Textbooks 2.0
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It is no secret that the cost of textbooks continues to rise. Two recent reports–one from the US Government Accountability Office (2005) and the other from the Senate Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance (2007)–found that the cost of textbooks has been rising at twice the rate of inflation for some time. One might argue that textbooks increase in cost as students demand more from them. After all, textbooks today must keep current on research that moves at warp speed, include engaging learning activities, and be appealing to the eye of a generation raised on the internet.
All of that comes at a high cost.
The challenge of keeping examples and citations up to date is particularly daunting for academics hitherto unused to tracking popular trends. New editions must be produced annually just to stay on top of the trend, and professors exhaust themselves digging up novel and engaging examples to illustrate ideas. Yet the textbook stubbornly a static one-way, top-down information delivery system.
In the early days of the internet, we talked a great deal about the differences between server-side, client-side and distributed technologies.
- Server-side technologies once dominated computing: they consist of large mainframes that are accessed with ‘dumb’ terminals. These are usually controlled by monopolistic corporations – the AT&T phone system is a prime example.
- Client-side technologies shift much of the processing power from the server to the client, but at the cost of shifting the investment and risk to the client. These ‘clients’ often require a great deal of skill to maintain and frequently develop a group of cult-like devotees dedicated to supporting their maintenance and use. They frequently require updates, as the ‘servers’ put out new and novel formats for the clients to consume. Personal computers, stereo equipment and automobiles are all classic examples of client-side technologies.
- Distributed systems consist of networks of ‘experts’ in specific areas of information that are willing to share that information with anyone else in the network who requests it. The network itself is robust, as it does not depend on any one expert to run, and it is easily expandable, as anyone can enter once they declare their area of expertise (and register with some expertise-recognition system). The information systems underlying the internet–including email and the domain name system–are classic examples of distributed systems.
I bring all of this up because textbooks–and the economic forces that continue to drive up their prices–bear many of the hallmarks of a client-side technology. They are in need of constant updates–through hardware, not software. They require significant investment on the part of the client. The risk is carried almost entirely by the client, not the server who provides the information. And, yes, they have a small and devoted class of followers.
This makes no sense. The distributed systems that run the internet were inspired by the way the academy shares information through a system of recognized experts. We, the professors who continue to choose textbooks, have failed to recognize this inherent contradiction: textbooks typify the very culture that we are meant to oppose. The academy is designed as a distributed system. And our continued reliance on textbooks makes us think of it, and present it to our students, as a client-side enterprise.
Why not take advantage of the informational system that the academy inspired to deliver information about the academy? All the tasks of developing and producing a textbook–research, writing, reviewing, editing, distributing and using–can be improved by the open collaboration of distributed network of experts.
There is nothing stopping us but us. We are the authors, editors, reviewers and consumers of this media. The publishers provide us copy-editors and fact-checkers, yes, but they will never be as good as the users themselves, if we allow them to contribute to the project by offering feedback, ratings, and commentary.
The new, distributed, textbook–of which this site is an example–surpasses the traditional one in at least these ways:
Interactivity – The current crop of textbooks make a big deal of ‘active learning’ and ‘engagement.’ They are, however, static prose on an unchanging page. Even the newer electronic textbooks tend to be static PDF versions of the page images with, if you’re lucky, interactive questions at the end of the chapter. The hypertextuality of the internet has long given us the potential for genuinely interactive texts. Douglas Adams experimented with interactive fiction back in the 1980s with his infocom games, and again in the late 1990′s with his ‘Starship Titanic’ game. The idea is not new. But it has not been explored much in the textbook marketplace. Real interactivity could allow the author to present examples, solicit responses from the students, tailor and tailor the experience to the individual student. For example, see: Inquiry-Invitation to Critical Thinking.
Multimedia - No matter how good, examples in a static, printed textbook will be static and printed. Today’s students have grown up with multimedia, embedded interactive content. Adobe Flash, HTML5, and video streaming make all of this possible for textbooks today. We simply have to take advantage of the existing technologies to develop new content. Consider critical thinking for a moment. Most critical thinking instruction has focused on the analysis of static text. This is not surprising, as most critical thinking theory descends from the work of John Dewey, who was primarily interested in the training of a public that received their news primarily from newspapers. The forms of reasoning emphasized in most of the texts available today and the techniques for analyzing them, therefore, tend to be those that appear in static prose (e.g. argument mapping). Today’s information is not a monomedium like it was in Dewey’s day. It is a multimedia experience that has its own techniques for distorting information and persuading opinion. For example, consider the visual fallacy that is: Economist Visual Fallacy.
There are a number of new tools appearing that will allow annotations directly on multimedia content. One of the most exciting is Diver, a new project from the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning. We hope to include such annotations as a part of our ‘analysis’ section soon.
Modularity - Instruction is best when it initially can connect to students interests, and then can transport them to somewhere new. Publishers, even textbooks authors, will never be able to understand a particular populations’ interests better than the instructor. Recent generations of textbooks have attempted to create systems where individual instructors can tailor their textbooks to the particular needs of their student body. These are valiant attempts to put a band-aid on a flawed system. Standard, open-source content management systems–like WordPress3, which runs this site–are far more adaptable and modular than anything the textbook publishers have yet produced. We simply need to take advantage of the existing technology.
Non-linearity - Whatever their strengths, textbooks are a linear medium. Students do not use them in a linear way, however. They flip back and forth, skim for bullet-points, check out the end-of-chapter questions as they read the prose, etc. In a textbook, there is one relationship between the concepts, examples and activities: page order. Before or after. WordPress gives me at least four relationships that can hold between the concepts, examples and activities: same category, same tags, pingbacks / trackbacks, and related posts. These can be further fine-tuned with additional tools. For example, see: Gizmo-lesion.
Dynamic – Finally, textbooks are in need of constant renewal, at the expense of the end-user. This site is built on the idea that information is temporally bound. It will constantly be updated, constantly refreshing the relationships between ideas. As one example resonates better with a new generation of students, it will rise on the popularity meter. As examples get superannuated, students will tell us in the comments. Modules on basic concepts–such as modus tollens–can be associated with the most recent popular examples to keep the content fresh. (Example forthcoming with the API)
An Economic Analysis of Textbook Pricing and Textbook Markets. Koch, James V. for the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, US Dept. of Education. September 2006.
College Textbooks: Enhanced Offerings Appear to Drive Recent Price Increases. United States Government Accountability Office. July 2005.
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