Tablets vs. textbooks
I’m not sure what I think about the tablets vs. textbooks debate. But my guess is that tablets are the wave of the future, whatever I might think.
The actual text of textbooks has already become pretty awful, banal and PC and anti-American all at the same time. But I don’t think tablets will necessarily be better, although a broader range of material ought to be available on them. At any rate, I’m more interested in what the kids are reading than the medium by which they read it.
Of course, I was educated during a time when it was textbooks all the way. What I remember is how heavy my books were, and how my arms would ache as I carried them to school—especially if it was also cello day (try being a kid carrying a huge stack of books plus a cello). Our school books didn’t even begin to fit into our desks—those old dark wooden ones with the inkwells—and so we had to share our seats with a stack of them.
This sort of desk, this sort of seat:
Not only did we sit on those seats with a bunch of books sitting next to us, but we had to stand to recite. And since the girls had to wear skirts or dresses, and sometimes the skirt would get caught under a book, that could wreak havoc when we would stand up and all those carefully-placed books would came crashing down, our version of a failed tablecloth trick.
In first grade we had an ancient teacher (I think she really was ancient, she didn’t just look old to my very young eyes) who every morning would walk down the rows checking us for clean fingernails and whether we had remembered to bring a handkerchief.
A cloth handkerchief. That’s how old I am.
A cloth handkerchief.
I still see that in Japanese mainstream media.
Old or just alien?
Ymarsakar:
Old and alien 🙂 .
What I remember is how heavy my books were, and how my arms would ache as I carried them to school–especially if it was also cello day (try being a kid carrying a huge stack of books plus a cello)
I suspect that the heavy lifting problem has gotten worse since your- and my- childhood, as textbooks have increased in size with additional visual aids, such as pictures, maps, and tables.
Tablets sound like a better solution. Though, as you point out, what is actually written in the textbooks or tablets nowadays doesn’t necessarily make students better educated
Someone once pointed out that one could fill a $60 e-reader with out of copyright books that are part of the Western- and world- canon. Because they are out of copyright, they can often be acquired at no cost from places like Project Gutenberg. Also not as heavy as the hard copy books.
http://www.gutenberg.org/
You have plenty of company neo in those memories, the boomers were a bridge generation, born into a world without computers, VCRs, answering machines, cell phones, microwave ovens…
Modern American textbooks have become a scam industry. The pricing of textbooks is obscene. Not to mention filled with leftist propaganda. I have a fine Samsung android OS that cost me $99.
GB, Gringo & N-Neocon: I well remember the “A-Bomb Drills” which we had in Monte Vista Elementary School. NONE of our teachers or our books were telling us that those Soviet Reds had some valid points!! Aaahhhhhhh…For those days when Evil was called EVIL…Not an Ish-Shoe or an Inclusive Selfie-Hug!! Aaaahhhhhhh….. ((-:
http://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2014/08/fiscal-sanity-in-academia.html
Amazon books. I still want the names of the people in charge of the University-book scam.
The only reason they change the edition every semester or two, is so that teachers handing out homework can’t use the old books, because the new books are mandated, but the students can’t use the old books either because the homework problems are not numbered the same.
I have made the transition to a tablet. It was a bit touchy at first because tablets are touchy, but now I like it. Light weight and more portable than a lap top. I do draw a line at tech like google glasses.
Ah yes those desks. With…. still with the hole for the inkwell! Not to mention decades of initials scratched into the surface with the point of the metal compass that you locked the pencil stub into. And then the vast collection of gum wads making the bottom an upside down field of mouth rubble.
And the heavy textbooks plus the annual torture of trimming folding fitting and taping the manila book covers with the black printing and pictures and the lines for name and subject and “Home Room.”
Good times.
vanderleun:
I used brown paper bags for book covers, plus tape. And they never worked all that well anyway.
Ditto what GB and Y have written about the textbook scam in academia. I wonder why some enterprising students do not research the recent history of textbook uses in given classes, and then ask Professor X a question like this:
“Professor X, this course has changed the textbook every 2-3 years. Why do we need the 8th edition, when the 7th or the 6th or the 5th… editions were perfectly adequate? All this does is pad the bank accounts of the publishing companies and the profs who wrote the books. Why do you submit to such a financial scam being perpetrated on your students? Why do you not investigate more financially equitable solutions for textbooks for your class?”
Professor X: Crickets.[most likely.]
BTW, after my undergrad years of getting a STEM degree at StateU, where a number of my STEM textbooks were written by my profs, I was pleased to find out during my time in grad school that those same texts from my StateU profs were widely used. Gave me a higher opinion of my StateU.
Gringo, Democrats like to talk about war for oil and military industrial complex, but never notice how most of it is being profited on by Democrats?
Gringo, I was once the guest in a Business Law professor’s home in Boulder, CO. Home? It was a mansion. Built with the proceeds of his personally authored text books, which were required (of course) in his courses. The results of 25 years of textbook royalties. Nice little scheme he had going there.
Professor Reynolds has been putting the spotlight on the higher education scam for a while. Too bad someone didn’t start spotlighting this in the 1970s before it got so big.