Textbooks: A Value Proposition

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Textbooks: A Value Proposition

11/13/2007

By Stephen R. Acker

eduCommons, an open courseware platform pioneered at Utah State University and one reason for the state of Utah’s decision to earmark $200,000 for open courseware content development and use; and Connexions, an open courseware project anchored at Rice University (TX) that uses Lulu for printing-on-demand delivery of content. Need more sources of digital content? Try the American Council of Learned Societies print-on-demand program, the ever-expanding Google Print Library Project, or the consortial Open Content Alliance.

So with this ambitious set of projects underway, we still need to ask why haven’t we arrived at digital nirvana? Why do we still need print-on-demand as an option to help get us there? Taken together, this set of comments address the “when” question:

“Students still love print.” —Stacy Skelly (American Association of Publishers)
“Just wait until the next generation of students grows up.” —Mark Nelson (NACS)
“The content must meet the students where they are: video clips to their iPods, concise tutorials delivered to the field researcher, and flexible packages that can be absorbed between classes or while waiting to pick up the kids from soccer practice.” —Peter Murray (OhioLINK)
“Keep it simple, make it standards based.” —Rob Abel (IMS Global Learning Systems)
“We need to align incentives of our sales force with the goal of disseminating materials digitally.” —Dan Bartell (Pearson Publishing)
“When the inventory of digital assets nears parity with the inventory of learning materials available in print we’ll hit the tipping point.” —Frank Daniels (Vital Source). Daniels thinks this “inventory parity” could be realized in as little as 18 months.
“When the student participates more fully in populating the digital bookshelf.” —David Wiley (Utah State University)

Walking Down the Road: The Final Mile

As always, we have to calibrate our “change the world slider” somewhere between what the technologies are capable of delivering and what our social systems are able to absorb. David Wiley, lead architect of eduCommons and a faculty member at Utah State University, describes his ideal textbook as seeded by 30 percent of faculty-selected content that “magnetizes” 70 percent more content contributed from students taking the class engaged in active learning. Blaise Aguera y Arcas from Microsoft Live Labs offers a compelling example of an interface exquisitely designed for socially constructed knowledge spaces, and one able to place an entire legible copy of Dickens’ Bleak House on a single screen, preserving social context and page turning with an imaging algorithm that can zoom to a single word from within an entire text on screen. David Wiley, meet SeaDragon and Photosynth and may they someday serve your courses well (see link).