Teaching Without Paper    

Teaching Without Paper?

By Bob Rich

At 25 years of age, Sue has a serious spinal problem, due to the books she used to lug around in high school. Her younger sister Toni has been spared the load: her school uses electronic textbooks. Every student has a hand-held electronic reader. Some use a PDA, others a special purpose device. These are the size of a paperback book, and can hold more than enough information for the day's classes.

Reading devices are still expensive, but the cost of producing and selling an e-book is a fraction of the paper version. So, they can be sold for something like half the price. Parents and/or the school can rapidly recover the cost. Think of how many books a child needs during 12 years of education.

Electronic textbooks have other advantages:

• Text is searchable. You want to find the section on simultaneous equations? A few clicks, and there it is.



• When doing an exercise, you can look up the result without turning pages and perhaps losing your place.



• Hyperlinks to the internet can be included, so that the book is merely the portal to an infinite amount of information.



• When loaded into a computer, they can be viewed at any desired magnification, or even be read aloud by a text-to-speech program, so that visually handicapped students will be able to use them.



• Today's generation of kids are at home with electronic devices and find them natural. An e-book can be made to be 'cool' in ways you can't do on paper, by having dynamic features, interactive components, even music.



• And e-books don't eat trees.

Not all switched-on schools use handheld devices. Some require each student to have a laptop computer, which they bring to school. These have enough storage to hold an entire library. Where the school has raised the funds, a bank of computers is made available, and kids bring the reading relevant for the day in a 'flash disk' they can plug into a USB port.

Some University academics make another use of electronic textbooks. Instead of requiring students to access dozens of books, they take a chapter from here, a couple of chapters from there, and combine them into a unique resource, designed for the specific course. The authors and publishers of the source books are paid for the use of their copyrighted material, and everyone benefits both financially and in terms of convenience.

This is particularly useful in fields where the relevant information changes very rapidly. Examples are Law and Accounting, where new laws and court decisions have to be considered. This makes text and reference books become obsolete, often before they are published. With an electronic book, the cost of revision is little more than the author's time, so that an updated version can be made available for a fee, as frequently as necessary, even once a week.

There is only one obstacle to the use of electronic textbooks; they are new. There is always resistance and misunderstanding when new replaces old. "I'd certainly never read one. The only thing they're good for are doorstops," said Alfred Hitchcock about paperback books. David Sarnoff's associates said in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s: "The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" There are hundreds of such quotes. There will be similar ones about electronic books.

To find out more about this new technology and its promise, visit http://www.epicauthors.com/

Dr Bob Rich is an Australian author, currently with 13 published books, 3 of which have won international awards. He is a psychologist and professional book editor when he is not planting trees, looking after wildlife of building houses. One of the joys of his life is to be a professional in another field: being a grandfather to some dozen little people, a few of whom are genetically related to him. These children seem to like him, probably because he has no sense of humor whatever. You are strongly advised not to visit Bob's writing showcase bobswriting.com People have been known to burn the dinner, miss appointments or do without sleep because they get lost within the offerings.

Reprinted with permission of the author.