
As Classrooms Go Digital, Textbooks May Become History - newacc
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/education/09textbook.html?ref=technology
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davidalln
In my opinion, textbooks will forever be the dominate student resource and
people who call for its death are a bit naive.

As a student in a very tech-oriented school, I have experienced attempts to
bring knowledge exclusively digital and online (homework, lectures, tests,
etc.). And the more tech is piled on us, the more inconvenient it gets.

Textbooks have one advantage that the internet will never have: centralized
information. If I'm doing a physics problem and need to look up information
about electromagnetic waves, I'll flip to the index, look it up, read the
passage, then make margin notes or perhaps bookmark it. This is way too
difficult to reproduce with a Kindle or something similar. Even if there was a
device that had all of those features, I doubt they could do better than the
tried and true method.

However, what I see is what I reluctantly think of as textbooks 2.0. No more
way too expensive textbooks for a high school history class. Instead, teachers
will hopefully take more time to figure out exactly what they will teach and
textbook makers will size down their resources to accommodate. Did I really
need to buy a $90 ancient history textbook when we only read 50 pages of it?
Did I really need to buy a $200 Organic Chemistry textbook if we only did the
example problems out of them?

Let's not kill the textbook but fix the textbook.

~~~
RK
HyperPhysics is an example of the direction I think we need to be going in
(although it doesn't have the type of license I'd prefer). It allows you to
get info on almost every basic physics topic with nice examples.

<http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/HFrame.html>

Definitely a candidate to replace a textbook (minus problem sets).

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christofd
When you are first learning a subject it's really helpful to have it printed
out on paper. As you chew through it, you can leave all kinds of personal
markings, underlinings etc. And you are not distracted by a million other
things - a book serves only one purpose.

Later on, after already being familiar with a subject, a digital version is
o.k. as well.

Summary -> school children need printed textbooks, pen and paper, homework
done on paper (hand writing skills)

~~~
christofd
Although, certain online learning resources inspire confidence -> e.g. Django
book, Thinking in Java, O'Reilly Safari etc.

The nice thing with an online version is that you can e.g. scale up the text
size to an ultra-readable format, jump quicker between footnotes/ citations,
retrieve the TOC, look up words in the index quicker, leave feedback (Django
Book) on each paragraph. It really depends on the design quality of the online
resource... hypertext craftsmanship.

And look at all the info mangling possibilities in Freebase/ Freebase Parallax
(navigating between related sets of information) ->
<http://mqlx.com/~david/parallax/> or even Wolfram Alpha.

Books can't do this. They are linear.

