Will Richardson

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The Case Against Textbooks

April 16, 2005 By Will Richardson

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how at it’s core these technologies are all about content. Obviously, that in itself is nothing earth shattering, but sometimes I find myself really in awe as to the transformational potential of the Read/Write Web when it comes to curriculum. Certainly, the ability for our students to easily create and share content in many different forms requires us to shift our thinking about how best to make relevant the learning that takes place in our classroom. But the more profound shift for teachers, I think, is how we deliver curriculum to our kids.

Think about textbooks, for instance. I can’t begin to guess the amount of money we spend on texts at my school but I’m sure it’s a staggering amount. It’s also a staggering waste. Here’s what you can do with a text book: read it. You can also lose it, rip the pages out, deface the cover, and generally abuse it until it has to be replaced. But as far as a delivery vehicle for content goes, you can basically only consume it by reading it.

Here’s what you can’t do with a textbook:

  • You can’t annotate it. How strange is it that students can’t add their own reflections or thoughts or reactions, that they have to do that in a different space?
  • You can’t search it.
  • You can’t link it to other relevant ideas or concepts in any organized way.
  • You can’t access it if it’s not in your posession.
  • You can’t copy out important information and paste it with other important information.
  • You can’t share it in any meaningful way.
  • You can’t have the most up to date information about the topic.
  • You can’t edit it.

    Think of how much more interactivity we have with digital content, how much more power we have to make meaning of that content through connecting ideas and people with it.

    True story…yesterday, one of the supervisors at my school came up to me a showed me a printed 300+ text that one of our teachers had put together for a course. Amazing piece of work, and it was all in digital form on one of the shared netowork drives that our students have access to. The first thing I thought was that this should be a wiki where students could go in and consume the content but also interact with it. Push back where appropriate. Annotate it with their own examples and experiences. Be able to access it from home with their parents and experience it together.

    The first thing I said, however, was “This should be online.” The supervisor, who is an amazing educator, said, “it is online, it’s on the network.” Oy.

    We have a long way to go in our thinking about all of this, but the age of dynamic, interactive content is here now, and we should be pushing our teachers to move away from just depending on a printed text to delivery their curriculum. Books still have their place, for now, but I can’t imagine we’re going to keep them around in their present form for too much longer.

  • Filed Under: General, Read/Write Web

    Comments

    1. Bud Hunt says

      April 16, 2005 at 7:37 am

      Will,

      You’re dead on here. At my school, I’ve asked to be exempted from the textbook process because, as an English teacher, I have found that the big ol’ anthologies just don’t cut it. One book for every kid is an old way of doing things — and it doesn’t work too well. Different students need different texts for a variety of reasons. Mostly, they need books that meet them in a place where the book is useful to the student. We’ve been using paperback novels — a pretty responsive book strategy that doesn’t involve technology. Our students can write in them and interact with the text; every nine weeks, we can edit the curriculum by buying new books.
      But you’re right when you suggest that our texts could go online. In fact, they should. Lots of advantages — one being that you could conceivably edit several different “books” for the different readers in your classroom — but access becomes a big issue when all the texts are online.

    2. Pete Fuller says

      April 16, 2005 at 12:22 pm

      I was in a class recently where someone fairly high in GA department of education was discussing the viability of the one-on-one computing inititive being discussed in Cobb County, GA. When the subject of paying for such inititives came up, he had a ready answer. Textbooks. If the money that went into textbooks went into technology, every student could have a laptop with everyting they needed on it. I thought it was an interesting response, and having been in a masters program and buying textbooks for years personally, I really do feel that he was right.
      So, two birds with one stone. Access taken care of, textbooks gone. All sorts of new possibilities.
      P

    3. Tom Hoffman says

      April 16, 2005 at 2:13 pm

      I think this task requires structure than you’d get from a standard wiki. I’d want a CMS like Silva http://www.infrae.com/products/silva that can manage complex heirarchically organized documents as XML and transform them to different formats.

    4. Robert Stevenson says

      April 16, 2005 at 6:22 pm

      You bring up a great point here that is a hurdle for me, student annotations. I want to include this in the final version of my e-text engine, and I could rewrite some of the core wiki code to allow it, but I’m thinking it’s better for me to wait for the next version of media-wiki to be released with that capability built in.

      The rest of your case is excellent. High schools are spending an around ten dollars per student, per course, per year, at least. There’s the money to make technology work as an important part of the curriculum.

      -Bob Stevenson
      schoolnation.org

    5. Robert Stevenson says

      April 16, 2005 at 6:23 pm

      posted twice. Sorry

    6. Dean R Shareski says

      April 16, 2005 at 10:06 pm

      Looks like this will be happening next year in Tuscon.

    7. Robert Paterson says

      April 18, 2005 at 6:16 am

      I was lucky from the age of 16 onward at Harrow, 40 years ago, there were no text books. We had to find stuff out and our teachers really knew their stuff. At Oxford again not a text book in sight. We would be given a question and then it was off to the library.

      I am appalled by the idea of textbooks. They tend to be out of date and expensive.

      In teaching business, the closest i will get will be to find a book that illustrates the point so if we are talking about retailing I will ask my students to read Sam Walton’s autobiography. The resources now available to any student of any age on the web are current – free and easy to find. Also what excuse does a teacher/prof have of not knowing their stuff?

    8. Emma says

      April 18, 2005 at 7:24 am

      Don’t forget though the “reading in the bath/ on the bus/ in bed” argument for text books …

      I do agree having them electronically allows for interaction – but I think that for many the screen still isn’t the easiest surface to read.

    9. Corrie Bergeron says

      April 18, 2005 at 8:10 am

      Emma has a very good point. I understand that there are studies (I can’t cite them, unfortunately) that show that people read on-screen texts in fundamentally different ways than texts on paper. Some researchers think (and again, this is heresay – I don’t have the studies at hand) that it’s partly due to the difference between staring INTO a light source – the screen – and reading by reflected light – the printed page.

      And Will, you yourself pointed out bloggin has changed the way you read texts. Your attention span is shorter. That’s appropriate for blog entries and short news articles, but what about something that requires spending a lot of time?

      I’m having a hard time reconciling the comments above by Bob Stevenson and Pete Fuller – where do we find a $40 laptop?

    10. Laura Pearle says

      April 18, 2005 at 11:26 am

      IF:Book has some interesting comemnts on the McGraw-Hilln “eBooks in Education Conference” here: http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2005/04/thought_i_would.html

      The points made about the inflexibility of current textbooks are valid, but I’m not sure allowing students to create their own is any better *unless* they also learn how to learn and do research and evaluate. In a class of 20+, it’s just not going to happen, or if it doesn, it won’t happen well. Thomas Friedman’s fears about our now flat world will really come true if we don’t make sure our kids have a good foundation from which to base all this constructivist learning.

    11. Will R. says

      April 18, 2005 at 4:26 pm

      Corrie,

      I think the reading on the screen issue is one for immigrants, much less for natives. I do find it harder to read longer works on the screen, but that may be because I’ve just become so used to jumping around, clicking links, and following discussions. I’m trying to be reflective about that, trying to figure out what it “means.” And I do think that kids should be required to read longer works. But like it or not, most of what we read is going to be on screen before to long.

    12. Laura Pearle says

      April 18, 2005 at 5:13 pm

      Will, you’re one of the few that prefers to read on screen. Walt Crawford (in his recent Cites & Insights) comments on blog printablity because it *is* difficult to read something long while staring at a screen. I can’t do it and neither can most people I know (including my students). All this e-stuff leads to great paper printouts so they can read at leisure and comfort.

      My optomitrist, on the other hand, is thrilled with it because the poor resolution and the way the screens recycle/refresh is bringing him business by the truckload.

    13. Bud Hunt says

      April 18, 2005 at 5:18 pm

      I guess I don’t quite see the problem of printing what one creates online. Not everyone will — but some might. Heck — isn’t it about options? Those who prefer the screen will have it, those who don’t will have an option — actually, many options, as they can fiddle with fonts and sizes and whatnot.
      Right now, with textbook “technology,” we get one option. And that option isn’t working for many.

    14. Pete Fuller says

      April 21, 2005 at 5:13 am

      Well, when you take that $40-80 and multiply it by 5, your’re in the $250-350 range. This is around the amount per laptop that the large laptop purchases in Maine and Cobb County Georgia got. Now, there are additional expenses, and I don’t think a total move away from printed media is the way to go (don’t you know that lots of those pages are going to be printer on your laser printers anyway). But thats where I’m getting a laptop out of the books.
      P

    15. Robert Stevenson says

      April 25, 2005 at 1:31 pm

      I didn’t suggest we could find a $40 laptop though I agree with basis of the economics above, and I don’t think every student needs to have one to take advantage of the advantages of e-texts et al. The high cost of laptops is a misleading argument though since both schools and individual students are already investing in this kind of technology for other reasons multiplying the number of access points a student has an opportunity to take advantage of regardless of whether or not they have a laptop.

      -Bob Stevenson

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