The history of digital reading in a fascinating one and I believe exploring its development arc helps predict the trends that may lie ahead. Thinking about what worked early on – meaning what was read in digital form – use cases where search, find, and quick read were the primary means of interacting with the content, such as encyclopedias and reference works, directories and other data driven compendia.
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing two of the most influential forces in publishing today: Cathie Black of Hearst and Jane Friedman of Open Road Integrated Media at the Publishing Business Expo. We spent an hour talking about the impact of digital on the book and magazine industries and both Cathie and Jane were immensely impressive. To open our session entitled Reinventing Today‘s Publishing Company, Cathie and Jane each spent 10 minutes in their opening remarks. Jane presented the 4-layered “cake” that is the structure of Open Road, and Cathie played a video and followed it up with an overview of the goal behind the massive effort that will roll out behind the campaign entitled “Magazines, The Power of Print.”
After she played the video Cathie said “We don’t have a print problem in magazine publishing, we have an advertising problem.” I couldn’t agree more.
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Mike Shatzkin
on Mar 23rd, 2010
@ 6:08 am:
Very thoughtful and original post. You make a critical point that textbooks matched the ecosystem of learning: one class moving at a constant speed from a common starting point to a common ending point. And clearly, digital change enables our learning materials, at least, to be much more nuanced than that.
[Reply]
Chris Cosner
on Mar 24th, 2010
@ 12:38 pm:
Thank you for this post.
Re: “The basic assumption of each text is that students all come in at or near the same level and leave at or near the same level.”
Having taught a foreign language from various textbooks, I can say that there is no class in which everyone is assumed to be at exactly the same level, though it is perhaps always a quixotic hope. The teacher inevitably makes adjustments for as many students as possible. FL textbooks are designed to be used in precisely this way. Many include sets of questions in the introduction to help the student determine what to work on, as well as tests at the end of chapters. Students naturally learn to work with the textbook at their own pace. A good teacher expects more from advanced students and recognizes real progress in the less advanced students.
I’m not sure there is anything earth-shattering a digital book can bring to *this aspect* of the textbook. It is up to the author to create a pedagogically sound design, and up to the teacher to coach the students on how to use the textbook.
One way a digital approach might address the problem of different levels of ability is a kind of rental or buy-in to a whole set of textbooks, so the student is free to move forwards and backwards through the material preceding and subsequent to the class.
But even this may be resisted by educators. After all, the student is always free to go to the library for more material, or to work with a tutor if they are behind. The whole point of a class is to be working together on a subject, to be on the same page. That motivates less advanced students to catch up, and it helps the ‘advanced’ students to solidify material of which they may not yet have a perfect grasp.
[Reply]
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