In a Digital Future, Are Textbooks History?

A few years back, while buying a science textbook for my daughter's high school chemistry class, I noticed that her $180 textbook also came in a relatively cheaper electronic version. My wife, who loves her Kindle, had suggested that we solve the problem of lugging too many heavy textbooks and save some money by buying digital textbooks.   Are we are at the leading edge of a fundamental change in educational technology?

In the United States, textbooks are a $14 billion market, about evenly divided between the K-12 segment and the college segment.  This market is on the verge of being disrupted.  The web and digital media disintermediate knowledge and shatter historical monopolies on information, communication, and learning. They are a classic example of what Clayton Christensen, currently dean of the Harvard Business School, termed "disruptive technology" in his prescient first book, The Innovator's Dilemma.

Schools and schooling are moving online. More schools and increasing numbers of teacher are creating their own instructional materials.  They make PowerPoint presentations, podcasts, and YouTube videos and post them to the web. Neeru Khosla's CK-12 Foundation, which creates digital textbooks from free, digital media, has submitted several of its "flexbooks" for adoption by the state of California, which the department of education hopes might save millions of dollars. 

I don’t use textbooks.  All my lessons are hands-on, inquiry science where we are either doing an experiment or reflecting on and creating meaning for an experiment that we have just done.  We experiment, we talk, we write.  I tell my students that our textbook is the one they create in their science notebooks. 

In the past, I kept some sample textbooks to look something up.  Now I use trusted sites on the web to look things up.  For ideas, I might use the web or some creative books, such as Culinary Reactions, a great book on food chemistry by Simon Field, to plan a lesson.  But no textbooks.  Move over McGraw-Hill and give Gutenberg the news.

 

A Day at the Maker Faire

Yesterday I took two of my students to our local Maker Faire and we had a great time.  In case you are unfamiliar with these events, they were started in 2006 in San Mateo, California, by Dale Dougherty, the founder of Make Magazine, as a celebration of  “arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset."  The Faire fondly refers to itself as “the biggest Show-and-Tell on earth.”   Make Magazine is a key publication of the Maker culture, a major movement intersecting with tinkering, hacking, and Do-It-Yourself.

We spent four hours just wandering around, looking at whatever caught our eye.  We all wanted to see the giant Mouse Trap gizmo designed and built by Mark Perez and we got to the barrier over 15 minutes early.  It was a giant Rube Goldberg device at least two stories high that was modeled after the old Mouse Trap game.  A gear wheel would release a hammer that start a bowling ball down a flight of stairs and so forth, ultimately with a two-ton safe crashing down on an old BMW.  That was pretty dramatic!

We made LED greeting cards at the Chibitronics booth, which delighted my students.  I really like how their idea of using copper tape and flat watch batteries has made simple electric circuits much easier and more accessible for students to make more electrical projects.  I get the same effect as copper tape by using aluminum foil cut in strips and backed by transparent sticky tape.  We also visited the booth of John Collins, The Paper Airplane Guy, and made our versions of his models.  The booth minders looked horrified at our mods but within the limits of the booth, they seemed to fly as well as those made by others following the “rules”.  We also ran into my friend, Simon Field, a technophile who operates a cool website called “scitoys” with lots of science toys, science projects, and science background.  It’s a treasure trove for teachers and students who like tinkering and awesome science.  We had a great day and now I’m trying to figure out how to use all the new ideas I got.