With new technologies constantly coming on-line, and with states like California, Texas, and Oregon allowing digital curriculum to replace printed curriculum, the question arises: what will textbooks look like in the coming years?
Dale’s post, "A hunger for good learning," featured a fantastic video about teaching math. In a few brief minutes, Dan Meyer showed us a photo of a math problem involving filling a tank of water and calculating how long that would take, then showed us why traditional approaches to teaching this problem stifled student learning. The picture showed a traditional math problem with a line drawing of the tank, a problem set-up written in text (octagonal tank, straight sides, 27oz per second, etc.) followed by short sub-steps that are needed to solve the problem (calculate the surface area of the base, calculate the volume). Then, finally, it asks the question “how long will it take to fill the tank?” Dan’s view is that this spoon-feeding of problem solving in little steps trains students not to think like mathematicians and not to have the patience for solving complex problems. Instead, Dan prefers to show his students a video of the tank filling up, agonizingly slowly, until the students are eager to know “How long until that tank fills up, anyway?” And then they’re off -- discussing, questioning, and, most importantly, formulating the problem on their own, just as good mathematicians do.
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In this example, the student finds all the needed tools lying around the page. A ruler for measuring the size of the tank, a cup of known size and a stopwatch to measure the rate of water flow, as well as various other tools, leaving it to the student to decide which ones are relevant to solving the problem. This textbook is interactive.
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In addition to living, interactive, participative, adaptive, and connected, we can expect the 21st century textbook to be personalized and mashable. Beyond that, though, could the 21st century textbook hold out a unique promise - that the student who uses this kind of textbook no longer needs to wait for high-stakes, anxiety-inducing tests to determine whether he had learned a topic? What if the digital textbook were instrumented to collect and interpret data in such a way that it could tell a student's level of mastery without test-taking, just from how he engaged with the content? Some of these measurements and interpretations are easy to imagine, such as: 'Which digital tool did the student first pick up to make measurements in the tank-filling problem', and 'What keywords did he search for on the internet?' Other kinds of data will be harder to interpret, such as: 'What solutions did he try on his scratch pad', 'What questions did he ask his peers', and 'Which of his peers' questions did he answer?' But to any degree, what would it mean for a textbook to understand a student's level of mastery in real-time from his work in this digital medium? With what information could a teacher know exactly what next challenge would be optimal for each student’s learning on a daily basis?
What if the textbook publishers could see, in aggregate, how effective their content is, learn from that, adapt their textbooks, and redistribute new and improved content in months, weeks, or days rather than the current seven-year adoption cycles -- much in the way that Google measures our interactions with their applications and improve them based on the results. Depending on how well the beta testers in Dan's classroom learned to solve algebra problems, the textbook modifications might become standard for all algebra students. What if the instrumented 21st century textbook were able to measure both a student's learning and its own effectiveness, and that capability moved education innovation itself to Internet time?
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Kind of a long read, I know. I took out some of the bits that were less to the point I wanted to share, but I recommend you read the full article if you have the time. As a geek of both technology and publishing, I am fascinated by this story. I mean, I think back to the textbooks I had in schools growing up, and even if they were just a few years old, they were already outdated. What if content were updated every year? Or even every day? It makes so much more sense for grammar schools to have a subscription-based interactive and up-to-the-minute accurate lesson plans and learning materials than it does to re-purchase an entire wealth of knowledge every 5-10 years that will instantaneously lose value and accuracy after purchase. I think more publishers are adopting this strategy, and i hope that by the time I have kids (if ever I have kids) their classrooms are filled with learning devices that pull straight from the cloud.
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