Are textbooks the last frontier for the digital to analog transition?
According to this post by Christopher Dawson on ZDNet Education, we are a long way from moving from analog to digital when it comes to textbooks. It’s a great read that starts to look at the hurdles in front of us in terms of making digital textbooks a widespread reality in education. Check it out.
I found myself reading this post and thinking, how hard can this really be?
As Chris points out in his article, the roadblocks (at least in the US) are around distribution, digital rights management, and, of course, infrastructure. The education system in the US is gigantic, so implementing something like what South Korea has, is easier said than done. In South Korea ”The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology and the President’s Council on Information Strategies shared with President Lee Myung-bak, paper-based textbooks, reference books, dictionaries and other materials for elementary schools will be digitalised by 2014,” according to this article on Asia Pacific Futuregov. Such digitized content will be made available via the cloud on a number of devices including but not limited to notebooks, tablets, and smartphones.
In talking with family members in college, it is quite evident that the desire to move digital is there. Just consider the fact that, by and large, Millenials a.k.a digital natives live and work digitally. They own multiple devices (laptop, e-reader, smartphone) and are comfortable consuming, creating, and sharing content via these platforms. So why in education have students been asked to act digitally (creating reports, communicating with teachers, tracking assignments, etc.), but when it comes to what’s required for them to learn, they mainly have to use an analog tool?
Seems weird to me to consume analog and create digitally.
It’s like recording music on tape, then capturing, mixing, and distributing it digitally. Same with movies. Doesn’t it make more sense to go digital from the start? Music for the most part has moved that way, as have movies. So when it comes to learning, why the lag? I’m sure there are a whole host of reasons as Chris pointed out, plus many more.
What do you attribute the lag to?
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