Hi Maria, I see what you're saying about the notion of "textbook" being outdated in the traditional sense. However, I suspect that the concept of "textbook" would mean different things to different people. To some people it may refer to very traditional texts, to others it may refer to self-instructional materials that incorporate in-text activities, yet others may use the term to incorporate multimedia components as we're observing many publishers are doing by distributing CD-ROM multimedia or supporting websites with multimedia activities and social interactions in support of the textbooks.
For example, I am a distance educator (DE) and in my first academic position at a single-mode distance education university we used to make a very clear distinction between: 1) DE study guides (self-instructional texts which included both learner-content interactions and teacher-student interactions using simulated communication strategies in print form) and 2) classical text books --- (which did not include learning interactions). That was twenty years ago! Increasingly we observed traditional textbook publishers incorporating many of the instructional strategies which were previously associated with the pedagogy of asynchronous learning. In other words -- we observed a convergence between face-to-face and distance learning pedagogy in the humble text book. Similarly -- the kind of "text" I see emerging from a peer collaboration environment like a wiki has a number of advantages: 1) More easily updated -- at one level the "text" is updated with every edit 2) More customisable -- it would be a relatively simple process to customise local copies by changing activities for the context 3) More cost efficient --- thinking back to my own student days where I was forced to buy prescribed texts, and the lecturer only covered a few of the chapters 4) More autonomy and freedom for academics and educators to collaborate on learning materials outside of the dictates determined by the economic decisions of publishers. I have a few interesting ideas pertaining to sound and video -- but more about this in a later post :-) Cheers Wayne On Wed, 2008-12-03 at 15:38 -0500, Maria Droujkova wrote: > 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 outdated?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] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
