This TED Video is from August 2006. Since then technology, on-demand publishing and digital tools have come a long way. Digital libraries, digital readers, web-books etc are more common place than ever with new developments happening everyday. Last week the ipad was launched and now we hear about a revolutionary new product (Mirus Schoolbook Convertible) that, by some, is expected to out-do the ipad.
See this video from 4 years ago for an outlook on the issues raised by technology including expectations from it. The issues and expectations are much the same today, but the world seems to have moved much closer to achieving the desired goals.
It is now a question of when, rather than if (digitized, customised and individualised textbooks will replace ordinary physical text-books)
Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind Connexions, his open-source, online education system. It cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share and modify course materials freely, anywhere in the world.
A long time ago I read, “Teachers are designers”. It has taken me years to understand the implications of that simple sentence. As a teacher who has taught across the grades and continents, I have struggled in designing curriculum (as per school, board, provincial and national standards), teaching-learning activities and assessment tasks. It takes a lot of time and creativity, both of which teachers find themselves deficient in! As an administrator, I have empathised with and supported teachers struggling to play the designer of their students’ learning.
So am I implying that textbooks have no place in a classroom? Certainly not! Textbooks are a tool, one of the many learning tools that a teacher/school uses to make students learn as per expectations/ standards. They are based on a certain syllabus but they are certainly not the syllabus. Textbooks are useful as sources of organised information about topics from the syllabus providing many exercises for reinforcing key knowledge. But they distort how understanding of an issue develops, since they present “only the cleaned-up residue”, “a simplified summation of findings”. The school in general and teacher in particular, need to use it as a resource for what it does well and compensate from other sources/ resources what textbooks do poorly.
Driven by convenience and profit motive, it seems that teachers/schools are abdicating their responsibility of designing students’ learning, passing it off to publishers, who have evolved into a powerful lobby. With the backing of the Who’s Who in the educational boards, they have successfully positioned and marketed textbooks as curriculum itself. Some publishing houses are also making inroads into training teachers about teaching. It’s simple quid pro quo, where the schools order textbooks in bulk from a particular publishing house who in-turn commit to train teachers about teaching learning. It goes unsaid that this training is a means to an end, the end being more sales for the publishing house.
It seems that convention has been turned on its head with teachers becoming a resource for the textbook instead of it being the other way round – textbooks being one of the resources for the teachers.
Yesterday, I came across a very curious bit of news – California has announced a ban on textbooks in schools. One of the reasons for such a radical move was to save money for the state exchequer, as textbooks were too expensive and that California spent $350 million on textbooks that it could no longer afford.
I dare say, if I were to meet Mr. Schwarzenegger, I would tell him that the $350 million that he hopes his government will save, would not result in a radical change in the financial situation of the State of California.
Nevertheless, a seed had been planted in my mind; and when that happens, additional information on the subject does come my way, without me necessarily actively seeking it. So I was not surprised when I discovered soon thereafter that the State of Virginia had decided to go with some open source online textbooks in its schools.
Hmm… it was now time for me to find out how wide and how deep this trend actually was – and I decided to actively seek out further information. I have been acutely aware of the differences in reading styles between GenNext (who can’t seem to read from a traditional book) and myself (belonging to the antiquated GenX and who cannot read anything but text on a piece of paper). Within this context, I mulled over another discovery that Barrett, the Honors College (in Arizona State) had proposed the use of the Kindle DX (a wireless electronic reading device from Amazon) to be used in a pilot group study and that the roster for the study group was filled up at an extraordinary speed and as soon as the students came to know of the use of the device in the class.
UK also seems to have made significant progress (probably in the last 10 years) towards a paperless classroom with an estimated 20% of the learning resources in primary and secondary schools being purely in digital form. Further, it has been estimated that in the next 10 years, this figure will reach 40%… interesting statistics to say the least. Casual discussions with teachers and educationists also revealed that many schools around the world had moved away from using textbooks in primary grades.
While these trends do not in any way suggest that paper based textbook has outlived its usefulness and it will soon come die a natural death; it does clearly lay down the path that teaching-learning methodologies / philosophies and aides are taking. Such trends are less noticeable in developing countries like India, where digital penetration is low and the digital divide is quite significant. However, the sizable Indian middleclass and the affluent do have the option and the opportunity of taking the same route their cousins in developed countries are taking.
This brings me to another discussion that I had with friends a few weeks ago, where my opinion on the topic was the minority opinion of “one”. At that time, I had raised the possibility that, we may in the future see a world, where children may not necessarily have to enrol into a school for their learning and technology would enable the learner to attend any school of his/her choice and study from a teacher of his/her preference. In this argument, I was opposed by my friends and colleagues; on the basis that a child needs a teacher and peer interaction that a school provides, for his/her overall development. I do not disagree with these needs of children, but contend that, in the world where children choose their environment of study separate from the four walls of what we today call a school, these needs of children would be addressed in another social setting.
Are there any takers out there who would agree with me on this discussion?
I have a recollection of someone telling me some time ago that education needs to be rescued from the 2, 4, 5 of the current system (2 covers of the textbook, 4 walls of a school and 5 days a week). Developments in some quarters suggest that we may have made some headway towards this direction, but the practice is far from pervasive. However, recent and emerging trends clearly show the direction in which education is headed.
