Slashdot Mirror
Arizona School Won't Use Textbooks
Some Guy writes "A high school in Vail will become the state's first all-wireless, all-laptop public school this fall. The 350 students at the school will not have traditional textbooks. Instead, they will use electronic and online articles as part of more traditional teacher lesson plans."
Textbook sales are a racket worthy of the Gambino family.
All the money is being spent on "tech in schools". At the end of the day, a bad teacher will be bad given a set of textbooks or laptops. Imo, this money should go towards more teacher training/more teachers.
This should be an interesting experiment.
I have had computers for years and I use them extensively to learn things but I have found that they are no match for good old books. Books are so much convenient to use.
I think it is unwise to completely eliminate the books from clasrooms. It would be great to augment the books with online resources. But replacing them completely seems to be a dumb move.
This textbook less classroom will begin to happen more and more once epaper finally comes to fruition. I know I would have loved to be able to download my books instead of having to buy a $200 text book for my college classes.
"Plus how are you supposed to draw mustaches and balls on all the pictures for the next class to see?"
Hack the server with the "text book" stored on?
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
Imagin the power government will weld when they can change education text of our children on the fly to suit the preveiling views of the government.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
What does technology, in the form of laptops, have to do with a good education? As a HS senior, the most productive learning experiance I've had has come from quality teachers that have an intrest in teaching rather than just moving students through the system and crunching points. I'd feel a whole lot better of my school put more money into training and acquiring good teachers that some nearly useless technology that is just a crutch.
Those who study history are doomed to watch others repeat it.
they'll be about as far away from their eyes as the books they were reading last year... i highly doubt this will be an issue...
"hey, let's replace $60 worth of books with $600 worth of fragile computer gear. I'm sure no one will drop one or anything."
E-books are great for things that change a lot, like science, and are good for things that are amiable to hyperlinks, such as information about Shakespear.
However, when it comes to plain old literature, like Shakespear's works, paper-in-hand is a much more pleasing experience than laptop-on-lap.
Sure, have annotated, hyperlinked copies of Romeo and Juliet on the computer, but for goodness sake give those kids an actual book to read if they want one.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Why does my '25 years in IT' brain shudder at the prospect of this? In a nanosecond the following flashed through my consciousness:
Dropped it, flat batteries, can't see it in the sun, viruses, forgot to backup, stolen, central server outage, corrupt file, server cracked, can't type that fast, wifi down, wifi overloaded, forgot my password, not enough power sockets in the room, pulled off desk by someone tripping over power cable, broken keycaps, spilled drink on it, fighting for printer time, someone took my USB memory stick, unauthorised upgrade...I'm going pale at the thought!
AT&ROFLMAO
I don't know about everyone else, but LCD or not I can't stand to read anything longer than a slashdot article (or its impending dupe!) on a screen. I have to have paper.
It seems like the superintendent promoting this and many of the posts here are ignoring a fundamental problem: content. While it is nice to write about how great e-texts would be, it's not as if publishers are going to give that material away, even if it exists. So the cost of textbooks will still be there. Additionally, the answer to better education away from the textbook doesn't seem to be taking away books, which, as it turns out, can be valuable resources. The answer would seem to be giving teachers better training and forcing them to be accountable. In my experience as a teacher, the answer has never been a different avenue for transmittal of information, it has been a better transmitter.
Great. now the kids won't read a damn thing. As long as they can just search the text, they won't even have to do a half assed skim of it to find answers. Say goodby to what attention span they have.
This should have started happening in schools years ago.
Why?
There isn't really any advantage in learning from a computer. In fact, most people won't like it as much because physical books are easier to read. If you don't understand something it is much easier to read and reread a text book than to read and reread a PDF document. The article only mentions that they don't want teachers teaching straight from textbooks anymore. I'm not sure what is stopping them teaching straight from the computer material.
I've really no idea why this is considered a good thing. I like computer and so forth but still I wouldn't want this. I've been given a Physics CD-ROM from school but still use the text book for everything.
And think of the cost! There aren't so many people at this school though so that isn't so bad.
- Jax
I'm sorry, I think this is a lousy idea. Other people have commented about the dangers of giving a schoolful of kids expensive laptops, but there's something else: it SUCKS to read tons of text on a screen.
I (obviously) like computers, and I read tons of technical documentation online, since it's usually extremely interconnected, and hyperlinks help. But if I'm reading something that's pretty much linear (TFA didn't mention the structure of these "online articles", so I may be wrong there), or when I don't need to have a terminal window open at the same time to try out commands and whatnot, I prefer a printed page.
It's easier to move around and get comfortable with any reasonably sized book than with a laptop. (It's not just weight I'm talking about -- consider availability of AC power, glare, etc.)
I'm taking a class over the summer, and it's annoying me that one of the books hasn't been printed up -- instead we just go to the author's web site and download the PDF. I'd have gladly paid printing costs to get a bound meatspace copy.
I just think printed copies should always be an option.
Whoever thought the idea of give laptops to highschoolers must never have worked with any. I remember from my days in highschool. The kids are a destructive force. If it can be broken or stolen, it will be. I mean, seriously, how long until these things start getting stolen and showing up on Ebay? How do they prevent that from happening? Also, how do you stop some hormonely charged punk from getting mad and throwing a laptop on the ground? You know that it won't take but a day for some kid to forget that he's got a laptop in his backpack when he's throwing it in his locker. Books on the other hand don't break, and aren't hot items to sell. (College books are another story)
Plus I can see all kinds of new excuses...like I got a virus! Or my batteries died! Or Windows crashed/Clippy ate my paper! Books don't lose power, don't get virus, don't crash.
In the end, considering the group in questions (Highschoolers) books seem like the better solution. Plus, if a system isn't broken, why fix it? Books have been working for a long time, and can for a long time to come.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
The title of the story says the school "won't use textbooks," not won't use books at all. If eliminating textbooks is all that the move is all about, then I'm all for it. After grade school, I hated textbooks because of the way they were often used by incompetent teachers as a crutch: "Class, turn to Chapter 10, page 335."
My best teachers in college didn't prescribe any textbooks. Instead we got reading lists.
In a field such as literature, a textbook could even pose the danger that your mind would be warped by the author's presentation. More often, only the supposedly "representative" short works of an author would be included in a textbook on world literature. If they are at all included, the longer works, such as the novels or epic poetry, would be mercilessly excerpted.
Thus you don't get to read the real James Joyce or T.S. Eliot, just snapshots that don't adequately reflect their pioneering contributions to modern literature (e.g. stream of consciousness or free verse in English). The effect of a textbook-based curriculum on a literature major is no different from the cultural experience of a tourist who stays in a country for two days. You return home thinking that beer and sausages are what makes Germans tick or that people in Spain and Latin America are lazy because they like to take siestas.
I'm a sci-fi vegan: I don't want the aliens to think we have as much right to live as the fried chickens we eat.
Well, the solution is to create an honest-to-god ebook solution: a hundred dollar lcd non-backlit cheapo unit, like a larger palm, the size of a piece of notebook paper, with an ethernet jack for transfering files in and out of non-volatile memory. It should run on AAA cells. It should be strong enough to survive a fall. Steel is cheap. Mass production would drive costs down -- how many students are there? tens of millions.
... lawsuits from publishers?
Laptops are simply Microsoft and Intel's way of locking in customers forever. eBooks do not need a bloody laptop. I'd imagine the publishers love the new hardware DRM being built into the laptops' chipsets by Intel.
Why isn't someone building a cheap, useful ebook?
(I'm about to leave the office for my "second job" as a Shakespearean actor, so you kinda pushed the button. Sorry.)
Shakespeare (and literature in general) needs to be taught more like physics (wait, hear me out) and less like history and biology are usually taught. The goal isn't whether you can read the text and translate it well enough to figure out who killed Mercutio. The goal is to develop an appreciation for the process of reading, and for the pleasures of literature.
Just throwing somebody the e-text isn't sufficient, but just throwing a copy of the Penguin edition and telling them to have it read by next Wednesday isn't substantially better. For Shakespeare, read it out loud. Don't just have them read it to each other, at least not at first, because they don't know what's going on.
That's actually something that could be done better with the laptop. It's a multimedia device. Let them hear actors reading, or watch actors performing. Good actors can make the page come alive far better than a high school freshman can. That's their job.
Using the laptop as a substitute for paper is worthless. But there are some great ways to start with the laptop and use it to change the way we teach. That's my rant for literature, but expand the thinking to watching demonstrations of physics, or using a fly-through 3D model of a plant in biology.
I would love to be able to have a high school senior pick up a copy of Hamlet and be able to truly understand it, but only once you've given him or her the basics. I certainly don't expect a freshman to be able to do more with Romeo and Juliet than look up the hard words in the footnotes and try to parse the syntax. Which means that they're reading all the words and missing everything that's really there, and they'll never do any better with Hamlet three years later.
If all they can do is tell you that Laertes' father is Polonius, you've wasted their time and yours. But if they've seen Laertes overwhelming rage and blame for Hamlet, and they have some idea why it sounds so awesome when he says, "I would cut his throat in the church," you've really accomplished something.
I can see in one years curriculum "we are going to war because of weapons of mass destruction". Next year the laptop says "we went to war to liberate a people from a ruthless dictator". If the first sentance was in the book, it could not be erased, and students would ask "what? why? how did it change?".
Read current textbooks much? You hardly need computers for such historical revisionism.
(Of course, while the 'right wing' efforts, mostly unsuccessful at that, of some people to get ID into textbooks and Evolution demoted to a theory on equal grounds, the highly successful and pervasive re-writing of history has been done by the multi-cultural 'left wing', and this doesn't bother the press enough for them to inform people. "Wings" quoted because in reality, the same mindset drives both sets of people; only whom and how much they offend changes, with the resulting changes in coverage. We really need to get rid of the mindset that school textbooks are the correct place to fight ideological wars. You can't make them ideology free, but surely there's something a little less extreme than the current situation. Look up "multicultural math" sometime... Oi! Whatever small core of value that idea may have had, and it is quite small, is destroyed by the effect it has on those it is taught to.)
Hopefully their textbooks aren't DRM'd, or this is the beginning of what Stallman laid out in his Right to Read essay. Or was that Eric Raymond? Some slashdotter'll know.
"Why?
There isn't really any advantage in learning from a computer. "
Have you seen sixth graders on the way to school lately? They're crushed under the weight of their textbooks, wearing backpacks almost as large as themselves.
Somewhere along the way we got confused about what textbooks are for. Teachers now use them both for the homework assignment and for in class teaching. That means carting every book you might need home with you.
When I was in sixth grade, they told us "You should be doing half an hour a night of homework for every class that you're in." That kind of schedule meant that I had to carry five textbooks and five binders to and from school. My backpack weighed literally 40 pounds. At the time, I was proud of that. The permanent damage to my spine has since changed my mind.
As far as I know, the problem is only getting worse.
Sure, maybe you feel more comfortable reading from a book, but that's mostly because of the mind-bogglingly stupid use of WYSIWYG in *every* application. Switch your monitor to white on black, you'll have a whole new outlook on life. With macs you can do this with one key combo, I don't know how easy it is on a PC.
Obviously, staring into a lightbulb, which is reading a PDF is normally like, is uncomfortable. Putting a 90 pound child under 40 pounds of books and other supplies is much worse. Bad enough just carrying it, but I've seen what happens when a child trips under that weight. It's a real mess.
Personally, I'd be happiest if the textbooks stayed at home and no teaching was done from them at all at school, but that alternative just doesn't seem to work. If the teachers are going to something as a crutch, at least let it be something that doesn't leave the child on crutches.
"It is a HELLUVA lot easier to get a kid to fork up $65 for a book than the $850 for laptops. What happens when someone steals the laptop? Not too many people look to jack you for a textbook."
Just buying the laptop doesn't mean the textbooks will be free. You still need to pay for electronic copies of the textbooks as well.
Vote for Pedro
then it might be arguably a violation of 4th and 14th ammendment protections (IANAL)
If the laptops are issued by the school there is no expectation of privacy. The schools would also probably have the parents sign a waiver.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
If the kids are there to get educated, shouldn't using a computer be second nature when they graduate? And how can you make it an extension of their minds unless it is central to the learning process?
And what if it happens to engage children more to use a computer to learn? The main problem most of my friends had in high school was hating showing up every day. What if your education was meaningful, practical, and you were fully qualified immediately out of high school for better pay because of computer skills being second nature?
I see this as a step away from silliness and towards reasonability. Precisely how useful ARE textbooks? And isn't the control over the textbook as a source of philosophy and slant one of its major problems?
Switching out stale, dry textbooks might not work, but it has the advantage of perhaps invoking the Hawthorne Effect: changing the environment sometimes will cause an improvement in productivity simply because the people think you are watching and interacting with them more seriously.
As of late, I thought it had been fairly well established that technology does nothing to help students learn more, or learn better. When I see stories like this, it makes me wonder which crony's friend/relative is getting the contract.
Speaking as a physics graduate student in a field where practically all the research material I need (published papers) is freely downloadable, I still think this is a very dumb idea.
Reading off a screen is fine if just want to skim a quick article, but when you're dealing with material that you really need to go over several times, digest and understand (i.e. the kind of thing they put in textbooks), there's no substitute for having a hard copy. And unless all these students have quick and easy access to a printer both at home and at school (and you've budgeted for the printing costs) a lot of the supposed advantage is lost.
While I think putting course materials online is a Good Thing, the idea (commonly expressed at universities) that doing this as a substitute for printouts will "save a few trees" is generally just a way of avoiding saying "if you want a printout you'll have to pay for it". I can't wait until they come up with the low-power consumption device with a screen as pleasant to read as a piece of paper that I can store the whole of Project Gutenberg on, but until then, focused studying really needs paper.
Are you kidding?
$500 a month is half a month's pay to some people.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Well, the solution is to create an honest-to-god ebook solution: a hundred dollar lcd non-backlit cheapo unit, like a larger palm, the size of a piece of notebook paper, with an ethernet jack for transfering files in and out of non-volatile memory. It should run on AAA cells. It should be strong enough to survive a fall. Steel is cheap. Mass production would drive costs down -- how many students are there? tens of millions.
... lawsuits from publishers?
:-) ).
Why isn't someone building a cheap, useful ebook?
If you can make it work, go ahead. People have been trying to make a viable electronic book for the past twenty years.
From what I remember of the failed attempts: PDAs and notebooks in 1995 sold many "ruggedized" variants: the kind that could stand a (single) three foot drop onto concrete, or partial or total immersion in water. These versions tended to be four to five times the cost of a "non-ruggedized" version.
The cost of steel wasn't the limiting factor; shock resistant hard drives tended to be, though. Weight was also a limiting factor; by using titanium instead of steel, Palm is able to cut the weight of their cases in half (plus make them look cooler
It's a non-trivial task to design a viewing system that
(a) is dirt cheap,
(b) looks good in multiple lighting conditions,
(c) is damage resistant.
You want "cheap" and "good" at the same time? Well, then, like the engineering rule says, you've ruled out "fast". Prepare to wait a long time to get what you want. I should know: I've wanted a decent pda/electronic paper solution for 20 years now. Palm pilots are the closest I've seen yet, and they've got a long way to go...
--
AC
Everyone wants a good e-book. If it was technologically feasible it would already be on the market. We may well have to wait a decade or two more before we get something like you describe that actually works well.
Maybe I misunderstood but the article says the school is going to "hand" each student an $850 laptop for the whole year. Sounds to me like the students don't have to pay for them. They are just being issued like public schools issue textbooks.
Here's tThe part that gets me:
the move to electronic materials gets teachers away from the habit of simply marching through a textbook each year.
Like hell. Uninspired teachers who simply trudge through a curriculum, or essentially read the textbook to the students, will do the same thing whether the material is on paper or on a series of websites. Probably sounds good in a school board meeting though.
When the students have reach a level where they can synthesize ideas from different sources and reach their own conclusion, then you are absolutely right. But do you really think HS physics students should read Newton's writing? Should 1st course calculus focus on reading Leibniz?
As for using the Internet, your teacher can still print texts from the Internet and give them as handouts to students. Laptops wouldn't be needed.
If you just throw the students onto the internet, you'll get papers detailing the "Impact of the Cthulu cult on ancient gaelic culture"!
"Think hard about why software engineers don't have a union."