Incremental Blogger

Rob Zelt, Neil Roodyn and others from the community had a roundtable luncheon with Bill Gates last week at TechEd. Think about this: How many executives from any tech company you can think of set aside time like this to meet with members of the community? Not many.

Rob Zelt has the best write up at this time.

According to Rob, the main topic of conversation was about education including a bit about Tablet PCs.

It’s great to hear on both accounts.

Bill Gates has been the leading public advocate of Tablet PCs. Just look at his last five speeches listed on Microsoft’s Presspass:

From TechEd: “We’ve also got the pen capability that we’re taking to a whole new level in terms of easy recognition, and how that is implemented in the hardware. I think of every student having a device that avoids the need for paper textbooks. The tablet device will let them take notes, record audio, connect to the Internet. It will be superior in every way, and yet it can’t be purely keyboard based. It has to have this touch and pen as well.”

From advance08 The Future of Media: “So that idea of seeing will have that in many places — your desktop in your office, you’ll be able to have things displayed and just point and expand the information, your whiteboard will be an intelligent whiteboard and you can navigate through information there. So it’s pretty spectacular when you get what we call natural interface. Likewise, being able to talk to the computer, talk to your mobile phone and say what you want or have a tablet-like device that you can just take notes on and those notes can be recognized or searched, sent off to other people. That is the combination of incredible processing power together with software breakthroughs.”

Microsoft CEO Summit: “The early uses of this, besides Surface, include things like the touch on some of the phones, including Apple’s, it includes the pen on tablet computers that are very popular in verticals like medicine, and we expect to catch on with students who want to take notes or people who sit in meetings.”

2008 Government Leaders Forum Asia: “I’ve got one last thing to show, and I previewed this earlier, and that’s related to the student Tablet. To me this is an important milestone, and Microsoft has been investing in this for a long time. We see lots of ways that we’re going to drive this into the mainstream. In fact, my own daughter goes to a school where she uses a Tablet PC, and it’s phenomenal to see how comfortable she is, how she learns better. She tries out her knowledge, she communicates with her teacher in a new way. It is completely digital. The Internet is there, the ability to create things is there.”

Japan Premium Forum: “This will be important in the office and it will be important at home, so it will touch computing everywhere. You’ll see on your phone, of course, we’ll have touch and the pen as well. You’ll see on the portable computer we’ll have a tablet-like device that will have touch and that’s where the pen with the ink and ink recognition comes in.”

Five speeches. Five mentions of Tablets. If I went further through the list of speech transcripts, I imagine the trend would continue. That’s the way Bill Gates has been.

I also like the fact that Bill Gates spent so much talking about education. Oh, how I wish I could have listened in. Early on while developing for the Tablet PC I began to see how ideal a device like it might be for education. I’ve been working on some eWorkbooks (or activity books) for awhile that I think will offer a natural way for students to interact with their learning material. Cancer was a bit of hiccup along the way and now I’m racing to pay off bills like you can’t imagine, so my work has gotten more splintered, however, my goals have not. I can’t help but get inspired each time I think about how education can be improved with the right technology. The time is right. The devices are getting inexpensive enough, mobile enough, connected enough, and interactive enough. Now we need the software and content packaged well to leverage these devices.

I hope you don’t mind a little self-archiving here as I re-post some of my eWorkbook “applications” that I’ve been working on.

These include a variety of components ranging from crossword puzzles, clock problems, coin counting problems, math problems, matching problems, reading problems, word search problems, coloring surfaces, connect the dots problems, and so on that fit together nicely in an eWorkbook format. In addition, each component supports both handwriting and keyboard input as well as most importantly interactive feedback:

And here are a mix of algebra problems:

And an eBook that reads aloud for beginner readers:

As well as a personal diary eBook:

And a music composition eWorkbook:

Technology wise, they’re all written with WPF and XAML with portions ported to Silverlight.

As I look back over these screenshots I get goosebumps.

Steve Ballmer is predicting that print media will be gone in 10 years or so. He sees the print world going IP. I agree that the trend has already started, but I’m not quite sure about his premise: That the transition from print to IP is as equivalent to handwritten texts to printed texts. It may be more akin to the transition from hardcover to softcover or radio to TV or black-and-white film to color.

Each of these later technologies definitely displaced their predecessors, but they didn’t completely wipe them out. I think this is where Ballmer is wrong although I agree 100% that the majority of our reading will go IP in lets say the next 10 to 20 years.

I see some areas where the transition will occur faster than others. Take public schools, for instance. There’s no doubt in my mind that great, electronic reading devices and content could be created right now. However, it costs a bit too much in dollars and time at this point to get the ball rolling and keep it moving. It’s going to happen, but there are great forces (lack of understanding of the technology, competing print publishers that won’t port content, training) to slow it down. I go back and forth whether the colleges will have to go electronic 100% first. I’m leaning that way right now. (Colleges and universities by virtue of their class sizes have an immediate automation problem. So this is why I think they’re the most likely to go 100% digital first.) However, given the right hardware, I could see K-8 being the grades that make the first move both economically and efficiently thereby inspiring the other grades to shift. High schools have been dabbling with digital, but curiously because I think their content has to be so rich, I don’t think this is the place to start. That could just be my underestimation of where we’re at though. Oddly for at least me, this is where a lot of the laptop initiatives have had the greatest success. It may be because there’s relatively so much more writing going on at these grades. Anyway, I’m probably wrong in my instincts.

In terms of general reading material I think most people are already heavy Internet users–at least here in the US. Reference material is already going online too. TV and radio are slowly making their way digital and once they cross over, we’ll all step back and ask ourselves why it took so long. I think all of the media, print, radio, TV, though will keep publishing as they always have for a long time. I wouldn’t be surprised though to see print be the last hold out, however, in terms of distributing their content the traditional way, on paper. Why? Because it’s cheap to do and paper doesn’t require much additional infrastructure to consume. With the other medias you need spectrum, towers, and so on.

In fact, I actually see a blending of the digital and paper worlds coming down the road which will help to revitalize the disposable media. I wouldn’t be surprised to see video content in print magazines or pages that you couldn’t tap on that send sync commands to your phone or computer or whatever to add a website link to review or something similar.

So Steve Ballmer is right that the trend is digital. How fast and how extensive it becomes, I’m not so sure. If the hardware costs drop by a factor of 100 and the weight by a factor of 10, then I think he’s spot on. It’s going to take some pretty stiff competition though in the hardware arena before this happens, however. Maybe a company like VIA will pull it off. If so, then I’ll be happily wrong and IP content will have made a knock out blow to print media in 10 years.

[Found via TechCrunch and Gottabemobile]

At this year’s BookExpo America, evidently there was quite a bit of talk about the growing acceptance by consumers of electronic books.

It’s easy to see this happening. In part because of the relative expense of the books themselves.

I think we’re witnessing a transformation in pricepoint scale as much as anything else–somewhat akin to the introduction of the paperback.

What’s also interesting here is that I think we’re likely to see the publishers squeeze out the middlemen as electronic books grow in popularity. This is what happened to the computer resellers over the last 10 years as manufacturers decided to sell direct and within the music industry as more and more people wanted electronic access to their music.

I see the most justifiable switch occuring in education–particularly higher ed where book costs are through the roof. It’s not uncommon to find books over $100 a piece. Same goes for many proceedings and the like.

Now you could argue that the high prices are due to the relatively small market sizes and the actual cost of the printed book is minimal. True. But I think by going electronic and reducing the costs of the books, the market size will grow and we’ll see an even larger total market. Maybe the total numbers will never quite be like they were, but it’ll take fewer people to sustain the businesses and profit from them. So overall it’ll be a net gain.

Along these lines, the days of the school book store as we know it are numbered. They’ll still exist as campus convenience stores, but not as book stores per se. The publishers should ask themselves: Why are they giving so much profit in each book to someone else? They shouldn’t be. This is what the publishers should be focusing on, not the physical changes to the books themselves and electronic rights and the like.

It’s funny how some industries understand how this works and some don’t.

Some miscellaneous news from the Society of Information Display (SID) conference held this last week in Los Angeles:

BetaNews: “Samsung is also introducing an 82-inch “e-board” that has a multi-touch screen the company hopes will help one day replace white boards and beam projectors. Using a 60 Hz UD LCD panel, it’s the largest multi-touch screen on the market. E-boards are expected to increase in popularity as the price of LCD production continues to decline, but don’t expect to see the screens in every office and school room any time soon.”

Samsung was also showing off “2.3-inch e-paper that uses electrodes made from carbon nanotubes for enhanced “fold-ability.” The e-paper is an Electrophoretic display with carbon nanotubes that has the advantage over standard displays that it uses reflected light and does not need to continually refresh its display. So it can even show an image when it is powered off. This has huge implications for e-Books and other carryable devices.

LG demoed a multi-touch whiteboard too, though I can’t seem to find a reference for it.

And look at this 385 pixel per inch ePaper from Epson. Sizes shown were 13.4″ and 6.7″.

The full-color Readius e-Reader which boasts a rollable display was also shown.

Sounds like lots is going on in ePaper and large multi-touch displays.

Nicholas Negroponte: “Currently developing nations such as China and Brazil are spending $19 per student per year on books.”

In a post about the eBook design of the next-generation OLPC, John Biggs of TechCrunch thinks he’s figured out why Tablet PCs haven’t faired well, but an eBook design like this will.

“A laptop is an interactive tool. An ebook, even if it’s just a glorified, dual screen laptop, is a reading tool. That is why tablet PCs never took off in the mainstream: people don’t know what to do with a form factor that is clearly not a laptop yet is also clearly a powerful computer. There is no way to connect the act of “scratching out words on a tablet” to processing worksheets in a spreadsheet. Why doesn’t the iPhone have handwriting recognition? Because it’s a horrible way to talk to a computer, even now.”

First, I don’t see any reason why a dual-Slate eBook can’t be everything a Slate is and support interactive workbooks–not just read-only material. Second, most Tablet PCs today are convertibles and are pretty much indistinguishable to most people from standard laptops–outside of when the screen is folded down in Tablet mode. And third, the iPhone is a Slate form factor (no permanently attached physical keyboard) and not a full-fledged laptop and it’s doing quite well. So there’s more to all of this than simply whether something is a laptop or not, which has been the conventional wisdom.

Now in terms of handwriting recognition and pen input: What better place is there to support this than in schools? A very good discussion we should have is whether everything should be designed around the keyboard and mouse as our input devices in schools. Should we design programs so that typing an equation with a square root is as easy as typing a word? I can conceive of a program that does this, but is this really the best way to go? I don’t think so. Likewise, what about brainstorming and the arts and, well, doodling. Should everything be so keyboard focused? Again, I don’t think so, yet I can see a world like this evolving.

I’m betting, however, that as software becomes more interactive and devices with other forms of input more common, that we won’t see the keyboard and mouse as the best and only ways to interact with our content. After all, it’s the content that should be kind–not the keyboard, nor the mouse.

David Rotham goes into great detail discussing how the OLPC XO can be used as an e-book reader.

My thoughts? Hmmm. Maybe a little too heavy for long term use, but interesting nonetheless.

Engadget is linking to a very cool e-book concept from iRiver. Worth the look.