Slashdot Mirror
Devices To Take Textbooks Beyond Text
An anonymous reader writes with a New York Times piece about the tumultuous transition to electronic devices, instead of printed materials, for text. "Newspapers and novels are moving briskly from paper to pixels, but textbooks have yet to find the perfect electronic home. They are readable on laptops and smartphones, but the displays can be eye-taxing. Even dedicated e-readers with their crisp printlike displays can’t handle textbook staples like color illustrations or the videos and Web-linked supplements publishers increasingly supply. Now there is a new approach that may adapt well to textbook pages: two-screen e-book readers with a traditional e-paper display on one screen and a liquid-crystal display on the other to render graphics like science animations in color."
Why not have a pc / netbook that can do more for about the same cost?
Here in Uruguay all school childrens have an XO, that have a decent screen for reading text, even under sunlight. If well don't have a dual screen like those, cost less than half of the ones in the article, and can do far more than just reading books. And doing more than just displaying books means that education don't need to be something as passive as reading/memorizing a textbook, and a lot of its activities are oriented to getting student to participate. And we are talking about a device that is around since several years by now.
In my experience as a professor I found that there are two types of students. Those who get the material without much supporting information, and those who will never get it no matter how many different techniques you use. Bloating textbooks has just made it harder for those interested in the subject to wade through the crap.
Adding more to already bloated textbooks won't help. I should start a movement for smaller books.
Who are these people who read textbooks in direct sunlight?
And if you're such an advocate of sunlight, what are you doing posting on Slashdot?
How we know is more important than what we know.