Powerful tools, More Powerful Companies

The textbook is static, and there is a reason: It cannot be easily manipulated, altered, hoaxed, vended, spammed, scammed, gamed, facebooked, or otherwise converged as a profit center for communication companies demanding 25-30 percent profit annually for their stockholders.

Because the book is static, and as such, ensures credibility, it also safeguards the scientific method—which technology’s dynamic aspects threaten, in as much as our research methods are based on the book. For more on that, see http://www.halfnotes.org.

For a historical perspective, review how the predictions of brilliant scientists have faired concerning technology. Case in point: Negroponte’s “Being Digital” (1995). He, as many in this article, continue to overlook the gap between what these devices can do educationally and what the media are programmed to do by the manufacturers. (See Duke iPod experiment.)

These conferences need to analyze why libraries and archives, in particular, have been important to the scientific method and determine how those aspects can be preserved through dynamic media that lend themselves to entertainment and socialization more than to education and enlightenment.

Digital footnotes lapse. Libraries no longer own their databanks. Corporations “vend” knowledge.

When our brightest minds can figure out how to overcome the above obstacles, technology can fulfill its promise without also having to be revenue centers.

Michael Bugeja, Director at Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, at 7:30 am EDT on May 30, 2006

Textbooks

College textbook publishers have struggled mightily with little success to introduce electronic texts. Students may or may not want them, but it is clear that with some very important exceptions, the faculty does not, and the faculty serves as the gatekeeper to textbook purchases. Electronic texts and other digital materials will find a way into the classroom in those institutions that purchase materials on an institutiional level, not on the level of the individual course and the specific student.

Joseph J. Esposito, President at Portable CEO, at 11:15 am EDT on May 30, 2006

Unbalanced reporting?

The workshop’s white paper is not available yet, at least from the link Epstein provided. I do not know what resources Epstein used, but he may by providing us with a very one sided view of the discussions at the workshop.

I did find abstracts of the talks given. Some of the speakers do overstep the bounds of credulity.(http://serc.carleton.edu/textbook/program.html) Tanya Atwater, Professor of Earth Science, University of California Santa Barbara wrote:

The teaching and learning of many scientific topics can be greatly enhanced with electronic visualization tools, especially those that clarify three-dimensional spatial relationships and evolution through time, and that allow/facilitate changes in spatial and temporal scales. Computer animations are proving to be particularly useful for these purposes. Future “textbooks” must include moving imagery. While some modes of information transfer, such as reading and writing, require many years of training to be effectively used, imagery, and especially moving imagery, are innately understood.

The first two statements I agree with. I have used computer animations and 3-d drawing programs in several classes. But the last sentence is absurd. You cannot just watch an animation of a Fourier series model of a vibrating string, and understand it “innately.” I have to carefully teach my students how to understand it, how to think about it critically, how to connect it to the mathematics and the physical world.

However, many of the speakers seem do present balanced views and data based studies. When the white paper comes out it will be worth reading. Don’t let Epstein’s unbalanced reporting bias you against it.

Oh, as for lower division math textbooks, you are not supposed to read them like a novel or a history textbook. They are really more like reference books with problems and examples. Upper division math textbooks however do require careful reading.

Math, Math Prof, at 1:50 pm EDT on May 30, 2006

Comment to Ira Socol

There is a difference between a static medium and static knowledge. Without the former, dynamic knowledge is untrustworthy.

Again, I can’t give you a crash Internet course on how the director of a journalism school has come up with such a shocking assessment, except to direct you to our research Web site: http://www.halfnotes.org

Our research is peer reviewed and appears in technology and library journals. You’ll discover, if you read up on what we as researchers are doing at a peer institution of science and technology, you’ll better understand the point we are making about scientific replication, and that our intent is to make dynamic tools credible.

I would hope that you would cease with your comments about being shocked, making a scholarly discussion personal rather than informed—although you can thank the dynamic medium of Internet for that.

Michael Bugeja, at 4:05 pm EDT on May 30, 2006

Thank you for a more reasoned although still personal response. You make the assumption that I am fearful and state, with confidence, what I sound like.

Let’s approach this from a theoretical background, OK? The first wave of responses about any new medium represents the Hoopla effect. In sum, advocates keep singing its praises, much as you did in the last post. Much of what you write is true, but that still does not make the new medium reputable. For that to occur, the second wave (of which I am a part) stablizes rather than promotes the medium, often by challenging it to uphold standards of the traditional medium.

That is what we are doing at an institution of science and techology. Our latest research is an empirical study on Google vs. Wayback machine as a scholarly tool to resurrect dead citations. To do that study, we have to know technology—the differences in operations between a search engine and an archive, for instance. We have to work in a digital lab.

So please, Ira, cease with your assumptions about who I am and what I sound like and address these issues from an informed rather than personal perspective, especially since both our institutions are peer and we have used our names and provided links and done just about everything in our posts that Internet is capable of doing, showcasing its good and bad points within our digital dialogue.

For the sake of other readers of Inside Higher Ed, you can have the last word without any follow-up from me. I would hope that you might set an example and acknowledge that comments here are meant to improve technology for academic purposes, especially with regard to my first post about the biggest challenge of all: profit-minded communication companies.

All the rosy scenarios for academic technology in the 1990s have proved elusive because the medium not only is the message but the moral, too.

More for Ira, at 6:30 pm EDT on May 30, 2006

I apologize

Michael and Mike and More... I apologize for the tone. You are right about that. Though I still find distinct parallels between today’s “trouble with the internet” and all prior technology shifts in education and scholarship. And my studies do suggest a powerful link between Protestant Christianity and the devotion to what I refer to as “Individual Print Literacy” — each student sitting the book in front of him/her — and the concept of permanence imparted by print. It is a deep, deep cultural presumption, that I believe needs to be, in some ways, aggressively challenged so that it can be looked at close up.

I am also, yes personally, frustrated by the lack of attention to equity concerns in the “problems with technology” discourse. To millions around the world digital access offers opportunity to those who have been left out of the success story. That is where I becme passionate and angry. It seems like roadblocks are being thrown in the path of “universal design” because of what I see as entirely solvable issues — or even spurious issues (as when people say, “there’s lots of crap on line” — because, there’s lots of crap on bookshelves as well).

And no, I need not, in any way, have the last word or words. I never want that. I want conversations — no matter how clumsily I may enter some of them.

Ira Socol, Michigan State University, at 7:05 pm EDT on May 30, 2006

Somewhere in my book case is a 1913 copy of the textbook on physics by Millikan and Gale. It fits in a coat pocket, yet it covers much of the physics of its time. Sure, we have much more physics now—but high school texts mostly focus the basics, stuff already known in 1913. It is printed on ordinary (not heavy) paper, in black and white, is eminently portable, and includes problems, applications, even pictures of some eminent scientists and a bit of their stories.

Two things have happened since 1913 which need attention, badly. One, high school texts (and university texts) have become big, heavy and dense. A large percentage of students, meanwhile, have become less literate. Unless these two are fixed, physics in schools faces a near-impossible handicap.

Textbooks need become more portable and more user friendly. They may well be electronic—with easier cross referencing, etc. But don’t expect them to work without retaining the orderly framework whichs books have. (They may well also provide space at the bottom for a student’s own notes). See www.phy6.org for some free texts, which many people use.

And at the same time, something needs to be done to make students better readers. In 1913, reading books was the standard mode of entertainment, and in the process of being entertained, young people also became fluent readers. Today most entertainment comes from an electronic box, and fluency is down, tremendously.

That is the crux of the problem. You can show kids videos, you can make them press buttons on instruments far ahead of those of 1913—but in teaching physics, no one has found a better medium thanh the written word—printed on paper, shown on a screen, written or typed by the student’s own hand. And I firmly believe that the future of instruction will remain tied to information presented in words. Call the medium in which it happens what you will: I call it a textbook.

David P. Stern, Textbook evolution, at 12:30 am EDT on June 3, 2006