On the other hand, so many resources are available on-line that a hardworking teacher with ingenuity and insight could readily compose a custom curriculum/textbook as series of urls that could direct students at first, until they realize that they can surf quite freely on their own as they become familiar with the terms of discourse in their area of interest. I think this is the direction that reading/browsing is going. An important feature of an e-reader would be to keep a complete history of references or sites/pages visited, sort of a set of index cards that could be re-shuffled and re-worked in order to help a student organize research and enter the discourse as an independent free thinker.

I recently read about a professor who requires his students to write papers as Wikipedia entries, since they are thus required to cite sources and are learning how to enter the work-a-day world to boot. Students can also be encouraged to express their schoolwork as a blog; also happening in some classrooms.

I’m not quite sure how all this might apply to the K-12 set, but I bet it would to some degree.

From an educational perspective, going digital can only transcend learning in the classroom. Imagine texbooks transformed into “hyper” textbooks where the content is fully interactive. Students can take quizzes while reading along and learning the material. Students can jump out from one concept to a completely different concept with one click, to help that student make connections and apply those conecpts in different situations.

The point is…we are suffocating our students by forcing them to learn in a way that worked 200 years ago. Classrooms have changed (or are starting to). Why haven’t, or better yet, why can’t textbooks moved into a different direction? Maybe one day we will open a “Jurassic Library”!

• Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education: Learning in 3D Presentation Now Available
  via Kapp Notes: http://karlkapp.blogspot.com/2010/03/virtual-worlds-best-practices-in.html
  – presentations in Second Life about learning in virtual worlds.

• Textbooks Are Finished: It’s time to trade them for computers.
  Article in District Administration by Cathleen Norris and Elliot Soloway
  “To be clear, we’re not referring to digital textbooks, which are simply versions of paper textbooks that publishers typically provide if the paper-based version is purchased. A digital textbook is still a textbook, and as we have already stated, textbooks are no longer needed.”
  – http://bit.ly/aKtiHM

• Also read in April 2010 Wired today:
  “Simply moving printed texts to tablets (as with the Kindle) will be of limited value. To succeed, publishers will have to embrace multimedia and community-building.” -Bob Stein, Codirector, Institute for the Future of the Book — http://www.futureofthebook.org/. And check out their blog if:book.

To digitize textbook does not seem to make sense to me, because all that textbooks have to offer is, or should be, a small part of any learning environment.

Your post, Bill, states all of this very well and calls for something bigger than just textbooks.

I agree that digital content has so much more to offer than textbooks. There are two dangers of which educators must remain aware: First, the trivialization of content into entertainment because the same medium that contains important content (define that any way you want) contains the content of entertainment. I learned that from Marshall McLuhan. Second, without the scaffolding appropriate for each student, the wealth of content will be “mashed-up” into mush, sanitizing the content of any real evidence of reasoned concepts. I learned that from you, Bill.

The good news is that this defines our jobs as educators. We will never be out of work… unless, of course we insist on trying to hold onto the Tyrannosaurus Text!!!!

Years ago I met man who had made big news (3 full pages in the Baltimore Sun) when he documented 1100 (eleven HUNDRED) errors in his daughter’s Physics textbook. Some were small, but others included showing wrong graphs and once even showing a picture of Linda Ronstadt with a caption saying it was a graph. Yikes! Eleven hundred errors. He contacted the authors of the book, too, and NOT ONE of them even were aware that their names were listed as being an author. The way the publisher collected and packaged content was bizarre.

Books on CDROM or online will only help those who own a computer, however. This will certainly be a hurdle to full implementation. But, I agree entirely that the reasons for moving in this direction are all here and now being fueled by the decision in Texas.

Excellent post, Bill, with excellent articles of reference, too.

Thom cutting in…I saw the crow in the tree. I’ve done harder “Hidden Pictures”. Is this the winter “Blair Witch” sequel.