Beyond the Textbook, Beyond the Tablet, and Back to Basics

The Learning Lot > March 19 2012

[snip]

I'm reminded of that experience as I read the contributions of various folk leading up to Discovery Education’s Beyond the Textbook Forum. David Warlick asked readers of his blog to make suggestions about the future of the textbook and they responded that it will be:

• like a quest
• like a production studio
• like an extension of our brains
• like a reality game
• like a video playlist
• like swiss army knife
• like a personal assistant
• like a platform that provokes conversation
• like a holodeck
• like a choose your own adventure story
• like a Palantir
• map for a learning journey
• like an interaction engine
• like a Matrix up-link
• like an aggregator that searches and updates content
• more like a word problem than a calculation problem

Bud Hunt had a few suggestions of his own for the people attending. I really like this thought in particular.

The best textbooks moving forward are likely those that start with small building blocks from publishers, OER repositories, classrooms, websites, movie studios, and pretty much any other source for interesting information, and they become textbooks when they are hung onto a curriculum frame by a local school district. This might be done by a committee of teachers, or a small group of curriculum coordinators in a front office somewhere, but what important is that it’s not done by a salesperson seeking to please a state official in Texas or California.

[more]

Source

[http://bit.ly/FPyr1t]