a.k.a. Why I Don't Like Textbooks... in any form, and What To Do About it.
At the moment there's a lot of attention being drawn to Apple's new offerings on the e-book front; specifically, iBooks Author is a powerful new app available for free (to Lion users, or those who want to get around that small detail) which makes it easy to create slick, polished e-books filled with interactive features such as audio, video, interactive photos and graphics, as well as a host of other gadgets and widgets.
This is definitely a FTW moment for teachers, students, photographers, plumbers, absolutely anyone who has just about any content to share.
More important than that, however, are the changes to Apple's iTunes store, which will allow just about anyone to offer their shiny new e-books to the world, either for free or at a cost set by the author.
Absolutely fantastic.
No longer will our selection of books be filtered by the whims/market research of the giant publishing companies, or even the smaller ones. Now everyone can be their own independent publisher; a democratization of publishing that will level the field and (hopefully) allow social media mechanisms to identify the true markets and opportunities.
Think of the Podcast offerings now available on the iTunes store, and multiply that by a factor of 10, to include anyone who didn't think they had the voice and/or face to publish a podcast.
I can't wait.
But wait.
I see and I hear educational administrators getting excited about all the new e-book content being offered by the big textbook publishers.
Interactive textbooks with animations and videos... yes!
Much lighter to carry in student backpacks... yes!
Ability to annotate, and make study notes, and share notes... yes!
DRM terms that prevent sharing of the e-book, or re-use of it from year to year... what?
License terms, subscription models, all designed to lock schools into a legacy cashflow model... what?
Even my own (admittedly limited) investigation of an e-book solution for our school library could find no solution that would avoid a situation in which a title would be unavailable to students because all of the "copies" could be "checked out". The solution, as offered by both vendors we're looking into: buy more copies.
Of course.
In fact, as of right now, it seems this model doesn't even sit well with one of those giant publishers and its relationship with libraries.
For me, the promise of this technology is the promise of moving away from the traditional notion of a textbook: static information, filtered, edited, "owned" by a publisher with ridiculous costs associated with it.
The way e-textbooks look right now, the only real gain is in the student backpack loadouts: We'd still be paying for static information (albeit interactive), filtered, edited, "owned" by a publisher, and the ridiculous costs are now in the DRM and licensing terms that come with it.
So, whether it contains all the interactive bells and whistles or not, it seems that at the end of the day, an e-textbook is still a textbook.
And what's wrong with textbooks?
So many things.
There are some excellent articles and talks on this topic, only one of which I'd like to highlight below, but the main problem with textbooks is that they represent facts or events presented from a single point of view: The publisher's. And of course, we all know that the raison d'etre of publishers is, at the end of the day, financial gain.
Pedagogically speaking, this is a pretty big problem: Information presented in textbooks is typically taken as "fact", meaning that the role of thinking, evaluating, filtering, judging, what we collectively term Critical Thinking, is completely absent when these are used. Nowhere is this more true than with math textbooks, which not only provide "answers" in the back, but I have yet to experience an answer section devoid of errors.
As one line from the above-embedded Apple video says, "You don't have to do anything."
Not even think.
It's tough to say which are more abhorrent to good pedagogy, those STEM subject texts, or the Social Sciences. Should one publisher's point of view really be taken as "fact" in the presentation of, for example, historical world events?
While this may have been acceptable before the dawn of the information age due to purely practical/logistical reasons, it's just not good enough now.
What's my solution?
Glad you asked.
In the past, like I said, we accepted the word of the textbook as gospel, since there was little other choice.
Now, our choices runneth over.
Now, with any given topic, a good teacher can direct their students to multiple, first-hand points of view on any topic worldwide.
Translation tools have eliminated most language barriers, truly freeing content from "ownership" by anyone.
Multiple methods for solving problems, international viewpoints, individual accounts from citizens on the ground, experts from industries and educators worldwide are all available now to the resourceful teacher and student.
If that all sounds like something that doesn't really fit neatly between the virtual pages of an e-book, or can be covered by some sort of annual subscription, you're absolutely right.
Nor should it ever be.
That's right, I said it: Knowledge should be free, both literally and figuratively.
Of course, the role of the educator must necessarily shift, from strolling leisurely through a chapter per week to leading harrowing expeditions through the wilds of the information superhighways and myriad of social networks, to find and filter, examine and evaluate, develop and divine true meaning from all that is offered.
If that all sounds much harder than assigning one problem bank per week and taking it up every Friday, it sure is, and that's exactly what's wrong with using textbooks in classrooms.
Of course I'm aware of the limitations of timetabling and content, the curriculum that needs covering and standardized testing. These are incompatibilities to deal with, problems to solve, not reasons to stagnate.
Sure, there are educators out there who use textbooks (e- or otherwise) as just one in a long list of resources used to cover a topic, but I fear that those may be in the minority. Until we can educate our teachers out of this legacy use model of textbooks, and not be distracted by the gadgets and widgets offered by this new incarnation, we'll be stuck in a cycle of shuffling around information, instead of developing thinkers.
And that's why I don't like textbooks.
As always, I welcome your comments or feedback.
I love my new job.
