What about textbooks?

One of the many blogs that librarians in both public and school libraries will find useful is the one posted by David Warlick in which he covers new trends and ideas in education. Recently he has posted two takes on what textbooks will be like in the future. He proposes that they will be far more interactive than current textbooks. No longer will they strive to be "Centrally-Authoritative" and error free but will accept the fact that errors occur and will be self-correcting through social interaction. It's worth looking at the posting for June 26, which lists the characteristics of old and new textbooks. Now, some librarians may be shrugging off the idea of changes in textbooks as having any relevance to library books for children, but I think they are wrong. As the idea of interactivity--the importance of looking at books and other media as joint productions of writers and readers--grows, the changes will affect trade books as well as textbooks. And they will especially affect librarians who are the mediators between trade books and children just as teachers are the mediators between textbooks and children. As children become used to sharing ideas and giving input into their digital (surely these new textbooks will have to be digital) textbooks, they will want to have the same input into the books they read for pleasure. The importance of forums where children can react to their reading, post their responses, share opinions, and ask questions should not be underestimated. More and more libraries are moving into the 21st century as hubs of interaction rather than collections of static materials. Instead of seeing ourselves as offering objects to children, we will see ourselves as sharing with children the imaginative offerings of authors and illustrators. It's an exciting prospect and both adults and children will change and grow in the exchange.

Changeable textbooks

According to the N.Y. Times, Macmillan Publishing company is releasing software that will allow academic authors to change their textbooks after publication. Authors will be able to revise, update, and rearrange chapters to suit the needs of individual courses or new developments. They will also be allowed to insert new material from their other works or from other authors (presumably with the author's permission). This is an exciting new development in publishing form college texts and it's quite possible the trend will be extended to high school textbooks too. Of course there are dangers--new errors could slip into the book as the author makes changes without editorial oversight. I wonder whether there will be any hacking of textbooks to insert material contrary to the wishes of the author. The issue of security is always important for online texts. Overal, however, the possibilities for better, less expensive and more up-to-date textbooks look good. Let's hope this trend continues.

Another view of e-textbooks

California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has announced a policy of offering electronic textbooks to students. He suggested that this would save the state millions of dollars because the books would be free, although it's not clear how the content would be produced unless people were paid to write it. Pilot programs in various states have tried to study how students react to e-textbooks and the results, according to the Wall Street Journal, are mixed. Cost for commercially produced e-books are approximately the same as the costs for print versions, and publishers would like to keep it this way. Some students don't like reading on a screen and some complain they are unable to take notes or skip around to find specific content. Apparently the choice of how to read, as well as what to read, is very personal and schools and libraries will be experimenting for years to find a way of serving the greatest number of students. In this time of budget woes, it may not be easy to change a system even one that is as expensive as our current textbook market is.

Paying for digital textbooks

Governor Schwarzenegger's announcement that California schools will soon be using open source digital textbooks for science and math--and perhaps other subjects--was a welcome one to many teachers and librarians. The process by which schools and libraries can move to providing this material instead of paper books is still not clear. Digital material needs equipment to make it usable and school boards as well as library boards are notoriously stingy about buying enough computers and especially maintaining them well. It's not unusual to see a cluster of computers in a classroom and library in which half of the machines are "temporarily" unusable. The new Kindle and other electronic reading devices seem ideally suited to textbook use, but how will those stand up to repeated use by students year after year. It's important to look at the quality and cost of our textbooks, but librarians and teachers ought to be equally concerned with the quality and cost of the machines that give access to them.