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Bill and Melinda Gates: Textbooks Are Becoming Obsolete
Reader theodp writes: Thanks to software, Bill and Melinda Gates report in their 2019 Annual Letter, textbooks are becoming obsolete. Bill writes: "I read more than my share of textbooks. But it's a pretty limited way to learn something. Even the best text can't figure out which concepts you understand and which ones you need more help with. It certainly can't tell your teacher how well you grasped last night's assigned reading. But now, thanks to software, the standalone textbook is becoming a thing of the past" (if so, it'll be a 60-year overnight success!). The Gates are putting their money where their mouths are -- their education investments include look-Ma-no-textbooks Khan Academy and Code.org. Code.org, whose AP Computer Science Principles course for high schools "does not require or follow a textbook", boasted in its just-released Annual Report that 38% of all AP CS exam takers in 2018 came from "Code.org Computer Science Principles classrooms," adding that it had spent $24.2 million of its donors' money on curriculum and its Code Studio learning platform (30,300 hours of coursework), another $46.7 million to prepare 87,000 new K-12 CS teachers, $12.4 million on Marketing, and $6.9 million on Government Affairs. So, do we still need textbooks?
Excuse the selective quoting, but:
By the time a textbook hits the market it's already a year or three out-of-date. [...] It would need to be[...] organized to match standardized curriculum,
I think those things are somewhat in opposition. If you're at the level of standardised cirricula, then you're teaching intro level or a bit above. Anything much higher doesn't have standardised cirricula. On that note, most things that are intro level don't change fast enough to be out of date in three years (not everything, but most).
On another note, textbooks don't need to be matched to a cirriculum. At uni the lecturers often gave a list of books they thought were useful if you wanted to learn outside of lectures. The cirriculum wasn't organised around those books (or vice versa). And sometimes books are just plain useful for learning stuff, for example, I love my copy of Horowitz & Hill and NR.
On the other hand, a dig in the eye wit ha sharp stick would be a better bet than some of the things that pass for textbooks, especially at the mass eucation level.
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