Hi Maria,
I agree on the limitations of traditional textbooks, but I can’t help wondering about quality criteria within user-generated contents. Where’s the balance and who/how decides about it? I may appear “dated” but have some causes for concern: 1. I’ve recently started developing OER and some materials are real crap despite how rich in media they can be. 2. Not everything is online. May seem idiotic but I’m having trouble to find materials by seminal authors (Sociology, Anthropology). 3. Not every student has the appropriate background to decide on his/her study materials or priorities. You can’t understand post-modern theories without reading some “old bores”. 4. Mistaking form with content, does pretty mean good? Same way “old school” may argue pretty can´t be good. 5. Not every student has access to a PC and Internet access or enough bandwidth to stream videos. And, again, depending on the subject audio/video can be more demanding than reading, so not necessarily ideal for everything. Print on demand is great if No. needed are low or you really reduce costs printing locally, otherwise it can be more expensive than traditional printing. PDF of course provides access, nice stepping stone. Sorry if blunt, this is giving me some hard time. Right now I don’t even care for centralization (lol), if it’s good there’s always mashups. Cheers, Alex De: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] En nombre de Maria Droujkova Enviado el: miércoles, 03 de diciembre de 2008 21:39 Para: [email protected] Asunto: [WikiEducator] Re: Building a sustainable WE OER Textbook initiative I'd like to ask a naive question: why use the "genre" of textbook at all? Isn't the very genre a bit... outdated? A definition from Wikipedia: "A textbook is a manual of instruction or a standard book in any branch of study. They are produced according to the demand of educational institutions." A standard implies something long-term (permanent?), constant, closed. The demands are also centralized. Do textbooks allow per-student customization, semi-automated in smart social ways (at least as well as Amazon does for book recommendations)? Daily or hourly, dynamic changes of content based on who creates what in the world? User-generated content in general? Interactivity? Sound and video? No and no and no. And the question is, if we get "all that" from other places, what is the place of a textbook, then - if any? I see two somewhat modern parts in Wayne's list of generic questions: peer collaboration and print-on-demand. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. naturalmath.com: a sketch of a social math site groups.google.com/group/naturalmath: a mailing list about math maker activities groups.google.com/group/multiplicationstudy the family multiplication study --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
