"In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History" by Tamar Lewin in NYTimes

[Connie Weber]

"In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History" by Tamar Lewin in NYTimes

From the article:

"Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.

'Kids are wired differently these days,' said Sheryl R. Abshire, chief technology officer for the Calcasieu Parish school system in Lake Charles, La. 'They’re digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose and extrapolate. And they think of knowledge as infinite.

'They don’t engage with textbooks that are finite, linear and rote,' Dr. Abshire continued. “Teachers need digital resources to find those documents, those blogs, those wikis that get them beyond the plain vanilla curriculum in the textbooks...”

What do you think? Current realities... possibilities... Do you have some examples to add to the list in the article? Questions? Thoughts?

[Andrew]

In my mind traditional textbooks are history (or are on their way). Partially because the paradigm of a group of "experts" is a dying one. Who are the "they" that "write" textbooks. By nature texbooks are designed to cover lots of material broadly. I think we're in an era of "deep learning" now. It's not satisfying to simply skim from topic to topic. There is an artificial feel to the whole enterprise.

Is anyone familiar with Flexbooks? I think this is the way of doing things...teachers (with the aid of students?) 'creating' their own deep learning textbooks that are contextually relevant to the courses they teach. Done digitally, of course.

[Ian Carmichael]

Luddite Ian thinks that there is no patience for extended and reflective engagement with data, information and knowledge - so textbooks and other extended documents are under threat, not because the world has passed their usefulness by, but because the modern consumers can't get a bite-sized grab out of them, and so can't utilise their usefulness.

I know the gurus will tell me that information doubles every quintasecond and the challenge is to multitask, select, evaluate and parallel process in real-time with mulitple competing information flows etc. (and so get used to it, grandpa!) But I don't believe that knowledge can be created from a data 'grab' - prejudice can be, opinion can be, hypotheses might be framable, but not tested.

I worry - I worry that there's an idea that reflection, knowledge, understanding have viable shortcuts, and that it's possible to accelerate meaningful understandings in the same way that bits and bytes can be rushed from place to place in ever-increasing mouthfuls. If knowledge is just factoics then abbreviation is quite legitimate, but if the processes of the discipline - the disciplined mind - is to operate on a useful set of factoids, it needs time, extent, and connection.

[Andrew]

Sorry, I forgot to include the Flexbooks link. Maybe I suffer from cognitive dissonance but is it possible for me to agree with Ian and believe that a new digital, co-created, multimedia 'textbook' has enormous value? Because I do.

[Ian Carmichael]

OK, I'll check out 'flexbooks'. I hope they'll provide the paradigm I haven't seen yet in digital resources. (Anyway Andrew, some learning theorists have maintained that there is an optimal cognitive dissonance required for good learning, so possession of it is one of the conditions of learning!)

[Connie Weber]

Hi Andrew and Ian--

I think it's awesome that we're even thinking about the possibilities for new kinds of "texts"--and that word is really is rather a misnomer; "flexbooks" gets much closer to the idea, and thank you, Andrew, for sharing that.

Andrew, I'm going to join you in the cognitive dissonance and believe in both what Ian said and what you said, that "a new digital, co-created, multimedia 'textbook' has enormous value."

Here are some more links to studies of possibilities for "text shift." I learned about these in Todd Rose's research presentation at Future of Learning.

From www.cast.org:

Reading to Learn

Think Like a Historian

Customized Learning Inteface/Pedagogic Semantics

AIM Consortum

But beyond all the cool inventions, the thing I learned from Todd Rose that is at the top of all the "take-aways" I got from being at the Future of Learning institute: What seems to matter most is whether students feel they have the tools--that the tools are there and accessible to them--and NOT whether or how much they use them. Now isn't that fantastically mind-boggling?

No, on second look, not mind-boggling at all. What matters is whether the students feel empowered or helpless! And that has a lot to do with the affective side of learning, the neuroscience of it all. The tools can remove the fear state, move the student into the active and pleasurable state of learning. (Echoes of Carol Dweck here.)

So I'm for all sorts of research and experiments like this. And Ian, you do say it best, there are no shortcuts for understanding. But it's looking like there are plenty of ways to facilitate learning and understanding through some very jazzy and interesting high-tech tools, and some of these tools hold great promise. Even if nothing else, they get rid of a lot of roadblocks to development of literacies for students with "learning differences" or who are second-language learners, migrants.

But the key, the key to it all, at least as I see it, is that we need to do everything we can to help our students become more fully in charge of their own learning.

[Ian Carmichael]

Hmm. Well, I've been to flexbooks - a nice set of conventional (but 'webbed') texts.
I've thought to join up, and start one of my own - I've got a title - but intuitive and friendly the interface is not. This may be more about me, but I can't create categories for my book, a table of contents, chapters, or standards links. Still, it is beta, I presume it has its origin in California, and so is currently locked into California standards, but I do see enough to be keen to engage the release candidate version!

[Andrew]

True. In it's current state Flexbooks is High on Concept, Low on Content. Good way to describe it, too: 'Conventional, webbed texts'. To me, it does offer a potential new framework (and format) for organizing, creating, re-mixing our own 'text'books for use with our students.

The last few days, I've been thinking maybe what should happen is that my students co-create a multimedia flexbook of sorts this year as a Major Project. Keeps them involved in the process of learning: critical thinking, decision making, resource gathering, justification...Flexbooks can provide the Framework (in a conventional, syllabus type document that I will organize) then students could 'hunt and gather' rich (multimedia) resources for their own flexbook (need a new term!) using Google Sites.

At the end of the year, I can take the Best of the Best and do a 'Flexbook Mashup' of those!?

[Ellen Pham]

I can't read through the rest of the posts before commenting, Andrew- EXACTLY! Having this vast information/resource base at our fingertips, and then being able to produce and communicate something that is of value to ourselves from it, to find, test out, expand, winnow, hone and share what we have learned with an audience that might be interested, that's the power of it all, at least with the technology as it stands now.

The idea of audience has also changed. Each person in the audience is also a potential collaborator in a real and immediate sense that just wasn't possible for the average learner a decade or so ago, unless you were a scientist engaged in research or part of the military.

The "new technology" is about producing as much as consuming, and the collaboration can happen in all sorts of wonderful ways- you are not stuck, for better or worse, with your lab partner : ).

But, it's a lot of work! Once a teacher knows her way around the tools well enough herself, how does she encourage in her students the motivation and commitment that this type of consuming/producing learning cycle requires?

How is she given the time to teach in this way given our current test-driven mode of "accountability"?

[Ellen Pham]

Hmmm, and one more thing... dissecting a virtual fetal pig does not compare to dissecting a real one. Making that lopsided clay pot with our own hands, glazing and firing it, then presenting it to an important adult in our lives is a basic, fundamental experience of childhood and keeps us connected to our core as human beings.

Students (and all humans!) still need the vast amount of their interactions, when possible, to be in the physical world. We need this intellectually, socially, emotionally, tactilely!

So it's a balancing act. The teacher must always be reflecting on his practice, I think, and be careful not to waste his students' time, whatever the endeavor.

[Ed Hitchcock]

One can also argue that in today's age of 3d animation and interactivity, is it ethically justified to raise animals just to kill them for school kids to dissect?
Just sayin'
And for the record, I much prefer real dissection to virtual, but prefer rats to pigs.

[Ellen Pham]

Yes, I can see that point too, Ed. (Not the part about the rats, I've had those as pets!)

Well, we could collect animals that have died of natural causes, like we do with humans. Donate your dog to science :D

One of our past Oregon governors, Kitzhaber, who was also an emergency room physician, collected road kill as a kid to take home and dissect.

As an aside, I think our high school biology teacher told us that the fetal pigs came from pregnant pigs that were slaughtered for meat. That makes economic sense- what you can get for 10 or so fetal pigs wouldn't pay for the raising of the mother.

I also believe that kids should be able to opt out of dissections for moral reasons. That was not an option when I was young.

[Connie Weber]

Ellen,

Good summary here: "The idea of audience has also changed. Each person in the audience is also a potential collaborator in a real and immediate sense that just wasn't possible for the average learner a decade or so ago, unless you were a scientist engaged in research or part of the military."

That's a key idea to get across to teachers in this era; the students, for the most part, seem to know a lot about what's available. (And that's why the old-fashioned super-boring texts seem so dead.)

Then you ask one of the most crucial questions of all, my central question as well: are the teachers given time (the ultimate most important thing) to teach in new fashions, and time with each other and with the students to learn the new tools and ways of interacting?