Serendipity35

At the NJEDge Conference, Brian Richards passed along some information to me about the Life on Earth digital textbook project.

Like myself, most of you used textbooks printed on paper to learn. Most of our current students are still using them. But it seems like that is less likely to be true in the next 10 years.

Electronic books (including open textbooks) are often just digitized print books. That means they are digital representations of the page - from a pdf version to many of the ones available on hot new eReader devices. Electronic ink on electronic paper.

But there are some truly digital books. Those "books" (We may change that word, although I still hear that a band has a new album out when there aren't any record albums in the classic sense, so maybe not....) have multimedia, hyperlinks, can be reconfigured, annotated, saved in other forms etc.

A new project that I think will have a big impact both on digital book acceptance in education and in opening up books more is being done by the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation called Life on Earth. It will get a lot of attention because E.O. Wilson is the man in this field.

It will be a full blown fully digital version full of interactive multimedia presentations, but that is not the real news. The real news is that it will be provided to anyone who wants it for free.

Some chapters are supposed to be made available this month.

I applaud the effort to make a good digital book and make it available for free for education. But I hope they also attempt to address HOW the books are used. Textbooks in any form are tools. Good ones increase the odd that a teacher will present the right information in an engaging way. But great teachers can teach well with or without textbooks.

The book project costs money. You do need a business plan. K-12 books will be available for no charge, while college level versions will be sold at 10% of traditional costs. This is important. What we do with it is even more important.