In its front page article titled “As Classrooms Go Digital, Textbooks Are History,” the New York Times mentions in passing the fabulous opportunity to multiply the riches of education letting students access their subjects online. The reporter, Tamar Lewin, does a thorough job of hitting all of the key points from the traditional edu power players: the schools and the publishers. We learn that when classrooms go digital state standards are mapped and textbooks are online instead of printed. The school/publisher mindset is to serve up subjects in little boxes: standards, textbook chapters, curricula, etc. So, the challenge for the usual edu suspects has been to keep the stuff students use in those boxes while somehow making the tools youngsters use to access them digital.
The misfit here is that online knowledge resources are networks. When you put a piece of a network in a box, what you can learn from it shrivels. It is clipped away from its cognitive connections. We are left with kids who are connected on Facebook to dozens of friends and features — and for their “digital” study of a subject they are served up a little virtual box with a bit to learn in it that fits the standard of their grade and semester. Online networks of ideas are like critical thinking: they are in context and connect to related ideas. Here are a couple of samples; textbooks these are not; boxes they are not. They are networks:
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Trial of Zacarias Moussaoi
The Walt Whitman Archive
