Well it’s taken less than a year from the Kindle’s introduction for it to find its way into the schools. John McCain would be at home here, because these folks are true mavericks. The board voted last month to approve an expenditure of over $50,000 to purchase 147 Kindles for use in their schools, (albeit not by students):

http://www.sltrib.com/ci_10790737?IADID=Search-www.sltrib.com-www.sltrib.com

The school text market for Kindle is so far small to nonexistent, but Granite officials foresee the day when publishing companies embrace the medium because of simple market forces. Not only would use of the device in schools cut down on paper costs, but it would also cut down on space and energy needed to store books and move them from school to school. Rather than wait months for updated texts, they could instead be downloaded soon after revisions. The days when students strained their developing backs with a pack full of books would be over.

All that’s still to come. For now, Johnson said, the district’s Kindles will be put into the hands of librarians, assistant librarians and technology specialists at its elementary, middle and high schools. Once they’re versed in the ways of using Kindle to promote reading and literacy, what Johnson calls “the third wave” of placing the devices in classrooms can’t be far behind. The opportunity to save education dollars and engage students with technology they can relate to is too great to pass up, he believes.

It’s a small step, but (to borrow a phrase) a giant leap, since it demonstrates that the education market holds real potential as a consumer of this kind of technology, and the textbook publishers would be wise to embrace it. Amazon would be more than happy to help.

In a book published this summer, the business guru, Harvard professor and author of the best selling book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma” Clay Christensen, turns his analytical lens to the education sector and offers some compelling arguments about how best to reform it. His new book is called Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (co-authored with Curtis Johnson and Michael Horn), and I strongly recommend it to anyone involved in educational technology. If you can’t get to it right away, an excellent summary of it, written by the authors,  appears in this Forbes article. More can be found on their website, www.disruptingclass.com. Publisher’s Weekly offers this commentary:

It’s no secret that people learn in different ways, so why, the authors of this book ask, “can’t schools customize their teaching?” The current system, “designed for standardization,” must by its nature ignore the individual needs of each student. The answer to this problem, the authors argue, is “disruptive innovation,” a principle introduced (and initially applied to business) by Harvard Business School professor Christensen in The Innovator’s Dilemma. The idea is that an audience in need will benefit from even a faulty opportunity to fulfill that need; in education, the demand for individual instruction could be met through infinitely customizable online computer-based instruction.

A reviewer on Amazon offers this summary of the book’s arguments:

Dr. Christensen argues that the traditional government-run education system will in the near future be “disrupted” by the innovation of computer-based learning. At first, online learning will compete against nonconsumption by offering classes in subjects where there isn’t enough demand in any given school to justify offering a traditional course (such as a very advanced math one or an unusual foreign language). But eventually, He believes that the technology will improve such that computer-based learning will render the traditional model of education obsolete. In “Disrupting Class”, he postulates that demand for computer-based high school classes will follow an S-curve that will start to “flip” (significantly accelerate) in the year 2012. In the years between 2012 and 2018, Dr. Christensen projects that the share of online courses will grow from 5% to 50% of all high school courses.

Professor Christensen’s influence on industries and large organizations should not be underestimated. Intel sent its top 2000 managers to his workshops in the early 1990s, when it was being attacked on the low end by innovators such as Cyrix and AMD. The Celeron chip emerged from this exercise, which helped Intel fend off the disruptive technology of the newcomers. However, he recognizes that the public school system is a very distinct animal from a profit-driven corporation, and the tools needed to effect change are quite different indeed.

One aspect of his analysis, I believe, is spot on regarding how one of the major players in the educational field will be affected by the predicted disruption, and that is the publishing industry. He characterizes the textbook industry as:

a scale-intensive value chain business, marked by high fixed costs, much like the pharmaceutical and commercial aircraft manufacturing industries. The costs of writing, editing and setting up to print and bind a book are roughly the same, whether 1000 or 1 million copies are sold. …These are blockbuster seeking businesses. A large monolithic market for a single best selling title is just as attractive to a textbook publisher as the blockbusters Zantac and Lipitor are to a drug company.

There is little dispute among textbook publishers that because individual students learn differently, they need differentiated learning options. But the textbook companies can’t get there from here. Were they to focus on developing different books for each type of intelligence, their volume per title  – and their profitability – would decline markedly. Because this is so disruptive to their business models, most of the intellectual and financial energy of this formidable industry focuses on creating and commercializing still more blockbuster books for large, undifferentiated masses of students.

But Christensen and his co-authors point to the enabling technology of such Web 2.0 innovations as User Generated Content as the solution to this dilemma. In other words, the disruptive innovation will come from the consumer side, as opposed to the producer side, since the producers have too much to lose to be the innovators. Like most disruptive technologies, these tools will initially be adopted on the margin, say for tutorial purposes, rather than be integrated into the mainstream system right off the bat. His prediction:

For several years, most teachers and students will still have conventional textbooks. But little by little, textbooks will give way to computer-based online courses – increasingly augmented by user-generated student centric learning tools. At some point, administrators, school committees, and teachers unions will recognize that even without explicit administrative decisions ever having been made, student-centric learning will have become mainstream.

A bit of historical perspective may be appropriate here. Anyone who studied engineering or science up to the early 1970s would recognize the name K + E (Keuffel & Esser), the premier manufacturer of slide rules for over a century. Their story may ring a bell:

K+E held patents for a wide range of slide rule features, including improved cursor indicators, functions and scales, and the adjustable body mechanism. Caught by the huge market shift created by electronic calculators, CAD systems and laser surveying systems, which displaced all of their strong markets, K+E shrank dramatically after 1972. K+E even sold some TI manufactured calculators for a brief period trying to capitalize on their existing customer base and industry knowledge. The final assets of K+E, mainly involving paper products, were sold to AZON in 1987, after several painful internal re-organizations.

There are some striking parallels between companies like K+E in the 1970s and the textbook publishers of today. A prime indicator of an industry in decline is rapid consolidation. Another is the introduction of “new” products whose main objective is to protect the existng franchise that the “old” products have built up over the years. One wonders if any publishing executives have ever heard of K+E. The authors may want to leave a couple of copies on the desks of their publisher, McGraw-Hill.

The country that gave the world U2, Guiness beer, and the shamrock also seems to be on the cutting edge of educational technology, according to a story in Thursday’s Irish Times:

A GROUP of 18 secondary school pupils yesterday became the first students worldwide to replace their academic books with electronic devices. The first year students of Caritas College girls’ school in Ballyfermot, Dublin, each received an electronic book, pre-loaded with the required textbooks, as well as 50 classic novels including Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice and Oliver Twist . The use of the electronic devices will mean a dramatic reduction in the weight of the pupils schoolbags, replacing more than 6kg (13.2lbs) of textbooks, workbooks, an English dictionary and a novel with a 400g (0.9lbs) e-book.  In addition, the students will no longer need copybooks to take notes, as they can write and doodle on the electronic pages, similar to a regular copybook.

The pilot program has apparently been launched by Dublin based educational publishers Gill & Macmillan. Their director of sales is quoted as saying: “Although we believe that the widespread adoption of e-readers is some time off, this project allows us to determine how well they work in the classroom, how the pupils interact with them and to examine their potential.”

The device being used for the pilot program is the Iliad, by iRex Technologies. It list for $599 U.S. and is generally regarded as the Mercedes of e-book readers. In addition to handling e-books (including PDFs), this device incorporates Wacom’s pen writing technology, allowing the user to write directly on the screen with a stylus. The mind boggles when imagining the scenario in which a student can carry all her books and notes in a 15 oz package that fits in her purse.

No doubt some critics will say that at this price, why not buy them all laptops, but you’d be hard pressed to find a laptop with handwriting recognition and touch screen technology incoroporated for $600. Besides, the electronic paper display is unbeatable for reading long passages of text. The iliad comes with built in wi-fi for downloading content wirelessly, as well as an optional ethernet hook-up, in contrast to the built in “Whispernet” feature of Amazon’s Kindle, which is based on Sprint’s high-speed mobile phone network.

This is a bold step for a publisher to take, assuming they are underwriting the full cost of the program. If this assumption is correct, this begs the question, (or several questions): Does Gill & Macmillan plan to migrate all its textbooks to an electronic medium? How is their economic model different from that of North American textbook publishers, who so far have shown little interest in adapting their content to an electronic format? And finally, could they please open a U.S. branch?

We will be following the progress of this experiment in digital publishing closely over the coming months. Stay tuned.

In a stinging critique of its recent foray into the field of digital textbooks, the publishing industry was taken to task in a report released this week  by the Student Public Interest Research Group. The study, entitled, “Course Correction: How Digital Textbooks Are Off Track, and How to Set Them Straight”, outlines the findings of a survey conducted on two different college campuses last spring, and presents the following findings:

1. Digital textbooks must meet three criteria – affordable, printable and accessible:

In order to be a solution to high costs, digital textbooks must cost less than traditional books. That means digital textbooks must be priced lower than the net cost of buying a textbook – the purchase price minus the amount the student can expect to receive for selling it back to the bookstore.

2. Digital textbooks done wrong: e-textbooks fail to meet the criteria:

The first type of digital text we reviewed was e-textbooks, the digital book format offered by the major publishers through CourseSmart.  We found that they fall short on each of the three criteria we found digital textbooks must meet.

E-textbooks are too expensive
* The e-textbooks we surveyed cost on average exactly the same as a new hard copy of the same title bought and sold back to the bookstore.
* The e-textbooks we surveyed cost on average 39% more than a used hard copy of the same title bought and sold back online.

Printing is costly and difficult
* Printing was limited to 10 pages per session for each of the e-textbooks we surveyed.
* Buying and printing half of an e-textbook was three times the cost of buying a used hard copy and selling it back to the bookstore, for the books we surveyed.

E-textbooks are difficult to access
* Students have to choose between using the book online or using it offline – they cannot do both.
* Most (75%) of the e-textbooks we surveyed expired after 180 days, so students do not have the option to access their books in the future.

3. Digital textbooks done right: open textbooks meet all of the criteria

Open textbooks are textbooks distributed free digitally under an open license.  The key feature of an open license is that it permits users to make copies of the textbook and translate it into different formats.  So, open textbooks start as digital textbooks but can be printed in a variety of formats. We found that open textbooks accomplish what e-textbooks do not: low prices, printing options and accessibility.

Open textbooks are affordable. Open textbooks are free digitally, and students can purchase other formats at a low cost.

Open textbooks are easy and inexpensive to print. Students can print digital textbooks anytime, anywhere and in a variety of formats.  They can print individual pages at home, order a print-on-demand bound copy, or anything in between.

Open textbooks are accessible. Students can access open textbooks anytime, from any computer, without the book expiring.

The authors of the study urge faculty and institutions to do everything they can to encourage adoption of open textbooks:

For faculty, this means giving preference to open textbooks whenever pedagogically appropriate.  For institutions, this means providing incentives to faculty authors and pooling resources to develop a viable infrastructure to support open textbooks.

This report seems to be getting noticed, as it’s been quoted by most of the major tech and publishing blogs. If nothing else, it will most likely lead to a spike in hits on a couple of sites: Coursesmart (which PIRG ranks slightly below the IRS in its contribution to society), and on Flatworld Knowledge, which receives high praise for its approach to open textbooks. (Another site Connexions, offers open source educational content as well.) There will also quite possibly be a lot more traffic to file sharing sites like Textbook Torrents, which didn’t let pesky conventions such as copyright laws interfere with its users’ access to every textbook that has been scanned and uploaded by disgruntled students. (Although the site is currently not accepting any more registrations, which suggests that their legal bills may be exceeding their server costs.)

As the report indicates, the textbook publishing industry is overdue for change. But for some insight into some factors that might keep the business from changing as quickly as the technology is, it’s worth reading a column posted by a writer with impressive credentials, as an author, college professor, and a publishing executive. His post is called Why the Kindle Won’t Have a Dramatic Impact on College Course Materials for at least Five Years and although it focuses largely on the barriers to the adoption of the Kindle in the college market, it provides a cogent and laconic account of the economics of the textbook publishing industry. Among his observations:

• Within this context, e-books are budgeted as a small percentage of the overall budget. From the textbook publisher’s perspective the development costs are identical whether the content is being flowed into a print textbook or an e-book. This is because textbook publishers make most of their revenue of print textbooks and, consequently, most of the content development strategy is formulated around those print textbooks. E-books are simply “add-ons” or extra products that can be viewed as a by product of the core print development process.

• Within the current content development workflow for textbook publishers, the plant investment remains the same regardless of whether the product is a print textbook or an e-book. And, since publishers sell far more print textbooks than e-books, there is no incentive to change production workflows to favor the creation of minimized or lower-cost e-books from which print textbooks could be created. This means that publishing e-books, without significant changes to current design and production workflow, does not reduce the publishers’ costs significantly. This is important because it means all current e-book solutions for textbook publishers take into consideration the print book production process and derives cost efficiencies from that process. There are neither sales incentive or cost efficiencies in the current workflow that would cause publishers to get excited about the Kindle.

One could surmise that the same might be said for ebooks in general, not only Kindle versions. Until the design and workflow process undergoes a radical transformation, thus reducing the cost curve by an order of magnitude, traditional publishers will not be in a position to offer their content in an open (free or nearly so) model. This is a clear symptom of an industry about to undergo a stage of disintermediation, which is usually accompanied by major sell-offs of assets, restructuring and layoffs of thousands of managers and editors. It may take a decade or so, but eventually the textbook industry may consist of hundreds of small, specialized content producers, and a handful of POD providers. Instead of going to Barnes & Noble to buy their textbooks, the freshmen of 2015 may be stopping by Kinko’s.

The Association of Educational Publishers sponsors a blog called: Publishing for the Digital Future, which is a collection of essays, articles and opinion pieces that analyze the impact of the digital age on the field of educational publishing. In a recent post, the CEO of Evan Moor Educational Publishers offers up a number of questions that are often asked by publishers thinking about moving into the digital realm. His answers to these questions provide some valuable insight into the thought process of publishing executives. The writer, Bill Evans, takes a decidedly optimistic view of the future of digital publishing, and its effect on the industry. Here are some excerpts  of the questions and answers he addresses:

1. How secure is the e-book format? How can I be sure that my intellectual property isn’t going to be e-mailed to 150 of my customer’s closest friends?

Before answering this question, we first have to ask: How safe is a paper and ink book? The truth is that with better and better scanning techniques and better and better character recognition, any paper and ink book can be made into a digital book in a matter of minutes. Whether it’s a paper and ink book or a digital book, publishers will have to be vigilant about protecting their copyrights.

2. Will digital books cut into my other sales?

That has certainly not been our experience at Evan-Moor. It has been our experience that it actually grows the sales of a book. We believe this is because we are serving a different customer–a customer who has not previously been served. However, if the format did replace the sales of a paper and ink book, it would still mean greater profits for your company. Without any costs of goods sold or the costs of incoming and outgoing shipping, more money drops to the bottom line.

3. How should I price an e-book?

I’ve always taken the position that I’m not selling paper and ink. Rather, I’m selling content. The publisher may be saving on the cost of goods sold, but the customer is also saving the cost of shipping. In addition, the customer gets immediate delivery of the product. At Evan-Moor an e-book and a paper and ink book cost the same.

6. What’s the future of the digital book?

Right now, most publishers (including Evan-Moor) are simply taking the production files we have for our books and transforming them into PDFs for distribution. To a certain extent this is a lot like putting radio shows on television. It really doesn’t take advantage of all the possibilities of this new electronic medium. There are lots of ways we could think about enhancing our e-books, including:

• Providing a clickable table of contents to immediately get to the part of the book that you want to go to;
• Giving the ability to annotate the pages with the teacher’s notes;
• Allowing the teacher to customize the content for his/her class;
• Adding elements to an activity or deleting them or perhaps even changing the spelling for territories outside the United States;
• Selling chapters or even a few pages of a book rather than the entire book;
• Selling compilations and collections of e-books in a bundle; and
• Making the book whiteboard friendly so that the book is truly interactive. This might also include providing worksheets that now become self-correcting in the digital context.

8. What are the benefits to the ultimate consumer?

There are many reasons that teachers are going to want to buy supplemental materials in this manner:

• Get the book immediately;
• Do electronic word searching within the document;
• Store the book so it doesn’t get lost, and even back it up;
• Print exactly what you need when you need it;
• Avoid shipping costs;
• The teacher may have the ability to customize content for his or her individual classroom; and
• Use the book on a whiteboard, as well as printing it out.

Now you might be a bit confused if you read the answer to Q 3 (“At Evan-Moor an e-book and a paper and ink book cost the same”) and attempted to reconcile it with the rest of the piece. This statement might be paraphrased as “Let’s not change our pricing one iota, despite taking 30-40% out of our cost base and not adding any value to the content”. It is symptomatic of the antediluvian philosophy of the publishing industry. This assertion is all the more ironic in view of the other promises of e-books that the writer refers to. If they took the extra step and converted to a reflowable text standard such as e-pub, then one might see the justification for charging the same price, because of the value added to the digital content. Clickable ToC, highlighting and annotating text, electronic word searching – now those are features that changing the nature of the book (and education) as we know it.  Simply converting files to PDF misses out on the ability to deliver on the prediction he makes in his conclusion:

E-books and digital content are not just a new way of distribution–this is a whole new way to think about educational publishing.

It may be a new way to think about it but they’re stuck doing things the old way.

Now that Textbook Torrents seems to be offline, just as a new academic year is getting underway, what’s a poor struggling student to do when faced with exorbitant textbook prices? Well there’s a plethora of sites and services currently under development that have made it their mission to combat high textbook prices. One that’s been around for a couple of years, but that seems to be undergoing a rebirth, is Textbook Revolution. It appears to be a student-led organization that is close to launching a wiki.:

TBR’s mission is to drive the adoption of free textbooks by teachers and professors. We want to get these books into classrooms. Our approach is to bring all of the free textbooks we can find together in one place, review them, and let the best rise to the top and find their way into the hands of students in classrooms around the world. At Textbook Revolution, you’ll find links to textbooks and select educational resources of all kinds. Some of the books are PDF files, others are viewable only online as e-books. Most books are aimed at undergraduates, but there are at least a few resources at every level, from kindergarten to post-doc. All of the books are offered for free by their respective copyright holders for online viewing. Beyond that, each book is as individual as the author behind it.

This volunteer run strategy may or may not be sustainable in the long term. College students are among the most passionate soldiers in the movement against the mighty publishing cartel that puts profit before pupils, but they also tend to have a limited horizon – usually four years. No one every thought that Wikipedia would evolve to its current status, but it has taken more than four years to get there.

Textbook Revolution  summarizes it mission as follows on the site’s FAQ page:

The textbook industry today is run by a small group of very large corporations who care very little about education and very much about maximizing profits. The industry charges outrageous prices for new textbooks while simultaneously doing everything it can to make older versions unusable or obsolete. There is simply no reason that a new calculus textbook should cost $157. The study of calculus, at least the type of calculus that most of us need to study in high school or undergraduate programs, has not changed significantly in decades. For an in-depth review of all that is wrong with the textbook industry, please read RipOff 101, a study by CalPirg

At the other end of the ethical scale is Pirate Bay, which flagrantly violates global copyright laws, as described in this recent article in the NY Times:

The Pirate Bay, which is based in Sweden, presents a devilishly fearless challenge to American textbook publishers. It describes itself as an “anticopyright organization” and offers music, movies, television shows and software, as well as e-books like textbooks — not a single item of which, it boasts, has ever been removed at the request of a copyright owner.

As Randall Stross says in the article:

All forms of print publishing must contend with the digital transition, but college textbook publishing has a particularly nasty problem on its hands. College students may be the angriest group of captive customers to be found anywhere.

Several weeks ago the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to eliminate funding for the Reading First program, the groundbreaking but controversial Bush administration program that has given states $1 billion a year since 2002 to teach low-income elementary schoolers to read. A House committee also had voted to eliminate funding; if money is not restored before the federal budget is approved in the fall, the program could end. More about the program and the vote can be found in the July 1 USA Today

Any federally funded program targeting low income families is likely to be the target of criticism and the source of much debate on its effectiveness in addressing the problem. But I believe the comments of one sixth grade language arts teacher in Texas carry more weight than all the studies and reports cited in this legislative quagmire. Donalyn Miller is the author of the blog “The Book Whisperer“, and she makes the following observation:

The children cannot wait. They do not have more time. Students, who entered kindergarten in 2000, the year the National Reading Panel report came out, are in high school now. While Washington policymakers fumble to figure out what is best practice in getting children to read and crafting program after program claiming to have the answers, these children are graduating and breathing a sigh of relief that they never have to read a book again. …The only groups served by current trends to produce more and more programs for teaching reading are the publishing and testing companies who make billions of dollars from their programs and tests. …Meanwhile, the people who have the best ability in actually getting children to read—children’s book authors, parents, librarians, and teachers get the least credit (monetarily or otherwise). No hidden agenda exists with this group; they just want children to read…..When you take a forklift and shovel off the programs, underneath it all is a child reading a book….

Her concluding remark:

We don’t need another reading program; we need to go back to the first reading program—connecting children with books. This should always be our bottom line.

Enough said. (But not enough heard; the education industry lobbyists seem to drown people like Mrs. Miller’s voice out).

This blog is one of the best I have seen addressing the issue of how to instill a love of reading among young people today. Highly recommended reading.

It was bound to happen sooner or later, but barely six months after it was introduced, the Kindle is starting to become the “textbook of the future”. As reported this week in The Christian Science Monitor and Inside HigherEd, a handful of university presses are starting to put some titles on the Kindle:

This fall, Princeton University Press will begin publishing Kindle-edition textbooks. It’s on a short list of printing houses that are testing the e-textbook waters. (Kindle has also snagged Yale, Oxford, and the University of California.) But Princeton is the only to attempt a Kindle-first launch, offering Robert Shiller’s new economics book “The Subprime Solution” on the Amazon electronic reader two weeks before students can buy a hard copy.

This development has met with enthusiasm from back-breaking-bag toting college students, if the following post is any indication:

Oh thank HEAVENS some of the University Presses are getting into the Kindle game! This device will radically transform the chiropractic needs of college students as soon as they can get textbooks on there … it’s coming!

A quick search of college textbook titles available in the Kindle store today turns up a mere three results, with prices ranging from $25 to $40 per title. The Inside HigherEd piece reports about a 10% savings for the Kindle versions of the books, not a substantial discount given the cost of the device. Again though, prices should come down as volume scales up, and if publishers ever venture out of their protection-of-margin comfort zone, and face the fact that the consumer will eventually run of of patience with an industry that continues to charge as much for digital bits as it does for the physical product (can you say “record labels?”) Of course, if they continue to manage their business with this 19th century foresight, there are a plethora of Web 2.0 upstarts ready to step in and serve the market. (See my post about Flatworld Knowledge on April 18)

An interesting item in May/June issue of Multimedia & Internet @ Schools on the future of the textbook, in a world of Web 2.0 education:

Now let’s get some perspective. Let’s say you were in college in 1978. When you received an assignment, you would use reference books and journals in the library to do your research. You would then handwrite your notes and use a typewriter for your final draft. You used a slide rule to work on your discrete math homework. Sometimes you called your parents from a telephone booth to beg them to mail you pizza (aka beer) money. Not to mention that your biology textbook was a 6-pound, 700-page tome that took 3 years to get published and was already out-of-date.

Now, 30 years later, your son is entering his second year in college. He takes class notes on a laptop and does his research with online databases and (of course) Google while using a free Wi-Fi hotspot at Starbucks. He gets help with his math homework by contacting classmates through Facebook, and he forgets to call you from his cell phone because he doesn’t need money for pizza—he just uses his credit card.

But you don’t worry about him too much. His phone is practically a part of his body, so you subscribe to an online service that uses the GPS locator to sync it up with Google Earth, so at least you can see exactly where he is at all times.

Only one thing hasn’t radically changed—his biology text, which has now grown into a 12-pound, 1,000-page mammoth of a book that still takes 2 years to get published and is already out-of-date. What’s wrong with this picture?

“Textbooks have yet to respond to changes in technology, teaching philosophy, and student life,” says Paul Bierman, a professor at the University of Vermont. He made this statement at a workshop he initiated of 54 leading scientists, educators, and technology experts at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. They met under the theme “Reconsidering the Textbook.”

http://serc.carleton.edu/textbook/index.html

Here’s another thought-provoking excerpt:

Textbooks have been another casualty of budget cuts. Many schools are being told, “Don’t even consider ordering new textbooks for next year—the funds just aren’t there.” If only there was a cost-effective supplement. Hmm …

http://www.mmischools.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=13676

If a small fraction of the amount spent on producing, printing and distributing textbooks each year was invested in digital technology (such as Kindles or other e-reading devices), the long term savings would be sufficient to bring teachers’ salaries up to a level commensurate with their value to society.

Observation: A scan of the speaker roster at the “Reconsidering the Textbook” workshop reveals a collection of academics and technology leaders, but not a single representative of the publishing industry. I guess this would be a little like inviting the suits from the record companies to a confab hosted by Napster back in 1999 called the “Future of the CD”.

While enroute to our Canadian outpost for the summer, today’s post is a link to an insightful discussion about the effect of changing technology on education. It begins with a reference to a new book which is getting a lot of attention by Clay Shirkey, called “Here Comes Everybody”, kind of this year’s version of Wkinomics, by Don Tapscott.

In any case, it’s a dialogue that presents a variety of views on how technology and the choices it offers is causing educators to re-think their role in society.  Well worth reading, and a great link to follow.

http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/tln_teacher_voices/2008/06/will-everybody.html