Peter Williams, one of my valued Twitter contacts, put me onto this promotional video from Kno - a company that appears to have focussed itself on creating a tablet device with apps specifically geared to digital textbooks and learning.
It looks pretty impressive based on the promotional video, though I'm not sure how it can/will compete with regular tablet devices out there which ought to be able to produce something very similar through a program or app (and I have seen some of the big players out there spruiking tablets that will feature book-like dual screens). In other words, I think the future of good digital course material design lies with the material and apps themselves - not the physical 'carrier' devices per se.
From a language teaching perspective, I love the promo video because I think it really helps to showcase some of the fantastic interactive features that will enable digital textbooks to become much richer in terms of multimedia and personalisation. I can't see from the website whether this tablet and program supports voice and video recording, but they would definitely be features I would look for in a language learning based app or device.
Anyway, interesting to watch the evolution of digital textbooks. Exciting, too!
:-)
