Students jump around in textbooks—or whatever source for the subject they are learning. This revelation from a textbook study is stated in an article this week in The Chronicle of Higher Education and quoted at the end of this post.
Online knowledge aggregation – - the golden swamp – - is NOT linear. When subject knowledge goes openly into the internet, it settles into the network matrix that lets it link up among its internal ideas and with related webpages. In the internet knowledge cannot be forced into the usual linear ruts of textbooks. Eventually we are going to get to the place where teaching uses the natural networks of knowledge online — where students can learn by following patterns of interconnecting ideas. Professors will move beyond lining up bits of what they know in textbooks to optimizing links among their concepts online.
Meanwhile, this is progress, quoted from The Chronicle:
Edward H. Stanford, president of McGraw-Hill Higher Education, said in an interview that the new e-textbooks were developed based on an ethnographic investigation of student study habits done by the company. He said the company learned that students often do not study in a linear fashion, but instead jump around in the text, whether in print or electronic textbooks. “One kid in a biology class said, ‘I don’t read the chapter. I just look at the art. If I understand the art, I go on to the next art. If I don’t understand the art, I read,’” said Mr. Stanford. “When he said that, it made perfect sense to me, but until he said it, I had never thought about it that way.”
