Didactic Podcast (July 2071)
This (fictitious) podcast emanates from 2072 and explores how textbooks have evolved. The “Didactic” podcast describes the history of textbooks and how they have matured by 2072.
Transcript (full reference list is below)
If you’re tuning into this podcast, you are most likely familiar with environments where student engage in learning, but prior to the pandemic thirty years ago education hadn’t changed much for hundreds of years.
Excerpt from UNESCO Director General Audrey Azoulay (March 26, 2020): https://youtu.be/St_BQRSXmew
Sure, there were niche online pedagogy but it was consider more of a fad than a transformation of face-to-face in-class knowledge dissemination. The same can be said for textbooks. Long considered a required component of pedagogy, the way students interact with similar content is nowhere close to what teachers even envisioned back in 2020.
Excerpt from What is the future of textbooks? TextbookHub asks Teachers: https://youtu.be/T-kdEfoPu-o
It’s July 22, 2052, and this is DIDACTIC, a podcast about educational technology and its origins. I’m Sam Charles.
If you’re not familiar with the term textbook don’t be embarrassed. The term itself went out of style a couple of decades ago. While it is occasionally used today in a retro-chic sort of way, we are more accustomed to terminology such as interactive content, immersive educational components (IECs) and holographic two-way pedagogy.
Textbooks were physical books, not like the digital content we use today, that included materials and content that aligned with the curriculum of a course of lesson. According to Wikipedia, they date back to Ancient Greece where educators wrote educational texts focused on the alphabet, knowledge, and storytelling. Once they could be produced on mass, in the 15th century, the usage of these physical textbooks took off. They became common place as a teaching instrument since the 19th century.
Marshall McLuhan, in 1960, said: The sheer quantity of information conveyed by press-magazines-film-TV-radio far exceeds the quantity of information conveyed by school instruction and texts. This challenge has destroyed the monopoly of the book as a teaching aid and cracked the very walls of the classroom so suddenly that we’re confused, baffled.
Still, there were many educators who felt textbooks were paramount the success of educators in maintaining a consistent curriculum.
Excerpt from Oxford Education video: https://youtu.be/qqxc18pWzjc
Chen’s comments are similar to those of Prof. Miriam Ben-Peretz in 1990 article entitled the teacher-curriculum: freeing teachers from the tyranny of texts”. In the article, she talked about how “the adoption of appropriate materials and their skillful adaptation to specific classroom situations will either facilitate or hinder the teaching efforts of even the most dedicated of teachers.” According to Ben-Peretz, the textbooks inhibited the educator and the learner from choosing and expanding upon content at their pace.
In 1998 Loewenberg Ball and Feiman Nemser called for educators to only use these resources as an accompaniment to their planning and content delivery.
Sociologist Ryan Cragun stated in his 2007 paper “The Future of Textbooks” that “textbooks boil down subject matter to its simplest form, facilitating digestion, but foregoing complexity. They also tend to favor breadth – covering as much content as possible – at the expense of depth.”
Despite those calls for a shift from traditional textbooks, those textbooks remained a staple of pedagogy until the well into the 21st century through its ease of use but gradually the public shifted its focus.
During that time, Neil Postman famously stated in his book Technopoly: the surrender of culture to technology: “New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop.”
In a sense that technology, or at least the connection between the technology and the learners interests, was what was missing. Textbooks lacked dimension, depth and interactivity that users both educators and learners sought. Once technology and its usability came into stride with the needs of users, the sun began to set on textbooks like the emerging two moons (Phobos and Deimos) rising over Mars.
Still, even in 2013 according to Reuters, “online products accounted for 27 percent of the $12.4 billion spent on textbooks for secondary schools and colleges in the United States.” But, that wasn’t looking at the whole picture.
One person who didn’t see the demise of the textbook was John Maxwell. In his 1985 article “The future of textbooks: Can they help individualize education,” he argued that “textbooks will not only survive present controversies, but they will emerge as more useful tools than they are now.” He suggested that more than 90 percent of what occurred in classrooms in his jurisdiction were shaped by and centered around textbooks
In their book Multimodal texts in Disciplinary Education, Kristina Danielsson and Staffan Selander talked about “Working with texts in deliberate ways is a foundation for supporting students’ subject learning, and their potential to demonstrate their knowledge in the subject.
Peering into their crystal ball they envisioned, “digitally produced texts enabling other possibilities that open up for a more flexible reading order. For the reader, therefore, the reading process would differ from traditional texts. In a digital text, the question of beginning or ending would not be self-evident.
In the early stages of the transition away from textbooks, publishers like Cengage and McGraw-Hill tried to keep pace. According to a 2018 blog post by Kate Hassey, these publishers tried hybrid approaches of combining their printed textbooks with online software. It was perhaps too little, too late. Despite the addition of data and analytics, simply the cost, weight and continuous push for smarter, more sustainable materials led to the textbook’s demise.
It was a similar sentiment in 2010 by Celia Henry Arnaud who said “Improvements in technology could eventually pull those heavy conventional textbooks out of students’ backpacks, but textbooks as we know them probably won’t disappear anytime soon.”
Interactive and adaptive technologies quickly put textbooks in the rear-view mirrors of their solar powered self-driving vehicles.
Today, holograms and personalization using artificial intelligence drive student interest into areas that they have shown an aptitude or interest. The holograms act as an instructor when a human one is not available.
There is little doubt that the internet and technologies that sprung from it has enabled educators and learners to access information more easily as a result learning as accelerated but also adjusted to the varying needs of educators, learners, and subject matter. Assessment and experiential learning are now seamlessly integrated into these new technologies.
These technologies, that we now take for granted, allow for more enquiry. They allow for what we can call smart scaffolding.
Smart scaffolding is basically the ability of these new technologies to embrace Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) including intrinsic CL (inherent to a subject matter), extraneous CL (caused by the instructional design) and germane CL (required for connecting material to long-term memory)… they are precisely the reasons that textbooks of yesteryear faded away.
In their 2016 article “Technology and textbooks: The future,” Stephen L. Baglione & Kevin Sullivan recognized that it was possible for e-textbooks to be customized to fit students’ specific needs, and they foresaw that between the rising costs of producing textbooks and advancing technology that dramatic changes were on the horizon.
Their vision was closer to what has become our reality. While we no longer use terms like e-textbooks since books as they used to exist are becoming more and more rare. Technology has allowed what those researchers consider science fiction to become today’s reality.
Humans have long sought to prognosticate what is next in the evolution of education and pedagogy. In a 2017 paper by Ornat Turin entitled “How the futuristic school was imagined in science fiction movies and literature, she said “one is expected to accept the convergence of teaching instruments and information hardware with the human body.”
Today, reading is done through technologies that don’t impact our vision. These advancements followed the same trajectory as bone conduction in the audio sphere. Headphones and earbuds were eventually usurped by embedded chips that conducted sound through bone vibration. When research finally detailed the correlation between usage and eye health, the replacement of screens took some time. Using technologies that built-upon braille, artificial reality and other immersive technologies, we now have tools that enable us to explore knowledge in ways that never before seemed possible.
Innovation takes time. How we learn continues to evolve generation over generation. We become curious about new things so we investigate, experiment and build a spatial understanding so others can better understand.
This has been Didactic… Until next time, I’m Sam Charles
References
Arnaud, C. (2010). The future of textbooks. Catalysis Reviews. Science and Engineering, (27 September 2010), 63.
Baglione, S. L., & Sullivan, K. (2016). Technology and textbooks: The future. The American Journal of Distance Education, 30(3), 145-155. https://doi.org/10.1080/08923647.2016.1186466
Ball, D. L., & Feiman-Nemser, S. (1988). Using textbooks and teachers’ guides: A dilemma for beginning teachers and teacher educators. Curriculum Inquiry, 18(4), 401-423. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.1988.11076050
Ben-Peretz, M. (1990). The teacher-curriculum encounter: Freeing teachers from the tyranny of texts. State University of New York Press.
Cragun, R. T. (2007). The future of textbooks? Electronic Journal of Sociology, (1), 1.
Danielsson, K., & OAPEN. (2021). Multimodal texts in disciplinary education: A comprehensive framework. Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63960-0
Hassey, K. (2018, July 18). What is the future of textbooks and digital learning? Future textbooks digital elearning. Retrieved July 27, 2022, from https://blog.gutenberg-technology.com/en/future-textbooks-digital-elearning
Maxwell, J. (1985). The future of textbooks: Can they help individualize education? NASSP Bulletin, 69(481), 68-74. https://doi.org/10.1177/019263658506948111
Postman, N. (1992). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology (1st ed.). Knopf. Oxford Education. (2017). The importance of textbooks. Retrieved July 27, 2022, from https://youtu.be/qqxc18pWzjc.
TextbookHub. (2020). What is the future of textbooks? TextbookHub asks Teachers. Retrieved July 27, 2022, from https://youtu.be/T-kdEfoPu-o.
Turin, Ornat. (2017). How is the futuristic school imagined in science fiction movies and literature?. History of Education and Children’s Literature. 12. 673-697.
UNESCO. (2020). Global Education Coalition, Message from Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO Director-General. Retrieved July 27, 2022, from https://youtu.be/St_BQRSXmew.
All music is from YouTube’s Audio Library and considered Creatives Commons (not requiring attribution)
Tracks include: Skylines (Anno Dimini Beats), Earth Appears (Brian Bolger), Back To The Future (Ofshane), and El Secreto (Young Logos).