As Goes California: A Flawed Initiative Could Become a Fabulous Opportunity
Brian Kenney, Editor-in-Chief -- School Library Journal, 9/1/2009
Digital textbooks, once the playthings of a few Arizona high schools, are suddenly looking like they might become commonplace. And that could end up being a great thing for school librarians and, more importantly, students.
Back in May, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the Free Digital Textbook Initiative, which would make open-source textbooks—for now just in science and math—available to high school students. In August, 10 digital textbooks were selected that met California’s standards.
This is big news. California, along with Texas, is one of the leading players in the textbook market. It’s also the first time, that I know of, where a state has embraced open-source content.
Of course, there are more obstacles to this initiative than I can list. For starters, it’s a hasty response to the state’s financial crisis at a time when few school districts are in any shape to initiate change, even if it could save millions. (According to the governor’s office, textbooks cost from $75 to $100 per pupil, which means that a school district with 10,000 high schoolers could save up to $2 million by replacing its math and science textbooks alone.)
There’s also the huge question of access. There isn’t enough hardware in California’s school districts to support one-on-one computing, and no one is initiating a one-laptop, one-child initiative for the Golden State. Yes, some students have home computers, but many don’t. And suggestions that schools can get around this problem by showing the textbooks onscreen, or, even worse, by printing out the textbooks chapter by chapter, seem just plain silly.
Nevertheless, the horse is out of the barn. Not that digital textbooks are anything new, as the leading textbook publishers are quick to remind us. There’s been an organized, open-source textbook movement since 2002. But it sometimes takes a push—like a $9.99 ebook or a state’s catastrophic budget deficit—to force the implementation of new technology.
My guess is that California’s initiative will be a big mess. But in the end, it will also establish a beachhead for digital textbooks, and over the next few years, I suspect we’ll see similar initiatives spread across the country.
For school librarians, digital textbooks represent a big opportunity. Just imagine how you could customize your school’s textbooks, building in deep links to an array of content—from database articles to streaming media to books (both “e” and print) to open-source content from resources like the Library of Congress (see page 73). Librarians, of course, are experts at collecting the best content, free or for a fee, and a move to open-source textbooks might even free up funds to create stronger digital collections.
In fact, Marcia Mardis, an assistant professor at Florida State University’s School of Library and Information Studies, is studying how K–12 media centers can successfully integrate open content into their collections and services (see page 13). “Teachers don’t have the time to spend searching Web sites for these resources and then learning how to use them in the classroom,” Mardis says. “They need a sort of one-stop shop where they can come to find them—the type that a library media specialist can create.”
The digital textbook could be media specialists’ Trojan horse, stealthily moving materials from the library into the classroom. We could infuse these textbooks with different points of view in multiple formats, customize them to address diverse learning styles, and make them the launching point of Guided Inquiry. As the author-editor Marc Aronson wrote recently on his blog, Nonfiction Matters, “Out of the rubble of the economic crash is coming this great moment of opportunity, we just have to figure out how to seize it.”
