The Future of Textbooks

2007-08-21T19:07:00.000-07:00

I read an article at elearnspace that was discussing if textbooks need to be phased out now that we're in the 21st century and so dependent on technology.

This sparked a couple of thoughts:

Printing Articles - A few of my graduate school profs tried to give us online articles to read instead of purchasing at textbook. If I was using the article for a paper, I would tend to print it out because then I could highlight and mark it up with notes. I still do this today when I'm editing a document - I print it out.

Textbook Cons - Textbooks are expensive. I have a couple that I barely used, even though they were required for a class. And I could not sell them back at the end of the year because the professor was not continuing to use it for whatever reason. I can understand the technology issue, in that learning is becoming more mobile, and the way that people are using technology - web searches, email, mobile devices - should be reflected in their courses.

Wiki Textbook - It would be interesting to have students create their own textbook wikis for a semester long course. It would serve as a place for lecture notes to be taken, and reviewed, and they could collaborate with classmates, and be able to quickly link to other documents.

What do you think? Textbooks are phasing out or here to stay?

Welcome Back Instructionology

2007-08-21T18:53:00.000-07:00

I've recently been spending more time researching Instructional Technology, so I'm bringing back my IT Blog - Instructionology. I'll have to look around for my old blog posts and see if they can be imported into blogger - I think they were written in Moveable Type.