Publishers at UKSG 2013 were entranced by medical student
Joshua Harding’s description of how he uses an iPad to create a personalised
study environment and intrigued that he predicts better ebooks will lead to
better grades.
“I see the iPad as being the game changer” said Joshua, a
2nd-year postgraduate student at Warwick University. Although he admitted that not all students on
his course were as far advanced as he in using the tablet computer, he finds
acting as a mentor to them encourages uptake. “Students are ahead of the game”
he claimed, and publishers and librarians lagging behind.
The self-proclaimed Paperless Student took the audience through his typical day on wards
and in lectures, explaining he uses his iPad to take case notes, look up
anaesthetics, check online references during lectures and set himself reminders
to revisit recently studied topics.
He collects all his course materials together via the
iPad, preferring chapters to whole textbooks.
For his written (not typed) notes he uses Noteability and for PDFs he
uses Goodreader. He synchs files to other devices via Dropbox.
The publishers also got Joshua's wishlist, including making student scores for revision sections visible online, so each
can see how theirs matched to others, and for messages to pop up and
congratulate the student on completing a topic well, or reminding him/her to
go back and revise newly learned topics. Meanwhile the thumbs down was for multiple
platforms, DRM and the Epub format (“horrible”).
While publishers flocked to the lunch table to digest the assured presentation, librarians
wondered how the heck Joshua got all his
textbooks on to an iPad? The answer was he'd bought much of it himself via Inkling, and for the rest he had a generous
friend who disbound and scanned in textbooks as PDFs for online annotation. Hmmm. No wonder Joshua had said he thought universities should pay
for all student resources, and had been at a loss to understand why his library couldn’t
provide “free ebooks in the same way as print”.
Post-match analysis suggests Joshua is clearly on the
cutting edge, particularly in how he manipulates content using apps. Dymvue
is still wondering how libraries fit into this picture. We do, don't we? Don't we?
Joshua Harding's presentation is available online.
2nd post from UKSG2013, see also Asking awkward questions
2nd post from UKSG2013, see also Asking awkward questions
No comments:
Post a Comment