational devices.  Hence their limited success in the recent trials at Princeton, the University of Virginia, Case Western Reserve University, and Southern Vermont College.  (See, for example, "The E-reader pilot at Princeton" (2010), and our "Interim Kindle Project Report" (2010). )

Saving Grace

If you have read deeply into our Kindle project web site, you are aware that our research into using the Kindle took a very different approach to using the device in the classroom.

Rather than work from a conventional learning paradigm frame of reference in which the Kindle is examined for its capacity to improve the "classroom experience", we chose to examine the Kindle - and by implication, e-readers generally - by using it to provide new methodologies by which learning could be enhanced.  For example, as explained in our Interim Report, our learners used the text-to-speech of the Kindle to deep their comprehension of a reading.

The good news, then, is that since our Kindle Project focused on building new pedagogy for mobile educational devices, nearly all of our research results are transferable to the iPad.  (Yes.  The iPad is about to become our mobile learning device of choice.)

Further, we do not have rely on the rather thin justification that the Kindle is a green device; that using it would reduce photocopying and printing.  That answer seems like a "Perhaps".  At $.03/ page, the photocopying value of a new Kindle 2.0 is 8,633 pages; the Kindle DX, 16,300 pages.

In any regard, our Kindle Project has enabled us to begin to re-conceptualise our learning pedagogy and those results are applicable to our current iPhone and iPod Touch experiments and readily transferable to our next research project: the iPad.

Colour.  Display size.  A wider range of file types, including ePub.  Functional web-browsing.  Multiple applications.   There are a few things that the iPad doesn't seem to have relative to the K2: a text-to-speech engine and embedded note-taking.   (I write "doesn't seem to have" because there is always the new app solution.)  There is even a Kindle app.  Otherwise everything seems better or at least equivalent on a iPad.

There are issues of cost, especially when you include 3G connectivity.  The K2 is significantly cheaper.  Yet in terms of the financial arithmetic of payback on displacing textbooks, re-capturing the investment in an iPad is still expressed in months.  A question also lingers for us regarding the extent to which a feature-rich device yields net learning benefits in a conventional classroom.  Stay tuned.