Today’s post is about Libraries, books and their relevance in learning today, if you haven’t heard about Governer Arnold Schwarzenegger’s speech this week on the controversial topic of Digital textbooks, Here’s a snippet:

“Starting this fall with high school math and science, we will be the first state in the nation—the first state in the nation—to provide schools with a state-approved list of digital textbooks. Think about this. Traditional
hardbound textbooks are adopted in six-year cycles, so as soon as they are printed, then the next
six years you don’t get the latest information. So just think about the last six years, all the things that happened. For instance, the Iraq war, the country’s first African-American president, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression or the decoding of the human genome and the list goes on and on. So all of this you wouldn’t
have in those textbooks. Discoveries, science and progress are happening so quickly.

So the bottom line is, I feel how can kids compete in the global economy when the information
the schools feed them is stale and is outdated and is old? So digital textbooks will change, of
course, all of that; they can be frequently updated to better prepare our student. And there will also be more opportunities for interactive learning and you know how exciting interactive action is. Students could read about a science experiment and then click onto a video and then see immediately a kind of demonstration of this science project. This is what kids love and it will make them much more excited about learning. I know my kids
have—I have four kids, so I know how much time they spend on the computer when they do their homework and the exciting stuff that they see when they study.

So I think that’s what we want to do here, just really upgrade all of this. The digital textbooks are
good not only for the students’ achievement but they’re also good for the schools’ bottom line.
And this is the important thing here. The average textbook costs up to $100. So think about it, if
each of California’s 2 million high school students use digital math and science books, that
would mean that you could save the schools $300 to $400 million and that’s money that could be
used for hiring more teachers or to make class sizes smaller. And if you expand this to additional
textbooks, then you can save an additional few hundred million dollars.”

First a little imagination exercise:

Think of your typical library in your town or city, regardless of its construction it will be filled with row after row of books, probably similar to this picture:

Books that are probably out of date, in a shabby condition or (if yours is a university library) covered in hand written notes and underlining.

Questions, Questions, Questions

When studying how often do you read a book cover to cover?

I’d wager that you will dive into the book get the quote or section needed and put it back on the shelf, where it will stay until the next person needs it. If no one else checks out the book what is its purpose? There are likely to be 100’s of books that are never checked out of the library creating rows upon rows of dead space.

If the majority of people use books merely as quick reference tool to pull out selected quotes, what benefit is a library?

How do we deal with library collections ageing ?

Collections are normally refreshed every six years or so, with every year that passes the books contained therein get more and more out of date.

How can we expect our students to excel if the books they read have information that is at best inaccurate, at worst irrelevant?

Access Denied?

Within education we have students with a wide range of abilities, but what help is a book to someone with a visual impairment?

Granted we have magnifiers to enlarge text, screen readers to read the text to them, but one can argue that this only differentiates a student with an impairment from their fellow students. With e-readers such as the Plastics Logic’s reader or Amazons Kindle range we can provide all students with the same learning tool that will allow each student to customise text size to their own preference, without singling them out as different.

Access when you need it?

When I was studying at university I remember having to get to the library as quick as possible after a seminar to ensure that I would be one of the lucky few to grab a copy of the text needed for an essay. Often libraries only have 5 or so copies of a particular book (especially when it comes to technical or classical texts), 5 books will not be able to support a class of 30, let alone an entire program.

Why should it be a case of survival of the fittest, just because I could get their first, does it mean that my learning was more important than others?

What about students with a physical disability, do we ignore them?
What about students with a visual Impairment, do we ignore them?

Why do we continue to invest in a medium that restricts learning and (by denying students access course texts) harms academic performance? With a digitised collection we can (with appropriate licences) supply enough texts to ensure that every learner is able to access the information relevant to their course and in a manner that suits each individuals needs.

I wholeheartedly agree with the Governor but I also think he hasn’t gone far enough: I think we should remove physical libraries from education.

Now that’s a controversial idea.

Related posts:

1. Why the Kindle Failed Higher Education

I’m an e-learning developer at South East Essex College a FE/HE institution located in Essex, United Kingdom

I’ve worked at a range of Colleges and Academies, all of which pursue e-learning & ICT as a medium to enhance and support the learner experience. My education was interesting to say the least, I barely graduated from School as I had become disaffected with the learning experience, the traditional teaching methods used at that time and struggled with both the learning difficulties of Dyslexia and Dyspraxia.

It was not until I went to College (ironically it is the same institution that I work for now) that reignited both my passion for learning and computing in general. Through hard work & the support of lecturers I managed to secure both a recognised computing qualification, acceptance on a university degree and without sounding too melodramatic forge a new path for myself. I also feel having studied at the same College where I initially studied gives me a unique perspective, enabling me to see both sides of the coin so to speak.

As e-learning & the Internet itself was just getting started as a learning medium when I studied at the College (99-01), teachers and students were just getting used to the Internet as a resource let alone a method to evolve learning. It was as a result of my personal experiences as a student that I decided that once I had completed my Degree that I would try and return to the education sector to ‘give something back’ for lack of a better cliche, as I had personally benefited from the range of e-learning tools which enabled me to attain a level of education I had initially dismissed as an irrelevance, if not an impossibility.

From the abacus to the mobile phone, technology has always been used with varying degrees of success, at College & University I was introduced to the benefits of word processing, mind mapping, spell check, font and colour manipulation to improve readability and a whole host of other resources and techniques. The tools on offer to today’s learner far, far exceed anything I could have dreamed of, case in point; teachers can communicate with Students in an instant, show multiple videos on a interactive whiteboard without having to wheel in a 28 inch CRT, via mobile technology we are providing students with the ability to send/receive course content from anywhere that can connect to the Internet, be that the gym, on holiday or even in bed (now that’s personalised learning)!

Enough about history, I should talk about the present, what I do and where I hope to go from here.

In my role as an e-learning professional I develop applications & solutions to support teaching and learning (based primarily on Microsoft ASP.net and related technologies), this can range from simple web forms, event management systems to project managing multimedia recording solutions and full upgrade to lecture theaters. I also Blog about ICT and Twitter with other e-learning colleagues, both inside and out of College about e-learning, what it is and how it can benefit students and teachers.

The future..

I hope to continue blogging and establishing contacts with e-learning providers across the world, one thing that hinders e-learning is standardisation. From playschool, to Junior, to high school to university we all have differing systems, schemas, teaching methods and datasources. We do not teach in English Junior school and then switch to French from College onwards, so why do we do the same when it comes to e-learning? Moodle, BlackBoard, Bespoke software, some training, no training.

E-learning is supposed to make things easier for the learner, so why do we change the game at each step? It is this that I hope to change, perhaps open source is the key, perhaps not either way I’m looking forward to finding out.

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