Amazon partnered with Princeton to provide 50 free Kindle DX e-readers to students at the University. However some students found the Kindle so difficult to use that they would rather go back to lugging around textbooks.

The program was announced in May and began this semester for students in three classes. The students were taking Civil Society and Public Policy, U.S. Policy and Diplomacy in the Middle East, and Religion and Magic in Ancient Rome.

Each student’s readings for the class were already loaded on the Kindle. The goal was to make it as simple as possible to replace their textbooks with a Kindle.

One student called the device, “a poor excuse of an academic tool.” He added that, “It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.”

This student is one of many that actually enjoys interacting with his texts by highlighting and marking passages along the way. Unfortunately this method of active learning just wasn’t the same on a shiny electronic device.

In addition to losing the feeling of annotating and highlighting text, the same actions on the Kindle take longer. “An immense amount of time,” according to professor Stan Katz.

Katz also noted that the Kindle’s lack of page numbers made it difficult for his students to cite their texts consistently. That’s an oversight that makes the Kindle a difficult tool for professors as well as students.

However another possibility is that the Kindles were given the toughest possible audience on campus. The devices were provided to Public Policy and Classical Studies students who might be less interested in the latest gadgets.

Offer a Kindle to a Computer Science or even a Business student and you may very well see different results. Either way, Amazon needs to upgrade the Kindle’s feature-set before trying to take over academia.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 9:35 am under Amazon.

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