The bathroom shown above was designed by Armani for the gorgeous new apartments at 20 Pine Street in downtown Manhattan, New York City. The image is from the gorgeous digital exhibit here created to show the building online to prospective buyers of the new apartments in this historic Wall Street area office building now gone residential.
Why is it that our children do not have gorgeous digital tutorials like this one to study a subject like astronomy online? Use your imagination a bit and think how the different sections this Armani-designed exhibit could slide in and out to reveal planets, the solar system, and views into our galaxy and beyond into the universe. Where the map is on the 20 Pine exhibit there could be star charts. Other of the basic astronomy topics could composes sections and be linked to follow lines of inquiry and thought.
Too expensive to do? The 20 Pine exhibit could not have cost $100,000, and probably was much less. If an astronomy exhibit were made and put on line for $100,000, everyone on Earth could use it. The first 100,000 students to use it would do so for $1 each. When a million kids have done so their rate would have been a dime each.
We spend over $4 billion a year in the USA alone on textbooks. If we spent a few million making a terrific Internet exhibit (like Armani did for 20 Pine Street) for every topic students now study in textbooks they could all study for free for years following. We could afford learning exhibits with quality designers at the quality level of Armani. Why don’t we do it for astronomy? for our children?
Meanwhile our kids fumble at school with the pages of the sort of reference the great-grandparents had.
(Strangest of all is that there are already thousands of terrific free and open online knowledge pages. Many are as wonderful as the 20 Pine Street exhibit. Almost NONE of them were created by education dollars and most of them are not used in most schools.)
David Wiley has more to say about textbooks here.
