When I travel, I occasionally take a break from the local-wherever-I-am newspaper and indulge in USA Today. That’s how I came across the August 10 article “Learning Curve Goes Digital.” On the USA Today website, it is titled “Can college students learn as well on i-Pads, e-books?” http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-08-10-ebooklearning10_CV_N.htm The electronic “revolution” in school books seems to be mostly a post-secondary phenomenon at present, but likely it will come to a public school near you soon enough.
That got me to thinking about technology in general, books in particular, and school.
Technology and education have affected each other for millennia. I suspect the cave paintings at Lescaux must have had an educational function as well as a ritual one. And then there were cuneiform tablets and then papyrus and then parchment. While younger children learned and recited by rote, university students dutifully transcribed the book the professor read to them, so that when the course was done, they too would have a copy of the book. Not until the brothers Gutenberg felt pressed to invent movable type did school books as we know them today become possible. Even then, for the next few centuries, younger children learned mostly by rote and by recitation and with the aid of that new technology, the hand-held slate. All this was technology, but before my time.
By the 20th Century, things were starting to look pretty much like they do today, book-wise: standard primers like the McGuffey’s Reader (later, Dick and Jane), and a standard text for each subject in each grade. Printing may be technology, but it is not Technology as we think of it today, any more than is making pigments from colored earths. We will come back to books.
“Classroom Technology” began in the realm of Audio-Visual aids. Slide projectors, opaque projectors, filmstrip projectors, and 16mm film projectors that reliably jammed and broke the film at least once per showing came early on. I remember them from my school days. I do not remember an overhead projector ever being used in any public school I attended. In college, Dr. Rosine used one in Biology 101-102. It seemed very new-fangled, and I do not recall having one in my classroom until the late 1960s.
Classroom “Publishing” came in two flavors: the spirit duplicator or “ditto” machine and the mimeograph. The first, like its primitive ancestor the hectograph, was a dye transfer process; the latter was more akin to silk-screen printing. The first was relatively easy, but a master would yield only 100 or so copies before having to be re-typed and was good for only one use. The mimeograph was more complicated to operate, and stencils could be used multiple times, but they were very messy to store. Both of these technologies have been around for a very long time.
Copy technology was something new. Thermal copying processes came upon the scene about 1950, photo-copiers a decade later, although some years elapsed before either became available for use by teachers, at least in my part of the world. Early on, thermo-copiers seem to have been more prevalent. By about 1970, we had one in the office at Payette High School that would make ditto masters and mimeograph stencils, as well as copies, if you weren’t too picky about the appearance of the product. We weren’t encouraged to use it for routine batch copying, though, because it required special proprietary paper that was very expensive. When I started at Nampa High School in 1979, I was delighted to find that the office was equipped with a Xerox machine. Good-bye stinky and ephemeral spirit copies, good-bye messy mimeograph, good-bye expensive and crappy-looking thermal copies. I have not used any of the three for over 30 years and do not miss them.
The Xerox machine opened the door to a new set of issues that are coming into prominence only now, with the availability of more advanced technologies: intellectual property. Now it was possible for a teacher to augment the standard text with supplementary readings. It was possible to copy passages from books, magazine articles or portions thereof, news items, virtually anything that was black-and-white and would fit flat on the copier’s bed was fair game. Lazy teachers just pushed the button and ran off batches, showing page edges and all. Fussier types, like myself, would “edit” by trimming and cutting up the copies and pasting them up in the desired format before batch-copying; appearance benefited and less paper was wasted. I made a lot of supplemental readings this way, to go with whatever novel or unit I was teaching. It was far more cost effective than buying a whole book in order to use a few pages of it. I suppose we pushed the envelope of “fair use” at times. But I remember one Superintendent in the mid-1970s enthusing that he foresaw the day when it would no longer be necessary to buy textbooks because teachers would make all of their own materials. How did he expect us to do this? By playing fast and loose with copyright laws, no doubt.
The Personal Computer and widespread (but even today, not universal) access thereto brings us almost up to the present. I am not talking about the use of computers for students’ writing or the teaching of writing. That is another topic for another day and several more essays. I am talking about the access the internet affords students to all sorts of information. One administrator of my acquaintance would enthuse about how a student could go on line and get “The Information.” (I sometimes had an irrational urge to affect a Peter Lorre voice behind his back.) It has been a great boon to the writing of students’ research papers. That is the good news. The bad news is twofold. First, students become accustomed to relying entirely on Internet sources, largely ignoring more traditional print materials, a lazy habit that discourages thorough research. In the students’ defense it must be said that school libraries are often lacking in resources to support thorough research on topics meaningful to them. Second, it encourages simply cutting and pasting, a poor research habit at best. The niceties of rewriting the material to integrate it into the paper and crediting it to its source all are too easily lost. Most alarming, many administrators seem to be talking about precisely that – cut and paste – and they seem to consider that to be normal and even desirable.
A few years ago, during a negotiating session, the Board member across from the table was envisioning a day in the near future when books would be completely obsolete, because students could find anything they needed on the Internet. This man is now Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction. And that brings us up to the “electronic revolution in school books” and the USA Today article.