I about fell over today when I read a Arizona school is no longer going to use textbooks. Being a technology user, and one that is refreshing my education by taking some college courses. I am not sure how I feel about this. Books that I buy for my classes will never be able to be re-sold because I go heavy on the highlighter and sticky tabs.
Having used manuals on laptops before I am many times frustrated in being able to find specific data quickly. But with desktop search getting better and many document management programs indexing the text and providing hyperlinks to external source data is going to be a powerful tool in education.
I wish Hawaii had the foresight to do something like this but hey I am just happy they have text books. [Yahoo]
I think this is a good idea, in that it will force the teachers to do some thinking on their own. I know when I was in school, teachers taught out of the same book for years and often times, the text they used wasn’t even up to them. This will require them to develop a lesson plan and find content on the web. It also puts technology in the forefront and in the hands of the students. This will better equip them to handle a world that is increasingly online.
I’ll be interested in hearing how the first semester goes. Hopefully there will be a story in January to update.