John D. Halamka, MD, Chief Information Officer and Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School, reported on his blog last week that HMS has “recently implemented Kindle support for all our 20,000 educational resources at HMS.” It’s more than cool or innovative: with an annual budget of $50,000 for printing course materials, Dr. Halamka and his colleagues recognize the hidden economic drivers that will power Kindles and ebooks in general into a significant role in schools in the years ahead.
From a student’s point of view, the creator of the med20.com blog, schwen, writes:
As a undergrad and grad science student, I recall the pile of books that we had each year — most of them were around the size of a phonebook and mostly hardcover. Not only was this a huge expense for students (and publishers too), but it was also really tiresome to carry around and made for alot of waste when a new edition was released. I can only imagine that med-students have an even worse pile to deal with.
In Disrupting Class, Clayton Christensen, across the quad at the Harvard Business School, notes that disruptive innovation occurs in places where there’s a group whose needs aren’t addressed by current resources. Was there ever a group that needed a portable format for voluminous information that can be updated very quickly and accurately more than medical professionals? That’s where an innovation like the Kindle can take hold in education, and then someday find its way to the slower moving K-12 schools that just keep looking for another textbook.
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