Doug recently posted a letter by Janet HasBrouck, a teacher librarian lamenting the limitations of e-textbooks. ("Lamenting" may be too strong a word--I have an awful attachment to alliteration.)
"We seem to make assumptions about students and technology that are often not true, and there seems to be a lot of them about e-texts especially. I don't think we can necessarily combine the discussion about e-library books, including fiction and reference, with the discussion about e-textbooks at the high school or college level."
Meet Scott McLeod, a rising national figure, one of the "emerging voices that will shape the future of education technology." His dangerously irrelevant blog is challenging and in-your-face. He loves to tweak teachers, or at least a mythical version of teachers, and his blog is big fun to read, especially if you sprinkle it with a few grains of salt.
He wrote a
Scott is bright and educated. Yet here we go again, folks squinting through telescopes in their ivory towers, judging us sowing in the field, wondering why we keep sowing by hand instead of using the John Deere 1590 Seed Drill that is so much more efficient.
So here's my reason, a tiny section of an on-line textbook used by my school, cut and pasted from the Holt, Rinehart, Winston website it came from:
To be fair to the Holt, your view of this may be adulterated by technological glitches beyond Holt's control, but the image has a slight pixelated feel when view directly on the computers at school and in my home.
Maybe it will be better next year, maybe 5--call me when it works. If cars were rolled out the same way technology is rolled out in schools, Ford's first Model A cars might have lacked wheels.
