Are Textbooks Obsolete Yet?

Pam Zuege's ninth-graders tracked Hurricane Mitch as it swept across Central America. They've also seen the effects of volcanoes, followed thunderstorms, and watched as scientists charted seismic tremors from Japan to California.

"The kids could actually see the data as it came out, as the researchers were seeing it," says Zuege, who teaches geography in the Birdville Independent School District near Fort Worth, Texas. "That's something a textbook couldn't do."

But of course, the Internet can, and Zuege has made extensive use of it in her class at Richland High School. This fall she will begin another challenge: moving to the new Birdville High School to teach a pilot geography class that will rely almost exclusively on information stored on laptop computers or accessible via the web.

The course is the first of its kind in Texas, which made national headlines last year when Jack Christie, then chairman of the Texas State Board of Education, suggested the state consider replacing textbooks with laptops. "With computers and other electronic and information technologies, Texas does not have to wait years for the world-class system of public education that its people want and need," Christie wrote last fall in the Austin American-Statesman. "It is only a few keystrokes away."

Will computers replace textbooks? Perhaps the more pertinent question is: when?

"I think conventional textbooks -- they're pretty much dead," says Peter Cookson, director of educational outreach at Columbia University's Teachers College. "Not this year, but in the next decade."

The advantages of web-based and other digital materials -- rapid updates, interactivity, customization, audio, animation, and sometimes even lowered production costs -- have led many educators to view them as attractive alternatives to traditional texts. The technology is addressing the needs of classrooms that have moved from teacher-led to student-initiated exercises, from individual to cooperative learning, from strict grade and subject boundaries to interdisciplinary work that might involve children of various ages and abilities. And technology doesn't merely respond to changes in education; it creates changes of its own, influencing, for example, the roles of teachers and the scheduling and makeup of classes.
Down but not out

But while the textbook might be under assault from this barrage of electronic media, it's too early to count it out just yet.

"I was reading how textbooks were going to disappear in the '60s and how book publishing was going to disappear, and I see [book publishing] is as healthy today as it's ever been," says Walter J. Koetke, director of The Learning Odyssey, a nonprofit group that creates interactive, Internet-based software for elementary and middle school classrooms.

"The textbook is a structuring of knowledge," says Saul Rockman, president of Rockman Et Al, an education consulting firm in San Francisco. "It organizes an enormous amount of information in a socially acceptable pattern."

In the future, Rockman adds, "There will still be someone structuring knowledge."

But the idea of a single authoritative voice, the textbook's voice, might become increasingly outmoded as more diverse sources of information -- and more timely sources -- vie for attention.

"If all we do is scan in textbooks and make them available digitally, we haven't accomplished much," says Michael Hannafin, who holds a chair in technology-enhanced learning at the University of Georgia. He hastens to add that the Internet and other fiercely competitive digital purveyors will keep that from happening.

To glimpse this postmodern classroom, you can go to Zuege's school or travel some 600 miles west to Ysleta Elementary School in El Paso, where Sharon Wiles' sixth-graders are taking part in a pilot laptop program being developed by NetSchools of Mountain View, Calif. (Birdville's program is being undertaken by EdSoft Corp. of Dallas.)

Earlier this school year, each of Wiles' geography students picked a different country to research on the Internet. The students learned about their chosen nation's culture, economic base, and political system, and were asked to use this information to advise Wiles on whether she would want to live there. The students urged her to pack her bags for such places as Australia, Austria, and Germany.

In the course of the program, the children are learning to assess the accuracy and legitimacy of information from various Internet sources. And when those sources don't agree, they turn to an old-fashioned hardbound encyclopedia to resolve discrepancies.

"You would need a couple of dozen textbooks to get through all the information that they wanted," Wiles says.

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