This article from 2 Cents Worth says a lot of what I am thinking about textbooks at the moment. In particular, in describing an assignment requiring students to write a report based on web research from a variety of sites:
The fundamental difference between this and a traditional version of the assignment, has less to do with the presence of technology, and more to do with the conspicuous absence of a textbook. Rather than getting their content exclusively from a packaged information product, designed to make learning slick and easy, students are asked to visit a variety of information sources, that, hopefully, do not agree on every aspect of the topic. It puts more responsibility of learning, on the shoulders of the learner, to make some decisions, recognize that there is more than one side, more than one answer, and more than one perspective. [Emphasis added]
The core idea here is right on the money: Real learning begins with students having to come to terms with the fact that basic information does not come prepackaged, unlike what textbooks would have us believe, and a large part of learning a subject is just figuring out how to find and manage the information about the subject. It seems to me that one of the major goals of higher education is to teach students how to be good producers and consumers of information, which means that they have to learn how to seek out information on a question they want/need to answer, and synthesize that information into something useful and true.
That includes resolving conflicts within the information. For example, in a GE 103 lab recently we found that an online mortgage calculator gives a different result from a student’s calculations with the mortgage formula in a book, because it turns out that the calculator was using a different formula! It was a very eye-opening experience for the students. And if we’d just stuck to a book, it would have never happened.
We are trying to get students away from believing something is true just because an authority figure says so — we want students to believe in the truth of something because they really apprehend its truthfulness, because they have considered it from all angles and put it to the test, and it’s survived. When you have a strong authority figure in the class — whether it’s a “sage on the stage” kind of professor, or a textbook which serves as a proxy for a human authority — this kind of learning isn’t going to happen.
And why should students pay for information that is common knowledge and freely available, anyway? That stuff ought to be, and wants to be, free.
I’ll have more to say on this in coming days, since I am going textbook-free for my two upper-division classes in the fall (Problem-Solving and Geometry).
Filed under: Education, High school, Higher ed, Teaching
But you’ve got to admit there is something beautiful and compelling about a good textbook. The sense of comprehensiveness, of completion, of authority. The sense that you hold all there is important to know about a subject in your hand. I realize this is an illusion, but it is the illusion of mastery that got me hooked on biology. I’m obviously now well past that illusion, and realize that 90% of what there is to know is yet unknown, but I still love to read textbooks. And I think an important prerequisite for teaching the kind of self-directed learning you describe above is setting a good foundation of knowledge that has been curated by experts in the field and found to be generally true. It’s from within this framework that critical thinking can emerge to test new knowledge–and often mature to be able to criticize the very framework in which it took root.
Doc:
Maybe the texts in biology are better than they are in computer science. I’m happy to admit that there is something beautiful about a good textbook (though I’m not sure I’ve ever found a textbook I love reading, and really good textbooks are rare). But the issue is, are they serving their primary audience, which ain’t us.
I wrote about this here and Robert followed up over here. Students have enough of a problem with language at the college level to begin with, and they struggle even more with the language of the discipline. They aren’t reading much of anything before they get to college (I realize that’s an unsupported assertion, but I feel pretty confident about it), and we expect them to read these textbooks?
I also think there’s a “curation” problem. There are too many textbooks out there, and I’m concerned about quality. My bottom shelf at work is filled with beginning Java programming textbooks, sent to me by publishers. How many do we really need?
I think that sense of complete authority is one of the things that make textbooks a bad idea in this day and age. The fact that the authority is more or less illusory makes me less inclined to use a book!
However – one of my favorite things is to look at old textbooks, especially antique ones, from the days where information was not so freely available and a well-written textbook really was the best gateway into a life of learning — and perhaps the only source of knowledge available to kids in remote areas like the American frontiers. I’m especially fond of 19th- and early-20th-century books in math, history, and geography. There’s something about opening up a geography book from 1910 and seeing a chapter on the Ottoman Empire that just floats my boat.
Calculus books from the 1960’s and 1970’s are neat too — so rigorous! They sure didn’t try to sex up the subject back then.
I’m also very fond of antique biomedical texts. One of my favorites is a monograph entitled something like “The Home Medical Advisor,” written in 1928. Technically it’s not a textbook, since it is written for the educated layperson, but in form it is very texty–and nearly 3 inches thick. What is most amazing to me about this book is how little has changed in western medicine since 1928. If you added a chapter on antibiotics to this book, the advice would be very nearly current best health practices.