Bill and Melinda Gates: Textbooks Are Becoming Obsolete 162
Reader theodp writes: Thanks to software, Bill and Melinda Gates report in their 2019 Annual Letter, textbooks are becoming obsolete. Bill writes: "I read more than my share of textbooks. But it's a pretty limited way to learn something. Even the best text can't figure out which concepts you understand and which ones you need more help with. It certainly can't tell your teacher how well you grasped last night's assigned reading. But now, thanks to software, the standalone textbook is becoming a thing of the past" (if so, it'll be a 60-year overnight success!). The Gates are putting their money where their mouths are -- their education investments include look-Ma-no-textbooks Khan Academy and Code.org. Code.org, whose AP Computer Science Principles course for high schools "does not require or follow a textbook", boasted in its just-released Annual Report that 38% of all AP CS exam takers in 2018 came from "Code.org Computer Science Principles classrooms," adding that it had spent $24.2 million of its donors' money on curriculum and its Code Studio learning platform (30,300 hours of coursework), another $46.7 million to prepare 87,000 new K-12 CS teachers, $12.4 million on Marketing, and $6.9 million on Government Affairs. So, do we still need textbooks?
No Bill... (Score:5, Insightful)
... textbooks are not obsolete. Not everyone on the planet can afford internet especially schools in places where internet is costly/sketchy and teachers need classrooms where kids can focus.
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No, Bill Gates is totally right. We need to burn all the books. No one should have to carry around big heavy books that have no Internet backdoors for our spy systems to collect metadata from. Not to mention all the trees that will be saved!
Mandate Microsoft Surface Pro Windows 10 tablets in all schools today! For the sake of our childrens' future!
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...textbooks are not obsolete
They certainly fucking aren't; Dear Beloved Bill, on the other hand, is either suffering from accelerated senility or is merely continueing the subtle eugenicist fuckery of his ilk.
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Dear Beloved Bill, on the other hand, is either suffering from accelerated senility or is merely continueing the subtle eugenicist fuckery of his ilk.
This. This is the guy who sends poor countries some medicine (valuating them at five orders of magnitude above reasonable price) for the tiny string attached of agreeing to forbid local manufacture of said medicines. Or, promoting male genital mutilation instead of fighting it. And so on, so on. His "philantrophy" sets back what he touches about as badly as his "contributions" in the software world.
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Provide references for those claims.
Re: No Bill... (Score:2)
Got proof or concrete examples?
Re:No Bill... (Score:4, Interesting)
I find myself in surprising agreement with the Gates. As someone who was actually a teacher, I learned a lot about the deep negatives behind textbooks.
Not everyone on the planet can afford internet...
But they can afford it more than they can afford to keep current with textbooks. FFS, rural India and Africa have a surprisingly large amount of internet access. And not 100% of a community even needs it - just one person to pull down information.
By the time a textbook hits the market it's already a year or three out-of-date. It would be one thing if textbooks were cheap and we could just update them as needed, but they are a fucking racket. The people paid to write them are not necessarily experts in the subject, and they don't necessarily even have an education background. (I actually know some of them.) The cost that goes into making textbooks is really not that high, and the markup is utterly insane.
What we need are online texts that are free or very low cost, maintained and vetted by experts, and designed for educational use. We don't have that. We have parts of that, but not the whole package, which would be necessary to replace textbooks. If the Gates wanted to help, they'd set up such a system for all subjects. But to do that they'd have to understand something about the education system and hire some experts to work with teachers to figure out how to craft an internet replacement for textbooks. It would need to be low-bandwith, downloadable and printable, organized to match standardized curriculum, and be easy for teachers to craft lesson plans around.
But given this is the guy who made Microsoft, it's clear that such a concept would be utterly foreign to him.
Re:No Bill... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No Bill... (Score:5, Interesting)
Excuse the selective quoting, but:
By the time a textbook hits the market it's already a year or three out-of-date. [...] It would need to be[...] organized to match standardized curriculum,
I think those things are somewhat in opposition. If you're at the level of standardised cirricula, then you're teaching intro level or a bit above. Anything much higher doesn't have standardised cirricula. On that note, most things that are intro level don't change fast enough to be out of date in three years (not everything, but most).
On another note, textbooks don't need to be matched to a cirriculum. At uni the lecturers often gave a list of books they thought were useful if you wanted to learn outside of lectures. The cirriculum wasn't organised around those books (or vice versa). And sometimes books are just plain useful for learning stuff, for example, I love my copy of Horowitz & Hill and NR.
On the other hand, a dig in the eye wit ha sharp stick would be a better bet than some of the things that pass for textbooks, especially at the mass eucation level.
Re:No Bill... (Score:4)
There are other practical factors as well. Books are bulky, expensive, and just damned heavy to carry. I still don't think the technology for ubiquitous e-readers is cheap enough yet, but when you can buy a new tablet-like reader for the price of a book or two, many of the arguments for paper textbooks will seem a bit less compelling.
Still, I think "textbooks" as a concept, whether in printed form or electronic, will be with us for a very long time. I don't see why they'd ever become obsolete, as they're purpose-built for a student to read along with and learn in a structured way. What may change is the way we interact with them. Those little quizzes at the back of chapters? How about if a student can interactively take those quizzes right in the textbook (via the reader), and then software suggests a specialized review chapter and tailors future quizzes to help ensure they learn the proper material? That is, you keep drilling the student on the area they're weakest to ensure they learn the material, all with little to no additional work by the teacher.
This doesn't mean the end of the "textbook", but perhaps just an expansion of how it's organized and a change in how students interact with it. The simple act of a student being able to use a humble hyperlink to look up terms or concepts on the fly could be invaluable. I've already experienced this myself when looking up unfamiliar words with my Kindle.
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You've touched on the way things should go: not textbooks, but interactive educational software. Learning should be like an early Tomb Raider game: some exposition, mostly adventure and puzzles.
Not only books, but classrooms and teachers should be phased out. Computers and software should be able to handle everything but physical activity skills, at much lower cost.
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but classrooms and teachers should be phased out.
I wouldn't go in that direction, at least not for everyone. There are certainly some children who are self-starters and could make that work. I suspect I would have done far better with self-study than I did in a traditional classroom, which bored me to tears, and annoyed me with pointless make-work. Had I been able to test out, I would have done so in a heartbeat. But I'm not sure all children would flourish in such an environment.
When it comes to education, I feel it's best to be somewhat conservative
Re:No Bill... (Score:4, Insightful)
One year old textbooks...out of date? Please. Fundamental, primary level textbook content hasn't changed significantly in 50 years, current events, and modern (terrible) teaching trends notwithstanding. Tell me, with a straight face, that primary level basic math, life sciences, chemistry, algebra, calculus, geometry, ancient civilizations, literature, etc. etc. etc. have reason to be revamped because of new discovery, in the last ten years, and I'll know you're a sociopath.
The only reason they update every year is so that problem / answer sheets update, requiring students / districts buy new books, keeping the authors and publishers in perpetual perpetuity. That last bit goes double for college level textbooks, where our understanding of things is more prone to rapid change.
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Get a used textbook. The textbook will also last you for decades.
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So, how often does a text book on say, arithmetic, need to be updated in order to stay current?
I think 2 + 2 = 4 has been the case since a very fucking long time.
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"By the time a textbook hits the market it's already a year or three out-of-date."
Do you work for a textbook publisher?
I'm going to guess that a decent teacher - particularly in a school where they have little wealth - could make perfectly good lessons with the megatons of "out of date" school books pitched by US schools every year.
Has math or history gotten a major paradigm shift in the last 10 years? Something that invalidates everything ever taught?
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I'm finding myself hoping that this is true, not truly knowing whether it is or not. Textbooks have become a political battleground. I guess I'll show my leanings, by saying that it looks to me as if "Creation Science" is trying to work its way in, while other forces are trying to get sex education pushed out, or at least heavily watered down.
Moving to online texts may do nothing to resolve this part of the issue, in that no doubt there will be a similar structure to publishing them, as today Texas has in
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Moving to online texts may do nothing to resolve this part of the issue, in that no doubt there will be a similar structure to publishing them, as today Texas has inordinate power. It might even make things worse, if standardization were to go away. I don't know if its worse to have everyone using texts where religion encroaches on science, or having some people taught science and some taught religion as science.
Standardization would indeed vanish. Texas would lose its inordinate power. They have that power now because printing literally millions of physical copies of text books is too expensive to set up more than once. Digital texts, on the other hand, are infinitely malleable. It would be trivially easy to create the Intelligent Design Bullshit biology book for Texas and a normal "edition" for everyone else. The concept of editions would become little more than a version number.
`apt-get install elementary-b
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This makes it sound like text book authors are rich bastards that are ripping us off... while what, Microsoft/Gates is a poor selfless company that is only out to educate people for education sake? I don't buy it.
Anyway, with kids in schools, I can say some computer work is helpful. I like the reading assignments that are short and sweet and test you on comprehension in a piecemeal way. That way you can hone in on problems and overcome things by focusing on them. It makes reading much more like something lo
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My son's online curriculum automatically adapts to wrong answers, gives him extra questions where he needs practice, and gives me detailed reports of problem areas. But it's good enough that I rarely need to intercede and he's performing at about 97th percentile (the public school wanted to "code" him).
The problem teachers have is they're not exploring solutions that allow for the possibility that the teaching role is obsolete.
Frankly this is merely a return to the "one-room-schoolhouse" primer model but
Re: No Bill... (Score:2, Insightful)
I can drop a textbook down the stairs and end up with a few creased pages.
An iPad Pro, however...
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I wish I could drop a textbook down the stairs and end up with an iPad Pro!
Re:No Bill... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I think it depends on the market. The basic knowledge that a child needs in a developing country can usually fit in one text book. That is math, read/writing, basic science, and history. This text book can be printed on waterproof paper and can last for decades.
In modern schools the text book has gone obsolete. I remember roaming the halls in high school and college with pounds of fat ass books on my back. Right now on my desk I have whole classes of books on my android tablet. It weights 1/2 pound, maybe.
Rambling of a book user. (Score:2)
Even though we are supposed to love the newest and latest kindle because of it's anti-reflective display and fantastic battery life, books are much more "Keep on task" friendly. I think this is much more useful in our attention deficit world.
Publishers have always been trying to squeeze money out of schools and students by issuing the latest and greatest textbooks, but do we really need to re-invent the math textbook? It seems like algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculous have not changed much and o
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I agree here, it's too easy to get sidetracked & tempted, not to mention smart kids would try to hack electronic devices to be able to surf & do social media. I think you also need to keep in mind that kids of different ages & abilities will learn best wi
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Gates can pay for a Starlink to each school in a few years. Maybe also for some solar panels and a battery to keep it running. (They're already working on clean water and mosquito nets.)
This won't be a bottleneck very soon so it makes sense to overlook connectivity problems now when planning for the future.
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Textbooks are a great reference. As long as kids remember how to read and turn pages, so another half decade at least. The internet may be good for supplementary information, the textbook is generally laid out in a straightforward manner, it's compact, and it's all there.
People have been claiming that computers will replace traditional education methods since the late 1970s. And yet it hasn't come to pass. Every "breakthrough" here has been a flop. Online videos really are nothing more than the old films
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I read a book a few years ago, titled "High Tech Heretic", which talked about how computer based education (at that time anyway) was less effective than traditional teaching methods. I can't really comment on that, as I'm not an educator
Re:No Bill... (Score:4, Insightful)
textbooks are not obsolete.
But also not all textbooks are equal. There are excellent textbooks, but I can't say I've come across them frequently. Many textbooks exist merely to slightly re-phrase something from an earlier textbook. Some might not work well with a particular student's learning style. And some textbooks are simply poor quality and do more to obstruct learning than facilitate it.
There's no reason to limit the understanding of what constitutes a textbook. E-books, YouTube videos, and commercial instructional videos are all valid learning resources. A wealthy philanthropist could easily hire experts to write stable Wikibooks-style textbooks in the public domain to cover, perhaps not all, but quite a lot, of high school and university level curricula. Even considering traditional paper books, a textbook should be considered one tool among many for a student to learn material. Except for the newest, latest developments in a field, a university library will have multiple versions of roughly equivalent textbooks, and seeing explanations from slightly different perspectives can be enormously valuable.
A phenomenon that I have noticed, both in software and textbooks, is that once a product is more or less optimal, the desire to create new versions requires creating something necessarily sub-optimal. I once went through my university library for a book on a certain topic and I had to find a book with the original discoverer's insight from 1920s, because every book since then had to phrase the subject matter differently and, therefore, poorly. Although non-obvious, it was so simple that there really was only one way to explain it.
Consider calculus. First-year university calculus hasn't changed in 250 years. Second-year university calculus hasn't changed in 100 years. New textbooks aren't being manufactured because all those previous authors failed in their goal.
Oracle has a whole business model of making good software, charging for an upgrade that is deliberately broken, then charging to fix the broken version, instead of simply continuing to support software that already works.
Good textbook bad software (Score:2)
Whether it's textbooks, or other reliable resources, we need SOMETHING to offset the conceptual damage that stackexchange does to all kinds of technical learning.
Some textbooks are much better than others. The same is going to be true of software and digital resources. The vast majority of software that's out there for learning is not nearly as good as what you might want it to be. Does the format have some potential advantages? Absolutely. But it's easier to implement and distribute really bad digital
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Properly written textbooks are the greatest method yet devised for providing access to information. I've read textbooks from a hundred years ago and they're often just as good, or better, than something from a few years ago.
Obviously, that depends on what the topic is, biology textbooks that old are worthless.
The source of information should not be the sole source of assessing whether or not the reader has learned the material. A decent text book should have a set of questions and a set of answers. Obviousl
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Here here...
The single greatest advance for humanity was the printing press. The ability to accumulate and deliver knowledge beyond a generation or two, and to many, changed everything. Skills could be taught. Knowledge developed, information shared, at a scale never before practical. And accurately.
Now while the media change, publishing is still publishing. eBooks are books, though we are well on the way to losing the greatest value of a printed book in the current paradigm - to be able to share it, physic
Re: Good textbook bad software (Score:2)
Re: Good textbook bad software (Score:2)
Writing, yes. But publishing, distribution.
Re: Good textbook bad software (Score:2)
Right there, buddy.
What a waste (Score:1)
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What's wrong with trying to improve the quality of life in the meantime?
We are still many centuries away from being a species that can live on multiple planets... the sheer magnitude of difficulty in life support off of earth being one of the biggest hurdles, so being a true interplanetary species will require finding another planet that can actually support life such as ours (and further assuming that such a planet isn't already claimed by another species that could interpret our attempts to colonize as
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He should be building rockets to take us OFF Earth.
Educating young people who may some day build those rockets is a good approach too.
A good teacher/instructor is superior to any SW. (Score:1)
Call it wetware. This is why people learn better from other people.
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A good teacher is still going to have to figure out the order to introduce concepts, when to introduce. They will have to generate problems to solve. This is currently handled by textbook writers. So the same process has to be done, regardless of how or where it's taught.
If I never handed students a book and gave them printouts with homework on them, I've essentially written a textbook. If everything is online, same.
The physical textbook needs to go. But the work to produce textbooks will still remain.
Once
Guess what? (Score:2)
Textbooks are an expensive racket. (Score:4, Insightful)
Textbooks cost far too much for something the student will use briefly. Their prices are a burden to many students. Their weight and bulk are a burden to carry between classes.
I'm old and should be nostalgic for dead tree media. To hell with that. I can can download, convert and share ebooks for much less money. I can back them up effortlessly.
Tell me why I should prefer to make publishers rich for an inferior experience. Gates is right on this one.
Re:Textbooks are an expensive racket. (Score:5, Insightful)
Textbooks to me seem like a perfect opportunity for "Creative Commons".
The concepts have hardly changed in decades, why pay the publisher exorbitant rates for a rehash of last year's material?
With a CC textbook, it could be printed and bound, it could be printed a chapter or excerpt at a time, or it can looked at entirely digitally.
Publishers won't allow this (Score:1)
The racket is very clever here, especially at the college level.
Most of the first two years of college courses (e.g. English, calculus, physics, chemistry) is the same rehashed basic knowledge year after year. The publishers know this, and the only thing they do with new editions of their books is change the problems (and solutions) enough to prevent students from using old textbooks. Remember, however, that they also publish many textbooks for senior undergraduate courses that can be fairly dynamic.
If a
Re: Textbooks are an expensive racket. (Score:2)
Textbooks cost far too much for something the student will use briefly.
But that's a US problem; most of the world does not have a problem with publisherS being in bed with educators. So it's basically a non-issue due to its artificial nature.
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so the problem is the price? That's not the same thing as "obsolete". The reason people push the "internet" for this is because they mistakenly assume it's free.
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That said, the idea that code.org is not a textbook is false. It is. These guys are making loads of mo
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That's already happening, the problem is that none of the books have the reach that the major publishers have. This is a bit of a problem as it can lead to additional work being done when it comes time to have accreditation renewed or when ensuring that students can transfer their credits.
There's a reason why, despite how horrible the text is, Stewart Calculus is used at so many colleges. It's a terrible book, the examples are simple examples, and then he went overly complicated in the questions being asked
Gates is, as ever, a moron (Score:1)
No, they aren't. In fact the use of all sorts of books is on the *rise*. He is just as big an aspie as any other valley retard. The biggest thing people fail to notice at present is that young people are generally even *less* technologically saavy than their forebears. I'm sure his bloated ego wishes he was correct - he simply isn't, and his logic is the kind that isn't. People really need to inderstand: Gates was never particularly bright or visionary; he was just in the right place at the right time (not
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Young people today are no less technically-savvy than we were at their age... it's just that NOW, we have non-technically-savvy people using technology they don't understand & subconsciously regard as 'magic', whereas when WE were their age, the dumb kids didn't use technology at all. Or if they were rich, their parents bought them a Macintosh.
Ignore the kids who spend their afternoons posting selfies with ice cream cones, and pay attention to the kids building robots and winning FIRST competitions. THE
Shut the fuck up ... (Score:2)
... you didn't spend any of your billions of bucks investing your goddam time getting a motherfucking PHD in the methodology of teaching.
You're telling us what we need to hear to do things your way.
What a dirt bag.
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Definitely. The thing that matters most in presentation is clarity and comprehensibility. Videos and lectures are pretty much the worst way of conveying information whereas text tends to be one of the best. Especially if it's supplemented with animations as appropriate.
I've been working with math students for years and it's usually the language aspect of math that causes most of the problems. Occasionally, it'll be the reasoning and analysis, but the overwhelming problem is the notation and language aspects
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In university I found untranslated German wikipedia pages on math the best way to understand the concepts and how to utilize what I am being taught and I can't read German!
Well, I suppose "2+2=4" is the same in any language.
Paper books don't track you (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks, I'll stay away from ebooks that phone home where I stopped, started, how long I stayed on a page, whether I re-read it, what time I read... and then sell to advertisers continuous analyses of me based on that.
My converted ebooks don't track me. (Score:2)
https://calibre-ebook.com/ [calibre-ebook.com]
How can you be on Slashdot (supposedly News For Nerds) and not instantly know the solution to that problem?
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This. Textbooks and tuition are ridiculously expensive. If they get to spy on students' lives that way, shouldn't the price drop A LOT?
Silly person. Prices never go down. Profits for the publishers and universities just go up. You will pay more... forever.
Of course you could just not go to college... but then everyone would look down on you. You wouldn't want that, would you?
Yea maybe (Score:2)
I buy few books these days and do internet searches for most things. It has gotten to the point where I recall the query, not the actual information the next time I need the info. So I ask myself what happens when the internet is down
Bill Gates still operates Microsoft, apparently. (Score:5, Interesting)
From the transcript at that Charlie Rose web page:
08:42
"Bill Gates: I'm there about 15 percent of the time. And I get to work just on the R and D part, brainstorming with people, thinking, OK, how are we going to take this artificial intelligence and make it understand, help you use your time better. It's a very exciting time in software. There's five companies that are, you know, in a really strong position. Microsoft is leading in some really cool stuff so --"
It seems obvious that Bill Gates still has a huge amount of overall influence on the management of Microsoft, even if he mostly focuses on other subjects.
Some of the many stories about Windows 10:
Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. [networkworld.com] "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC." (Aug. 4, 2015)
Microsoft's Intolerable Windows 10 Aggression [ecommercetimes.com] (May 27, 2016)
Microsoft is infesting Windows 10 with annoying ads [theverge.com] (March 17, 2017)
Microsoft, stop sabotaging Windows 10. [infoworld.com] (March 21, 2017)
Re: Bill Gates still operates Microsoft, apparentl (Score:2)
Interactive computer learning (Score:2)
Interactive computer instruction was implemented 60 years ago by the PLATO system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
See also "The Friendly Orange Glow"
https://www.amazon.com/Friendl... [amazon.com]
For suitable topics and students, it works better than textbooks. Maths, for instance, or electronics. Subjects that lend themselves to many detailed, specific tests with mainly right/wrong answers.
One of the most strangely neglected areas of education and computing.
Texbooks will never be obsolete (Score:1)
This only reveals how ignorant someone that thinks they are in the know can be.
Do we think stone tablets written in cuneiform are obsolete? No, they are priceless artifacts from history and highly valuable. Books are much the same thing just with a lower shelf life.
While there are some things that could become obsolete, often times folks like Bill are only calling them obsolete because they do not fit into their control of the market schemes. They would rather you put your copy of 1984 on your kindle tha
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"They would rather you put your copy of 1984 on your kindle than carry it around on paperback"
I have plenty of (converted) ebooks and no Kindle. They can't phone home. Technology routes around damage.
So what's the replacement? (Score:2)
Tablets and E-readers suck for this. Flipping physically in a book back and forth from index to glossary to content is way easier and provides tactile reinforcement. Nothing in the digital realm compares.
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Chapter hyperlinks and search.
Hell, hyperlinks in the index.
Re: So what's the replacement? (Score:3)
That's not even close to a replacement. When you need to skip back and forth between page 3 of the index, the diagram on page 7 of Chapter 3, and page 24 of the answer summary, tablets and ereaders are pieces of crap. It's not like it's not theoretically possible to solve the issues, but no one (Apple, Google, Amazon, Adobe) seems interested in doing so.
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I've actually been working on an Android app like that on & off for the past couple of years. Some of the frustrations I've encountered:
1. Extraordinarily slow rendering performance compared to even a fairly OLD formerly high-end laptop or desktop PC (say, a 2009 Thinkpad T61p with 2.2GHz core2duo and 8 gigs, or ASUS P5A with 2.6GHz quadcore i7 and 8 gigs, both with 2010'ish SATA2 SSDs). I suspect much of the blame lies with poor eMMC flash performance, combined with open-source pdf-rendering libraries
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Hyperlinks are DEATH to understanding many topics. I've seen WAY too many "web-based" instructional sites that put the equivalent of 4 or 5 sentences' worth of information on a page, then spray diarrhea-like hyperlinks at you with nearly every word. The reader gets sucked into a rabbit hole that ultimately leads to nowhere, and ends up learning almost nothing.
Single-column web design, compounded by the 16:9 monitors we've been stuck with for 15 years, just makes things worse.
There's a REASON why textbooks h
Not if you need a searchable reference (Score:2)
The difference is that you can easily create an index of photos or text because they're not time-dependent. You can reduce them in size (photos) or context (keywords) by just reducing
issues with electronic versions (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes, one can question physical textbooks. I avoid them also as much as possible
I don't, though mostly beacuse textbooks have paragraph breaks.
Online Classes provided by Book Publishers (Score:1)
The latest craze in community college education appears to be online classes whose "content" is provided by the book publishers. From several of these courses, it appears that the publishers are sending their books to the lowest bidder and having them come up with slides and test questions. Then, the community college just has to hire someone to oversee the class and ask questions from students. Of course, the book is required reading, and without the book, you are likely to fail the class.
Why?
The tests are
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It's been a thing for many years. Community college courses are mostly space filler outside core material so they love this model.
They also love selling the expensive books at the school book store.
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It would be interesting to know what kind of profit margin college bookstores run, with the crazy price of textbooks (even 20yrs ago when I was in college). I'm sure the publishers get most of it, but I bet there's still some kind of mark-up.
still better then DRM loaded E-books with time out (Score:4, Insightful)
still better then DRM loaded E-books with time outs in them. Unless they make the E-books about 60-70% less then real ones.
Depends what a textbook is and for what usage (Score:2)
There was a good discussion on the vlogbrothers youtube channel (video and comments): https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
It really depends who are the target users of textbook. As a first time introduction to a topic, textbooks tend to be a little rough. But as collections of carefully curated piece of knowledge, they are valuable.
There is a need for a carefully written description of a concept and the various versions of it, with 200 exercises some of them with solutions. That is what a textbook is. Whether
Nails (Score:2)
UTTER BALDERDASH FROM A COMPUTER DESIGNER! (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me share a story: As a child, in Columbus Ohio, I had to walk one-mile each way between home and school, from 1946. I'd been admitted to First Grade at the age of 5, because my mother taught me to read, write and do simple math. That meant that I was always ahead of the class, so sat in back, so I wouldn't look so bored.
But, there was an upside: Every day, I could take a two-block detour and visit the local Public Library. So, every day, I'd leave two books I'd taken out the day before, and pick up two more to occupy myself in the back of the room the next school day. I read a lot of books, and learned a lot (and a lot more I've forgotten), as I worked my way through the Dewey Decimal system. And, one day, I carried Frederick Terman's "On Radio Engineering" to class...and was transfixed. There I was, at age 6, learning how my mom's radio worked! I went back home and tweaked the dials on the huge (vacuum tube) radio, finding out how the controls actually changed stations, and how tone controls could help me listen to far-away stations! It set me on a path of fascination with what became to be known as the field of "electronics." I worked in a TV Repair Shop at the age of 12, played with ZJ17 (GE) transistors at 15, went into the Air Force at age 19, and wrote a published article predicting the likelihood of the emergence of the "computer on a chip" some three months before Intel announced it.
Today, as I sit (age 78) in front of my computer, I never had the benefit of all those "electronic" substitutes for reading...to this very day, I look forward to reading my weekly edition of "New Scientist" (published in London), to stay abreast of information.
I don' need no STEENKIN' "video" from which to learn. What I did learn was how to DO IT MYSELF by soldering wires together, debugging the arrangement of electron flows until it worked, and then having the satisfaction of educating myself in the bargain.
There is joy in finding out, not having it explicitly explained. During my career, people have asked me, what 'College did you go to?' I have factually responded, "I've taught at several universities, I've been on faculty of a few...but I've never ATTENDED a College or University (save a few abortive attempts, lasting no more than a month before I became bored, relearning what I already knew.)
Having to read, at one's own pace; being able to go back a few pages to find that earlier illustration for guidance; having the freedom to pace myself to MY learning rate, are all benefits of books. I fear Television (which I still enjoy as entertainment) and Video in general is just a way to sell a product, not ENGAGE the participant in the learning experience.
Just one old woman's view...
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Exactly! Thank you, this is precisely my experience with books. They are tangible, tactile, books that give you an intuitive feel for where you "are
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A strange comment from Gates (Score:2)
Considering his own kids are/have been raised largely tech free.
Gates again (Score:2)
This culture of listening to people just because they're rich is deluded.
We have the scientific research that proves that rich people (in general) are rich not because they're super-humans, but because of a combination of talent, the right background and environment and sheer dumb luck. And that their talent in one region doesn't necessarily confer talent in other regions.
Bill Gates has been wrong about almost everything that's not related to making Microsoft an evil empire. He famously underestimated the I
Textbooks are not obsolete, their prices are. (Score:2)
Textbooks are not obsolete, their prices are. I worked in the textbook publishing world for many years; it's a racket. Now, most of the big textbook publishing companies have gone print *and* digital and also entered the "services" arena with "Learning Management Software". The biggest textbook publishing houses (most of the big ones are now private-equity-owned) are huge monoliths that can't adapt very quickly.
The "Open Textbook" movement has some promise in bringing down the cost of textbooks, but ha
Sure they are (Score:2)
Currently students spend THOUSANDS of dollars on textbooks. ... ...
Textbooks written YEARS or DECADES ago, and only mildly edited every year to justify "new" purchase pricing instead of feeding the used market.
Yet, more and more, we're seeing pushback from courses not using said golden geese.
What's NEXT to boost the profits.
Cut out the costs of the physically printing and/or shipping the book!
And will prices come DOWN on such electronic distribution?
What the fuck are YOU smoking? OF COURSE NOT!
On top of th
Don't care electronic or paper, but make it usable (Score:2)
I have a high school aged daughter and the school system has a schizophrenic approach to text books. In the science curriculum they mostly switched over to Power Point demonstrations of the knowledge they need to know. Where is the “knowledge” itself? Undefined. Just an outline of what you need to know. In a parent teacher conference I asked where they get the “knowledge,” what I got was a rambling explanation of a variety of source including the “OLD Science Curriculum bo
tech hype nonsense (Score:2)
Words and pictures. It's all words and pictures a book is just a delivery system. Computers are another.
It's beyond foolish to say "[insert kind of book] is dying"...it's still content.
Books are a persistent, non digital, non-powered
books forever (Score:2)
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If you want a really good O.S., forget windows. Switch to Linux. I'm ms-free since July 4th, 2018, and I'll *never* go back to windows.
Textbook ndustry growth is racket-based. (Score:2)
There's considerable profit in selling textbooks, including those integrated with computer learning. Follow the money and you'll have your answer.
The education business is not altruistic.