In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History

[groovedaddy]

At Empire High School in Vail, Ariz., students use computers provided by the school to get their lessons, do their homework and hear podcasts of their teachers’ science lectures.

Down the road, at Cienega High School, students who own laptops can register for “digital sections” of several English, history and science classes.

And throughout the district, a Beyond Textbooks initiative encourages teachers to create — and share — lessons that incorporate their own PowerPoint presentations, along with videos and research materials they find by sifting through reliable Internet sites.

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/education/09textbook.html?th&emc=th

[dysfunctional press]

1. one of the best things about this type of progress is that states like texas will have less power...

to influence what goes into textbooks nationwide.

the backward states will only continue to marginalize their own students, not the entire country.

[mike_c]

2. "kids are wired differently these days...."

I'm only partly in agreement with that statement. Yes, I'm encountering a significantly larger number who don't read much, or who claim to be "nonreading learners," but I don't actually find them any more "digitally nimble" than, say, my generation. Being hip to the the latest social networking sites or growing up with YouTube doesn't make one "digitally nimble." Having a good understanding of how digital devices work-- e.g. computers-- makes one digitally nimble because it allows students to use computers as open-ended tools.

But that's not what I'm seeing at all. More often, what I see is a form of "digital laziness," whereby if information isn't packaged in highly graphic and entertaining format it just doesn't attract interest. When I ask students to actually use their computers to solve problems-- model the real world, understand data, and so on-- most seem even more clueless than my generation.

The internet browser is the television of this generation, I think, in the sense that television was the television of my generation. It gave us access to a broader world than most of our parents enjoyed as children. But it didn't make us any smarter per se, and it didn't really give us any new tools for intellectualism. A new medium perhaps, but one that is so expensive to utilize that the costs have largely outweighed the benefits. But that's another topic.

I'll agree that kids are "digitally nimble" when I can pose my students a problem and someone uses their computer to produce a generic solution to the broader set of problems that the one I posed was an instance of-- it happens, very occasionally, but not nearly often enough to differentiate today's students from yesterday's, IMO.