I Disagree with Suspending the Purchase of Textbooks
I'll state right up front that I disagree with Vicki Davis's position here. But it should be stated. She writes, "I personally have to underline, write, rewrite, take notes in the margin and work with the text. I just have to. It is how I learn." Fair enough. And I absolutely think that you need to work with the material in order to learn it. When I was in university I also spent a great deal of time rewriting texts on paper (lectures too, which I transcribed as I listened to them). Now I use a computer to do this - and it's an important skill to have. Yes, some people still do it the old way. They shouldn't. And some people today just cut and paste from electronic texts. They shouldn't do that either - they are robbing themselves of their own learning if they do that. Vicki Davis, Cool Cat Teacher Blog, August 22, 2007. [Link] [Tags: none] [Previous][Next]Comments
Re: I Disagree with Suspending the Purchase of Textbooks
I think Vicki's position is a moderate and reasonable one - that a 100% digital classroom would be a less rich one - so I would have to disagree with you, Stephen, if you're advocating that classrooms should, in fact, be 100% digital. Sure, digital skills are valuable, but it would be callous to dismiss the value of "analogue" learning too. Claiming that skills on paper are obsolete in the wake of computers is akin to claiming that we should no longer teach students library skills because we have the Internet.
The more ways that students are equipped to research and learn, the better. If they know how to take good written notes and reference written materials, it is every bit as useful as knowing how to touch-type. It's a little known fact, but Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc., learned (hand) calligraphy, and this was the reason that Apple computers had beautiful, proportional fonts: Steve valued good writing and wanted to transpose this to the digital medium.
This is just one example of the intrinsic value of analogue media. They can inform, support and enrich our ventures into digital environments. I'm no Steve Jobs, but my own ability to paint and draw freehand serves me well when I design websites and multimedia for the screen; and my ability to spell and write fluently and expressively was honed on paper, writing hundreds of poems. My analogue skills afford me a solid foundation in any digital medium I might now encounter.
It's all valid learning. Forcing students into a digital mould goes against well-established pedagogical principles which evidence themselves in theories such as learning preferences and neuro-linguistic programming. All of us learn in different ways, and a good teacher will support and cater for a range of preferences.
To espouse that we "should" adopt digital teaching and learning methods at the expense of all others may well be advocating the latest of techniques available to the educator. But it is a narrow and antiquated view of teaching and learning itself, hearkening back to the 19th Century, to advocated that students shall learn as the teacher prescribes.
--L. [Comment]
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Re: I Disagree with Suspending the Purchase of Textbooks
If you've never spent the majority of your time in education picking up books, reading, skimming through them, taking notes - holding this object in your hands, turning over the pages - holding onto the corner of a page as you're thinking about something you just read, flipping around pages at random (and everything else we do when we read) just enjoying the physical sensory experience of reading - then moving to an entirely digital experience is likely to result in more time spent than necessary (initially) in your learning experiences whilst you try and adjust to a digital sensory experience; but I do agree that it is necessary (however uncomfortable) in today's world to be able to do this. My preference for now wouldn't be 100% digital or 100% not.
The digital 'adjustment' such as - pressing the pause button or some kind of icon equivalent, adjusting to reflecting sunlight back from the screen at you, having to click and listen to the incessant 'tapping' of keys rather than that nice kind of 'crunchy' sound of a page turning, not being able to hold something (fairly) light in your hands (not even a tablet or ultra-light laptop feels the same as a book...yet).
However if you've never read a book or magazine or newspaper and your first experience in the classroom is a laptop or tablet or pc, then its very difficult to say that you are that much worse off. When I was a primary teacher, the idea of having a bunch of Sony (or whoever else makes them) readers in the corner instead of lots of brightly coloured books would seem awful to me as a teacher, I don't honestly know if it would have been the same for the children as they would have been excited by the technology and pressing buttons. In an ideal world I would like to give them both so they can decide for themselves which works best for them, until the technology can adequately reproduce an adequate sensory electronic/digital equivalent..then I could work in 100% digital classroom, and have a paper library (museum!) in my own home - maybe bring them into the classroom for 'history of learning' themes :-) [Comment]
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Re: I Disagree with Suspending the Purchase of Textbooks
To tell a person how they should or shouldn't learn is preposterous. I have a system that works for me and it allowed me to graduate first in my class from Georgia Tech. I am an almost 100% visual learner and literally HAVE to have paper. I have a cousin who is an almost 100% auditory learner and the professor who kicks out her notetaker and rips her digital recorder off her neck because he says "she shouldn't do that" is also wrong.
We live in a world where people learn differently and to assume everyone works like us is WRONG! I have to disagree with you on this one. [Comment]
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Re: I Disagree with Suspending the Purchase of Textbooks
I have spent a lot of time thinking about how people learn. I've learned how to do it myself very well and I've learned a great deal from other people who have learned how to do it. So I don't think it's preposterous to tell people how they should learn, not even if people learn differently, no more than it is preposterous for a mater chef to tell people how to cook or a professional race car driver to tell people how to drive.
You are of course free to disagree with me. Your method may well have worked for you. I also ranked first in my class (and second in the Faculty of Humanities) and have the leather coasters to prove it, but honestly I was way too busy with the student newspaper and my other projects to worry about things like that. I managed to get myself to class two thirds of the time - that was good enough. I had to use a few books, but I wrote my essays and my honours thesis on my old Atari. My method worked for me. What have we proven? That there is more than one way to learn. I never denied that.
> I am an almost 100% visual learner and literally HAVE to have paper.
Perhaps this is just me, but I believe that there are many other media that are visual media. And in particular, the vast bulk of computer learning is visual learning. To say that you have to have paper because you are a visual learner makes no sense.
And in any case, we are talking about the students, not the teachers (because presumably the teachers already know the contents of the textbooks). They did not grow up reading books, taking pencil notes in the margins, falling asleep with them, etc. They are just growing up now and are developing the habits that they will stubbornly cling to when they are our age.
Should they be learning to study using books and pencils? No.
Why not?
Well, first of all, because if society collapses and they have to go back to paper texts and pencils, what they learn using computers will still work for them. It's not like they will be unable to read. Yeah, it may be a bit awkward for them. But civilization has collapsed. They'll cope.
On the other hand, if they don't learn to work closely with computers, then they won't be able to take advantage of all the other things you can do. Writing blogs and commenting on them and engaging in a real-time back-and-forth with people around the world, for example. If you make a stupid note on the margin of a textbook, it sits there forever. If you make a stupid comment, you get a slew of comments, including a response from the author.
Oh yeah, and then there's the cost. It costs a bloody fortune to print texts on paper and ship them around the country. It's a huge expense. And it would cost a fraction of that to put the same material online. And it could even become a learning process if students and teachers work together to put the content into a common authoring environment, like a wiki.
Yes, I know computers also cost money. But they already have computers. And they're going to keep buying computers. Going without computers in today's day and age is a non-starter. So, what it amounts to, is that it the books that are the extra expense. And specifically, the ink and paper we use to distribute text and images - the same visual content we could distribute so easily online.
Yes, once it was possible to be at the top of one's class using pen and paper and books. Today, though, it is a recipe for disaster.
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Re: I Disagree with Suspending the Purchase of Textbooks
LEt it be said, I do also type my notes and heavily use the computer as well-- however, I still live in a mixed world and not 100% digital. At some point, we will have digital paper and perhaps it will have the tactile features of paper -- however, we should always give options. To put a moratorium on the purchase of all textbooks is just too extreme? Why can we not require all teaches to have some digital integration? [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]
Re: I Disagree with Suspending the Purchase of Textbooks
I think Vicki's position is a moderate and reasonable one - that a 100% digital classroom would be a less rich one - so I would have to disagree with you, Stephen, if you're advocating that classrooms should, in fact, be 100% digital. Sure, digital skills are valuable, but it would be callous to dismiss the value of "analogue" learning too. Claiming that skills on paper are obsolete in the wake of computers is akin to claiming that we should no longer teach students library skills because we have the Internet.
The more ways that students are equipped to research and learn, the better. If they know how to take good written notes and reference written materials, it is every bit as useful as knowing how to touch-type. It's a little known fact, but Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc., learned (hand) calligraphy, and this was the reason that Apple computers had beautiful, proportional fonts: Steve valued good writing and wanted to transpose this to the digital medium.
This is just one example of the intrinsic value of analogue media. They can inform, support and enrich our ventures into digital environments. I'm no Steve Jobs, but my own ability to paint and draw freehand serves me well when I design websites and multimedia for the screen; and my ability to spell and write fluently and expressively was honed on paper, writing hundreds of poems. My analogue skills afford me a solid foundation in any digital medium I might now encounter.
It's all valid learning. Forcing students into a digital mould goes against well-established pedagogical principles which evidence themselves in theories such as learning preferences and neuro-linguistic programming. All of us learn in different ways, and a good teacher will support and cater for a range of preferences.
To espouse that we "should" adopt digital teaching and learning methods at the expense of all others may well be advocating the latest of techniques available to the educator. But it is a narrow and antiquated view of teaching and learning itself, hearkening back to the 19th Century, to advocated that students shall learn as the teacher prescribes.
--L. [Comment]
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Re: I Disagree with Suspending the Purchase of Textbooks
Steven, you said: "I don't think it's preposterous to tell people how they should learn, not even if people learn differently, no more than it is preposterous for a mater chef to tell people how to cook or a professional race car driver to tell people how to drive." This seems to imply that that you think you're a "master" learner of some sort, just because you've been learning all your life.
The clear difference, of course, is that so have we all, and many of us have excelled in our own fields of learning. So when you say that you think you know how everyone else should learn, because that is what has worked for you, it is like saying that we should all wear your prescription of glasses to see more clearly. Sure, you've been seeing all your life, and you've learned how best *you* see, but your prescription (while it may well work for some others) will not work for us all.
I will give you a few examples where paper still trumps laptop. Let's start with sketching. Sketching involves quickly putting down graphical ideas. Lines ain't lines - you need to be able to use different pens, different weights of line, rub out pencil and put down ink. And do this in a way where you're concentrating on the idea you're capturing, not the medium you're capturing it with. As an experienced graphic designer who's used both digital and paper media for my work, I can tell you that paper is still the best way to work on initial ideas - not just because it makes it easier to rework a graphic, but because it provides a record of your work in a way that digital prototyping does not.
That is to say, I can sketch out 40 ideas quickly, and view them all relationally as a single body of work, picking out the best features of each to create my next concept. I can spread my ideas all over a table to compose and create. And unlike a digital drawing application, my erasures and deletions are not lost forever: each iteration of the design process yields a record of that process, not just a product.
Furthermore, digital mediums lack the dimensionalities that can be expressed in more traditional media. An artist cannot learn to paint on a laptop. The texture of paint, the intensity of colour, and the feel of brushes cannot be digitally replicated. Learning isn't just about text, sound and pictures, and it is the additional dimensions of learning beyind these mere basics that computers become utterly inadequate.
Sorry, Stephen, but you're wrong on this one. [Comment]
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Re: I Disagree with Suspending the Purchase of Textbooks
> I will give you a few examples where paper still trumps laptop. Let's start with sketching... the texture of paint, the intensity of colour, and the feel of brushes...
These aren't textbooks. You're changing the subject and (deliberately?) misinterpreting my argument. I never argued that people shouldn't be able to draw and paint. I am arguing that schools should not be buying textbooks.
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Re: I Disagree with Suspending the Purchase of Textbooks
I stopped using textbooks and went "digital" a little while ago. At first I wanted to see if could be done, then it just proved to be better. Way better.
There is a significant paradigm shift required to really understand why textbooks are a waste of money. A textbook delivers content. Period. Digitally, students generate content.
Which is richer? [Comment]
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Re: I Disagree with Suspending the Purchase of Textbooks
Steven, you said: "I don't think it's preposterous to tell people how they should learn, not even if people learn differently, no more than it is preposterous for a mater chef to tell people how to cook or a professional race car driver to tell people how to drive." This seems to imply that that you think you're a "master" learner of some sort, just because you've been learning all your life.
The clear difference, of course, is that so have we all, and many of us have excelled in our own fields of learning. So when you say that you think you know how everyone else should learn, because that is what has worked for you, it is like saying that we should all wear your prescription of glasses to see more clearly. Sure, you've been seeing all your life, and you've learned how best *you* see, but your prescription (while it may well work for some others) will not work for us all.
I will give you a few examples where paper still trumps laptop. Let's start with sketching. Sketching involves quickly putting down graphical ideas. Lines ain't lines - you need to be able to use different pens, different weights of line, rub out pencil and put down ink. And do this in a way where you're concentrating on the idea you're capturing, not the medium you're capturing it with. As an experienced graphic designer who's used both digital and paper media for my work, I can tell you that paper is still the best way to work on initial ideas - not just because it makes it easier to rework a graphic, but because it provides a record of your work in a way that digital prototyping does not.
That is to say, I can sketch out 40 ideas quickly, and view them all relationally as a single body of work, picking out the best features of each to create my next concept. I can spread my ideas all over a table to compose and create. And unlike a digital drawing application, my erasures and deletions are not lost forever: each iteration of the design process yields a record of that process, not just a product.
Furthermore, digital mediums lack the dimensionalities that can be expressed in more traditional media. An artist cannot learn to paint on a laptop. The texture of paint, the intensity of colour, and the feel of brushes cannot be digitally replicated. Learning isn't just about text, sound and pictures, and it is the additional dimensions of learning beyind these mere basics that computers become utterly inadequate.
Sorry, Stephen, but you're wrong on this one. [Comment]
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Re: I Disagree with Suspending the Purchase of Textbooks
Joe Jamison
I teach in a school district where every grade 7 and 8 student is given a laptop computer. We are now looking for digital resources that students and teachers may use to help us meet our goals of increasing student literacy and numeracy. We are talking with publishers about ebooks as we believe this is a natural progression. Also, Coolschool has started creating courses that do not reference textbooks. All the explanations ...etc are digital (coolschool.ca).
I believe in a few years we will not be having this discussion as most textbooks will be digital. Textbooks are bulky, expensive, and part of the industrial age. [Comment]
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