Textbooks versus Technology: The Right Debate?
Posted on December 1, 2008 by David Gray
Here’s a Texas-sized story about an ongoing debate in the Lone Star state over textbooks and technology. It is a K-12 story but it is all about a major question we at UMassOnline face all the time: what is the best allocation of funds for technology; what is the right balance of new and traditional?
In Texas, some say way too much is being spent on an outdated form of information conveyance—the textbook. Others argue technology spending is risky due to fears of rapid obsolescence. I say that the hardened positions of people on both sides of the issue have left everyone debating the wrong question. It should not be an either/or conversation. It should be a dialogue about how a combination of two information sources – computers and books – can together transcend the value of either when both are used in appropriate ways.
“Appropriate,” of course, is the hard part, which may explain why people would often rather argue over all or nothing propositions. And, in fairness to Texas and educators everywhere, knowing how and when to combine the traditional with the technological isn’t easy, nor is it always intuitive.
One statistic in the news story did suggest to me a starting place for thinking and talking about technological balance:
On about 57 percent of the K-12 campuses, there are four students per computer…
I’m fairly certain of the answer you would get if you asked average college students if they wouldn’t mind sharing their computers with three others. Of course, a simple response might merely be that college level study implies a higher level need for technological access. Perhaps. But if we’re preparing school children today for college tomorrow, improved access to technology now seems like an appropriate thing to do. To boot, ever since my own kids were in elementary school, the sight of young children bent over by the weight of 20 pounds of textbooks in their backpacks seemed inhumane to me. Notebook computers or ebook readers could address this problem and do so in a manner that is environmentally conscious. Traditional textbooks will be with us for many years to come, but it’s time to see technology redraw the balance. Kindles, anyone?
Tags: Emerging Technology, Policy Matters, Tools and TechnologyPermalink | Trackback |
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- Balance
- Distance Learning and the ‘Right’ to an Education
- How do you take your learning?
- How Much Might People Pay for a Free College Education?
- Educational Marketplace Relevancy and Corporate Collaboration
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This is an interesting debate.
There are, of course, many sides to an argument. This year helped a friend whose kids are, for the first time, are not given textbooks but rather a URL and signon to access a secure PDF of their textbook online.
This seems interesting at first, but as someone who has tried (at the graduate level) to use ebooks as substitutes for physical books, I can tell you that it was difficult. It’s simply not as easy to read an ebook compared to a real book. It’s also not easy to mark it up with notes that make sense to you, the reader.
The other issue I had was DRM (digital rights management). Having spent $55 on an ebook (regular price $75), I was sad to discover that when my hard drive crashed I could not use that ebook anymore because the DRM on the ebook had bound itself to my hard-drive’s serial number and I would not be able to ever use it again.
Kindle books suffer from the same problem. Granted I could get another kindle and put my books on that one free of charge, but if I wanted to use another platform, it would be problematic. Physical books on the other hand preserve better than ebooks and for a college student this is good. For a K-12 system where information needs to be refreshed more often a kindle could work provided that it were a ruggedized version to withstand drops, spills and general roughness.
When all is said and done, my personal stance on the new vs emerging is: do a cost/benefit analysis, give me the pros and cons, and then I decide. I am generally pro-emerging, but I won’t just it just because I can.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/12/03/kindle.electronic.reader/index.html?iref=newssearch
“Its texts account for 10 percent of Amazon’s book sales despite the fact that 200,000 titles — a tiny fraction of the books offered on the site — are available in digital form.”