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Relevance of Textbooks: Personal Reading




Greetings,

Today, I came across an interesting article from Xplanazine.  As the title indicates, this article comments on the relevance of textbooks and educators.  With the advent of computers and the internet, the price of information (as opposed to knowledge, defined as information that is supplemented with context and interactivity) has dropped significantly.  The author then declares that if teachers are merely passing along information, they should be phased out, just as every obsolete job or service should be.  A good teacher, he continues, transmits knowledge rather than mere information.   Many textbooks, on the other hand, are based on providing information rather than knowledge, and thus they need to either provide knowledge, or be priced competitively against other information sources.

I would argue, even though they are overpriced for the service they provide, that the role of the traditional textbook should still hold a high value in the classroom.  The textbook provides a common denominator of information for each student’s knowledge to be built.  I believe that the teacher’s main purpose is to take information given to the students, and make it understandable and useful to them (i.e. take information and make it into knowledge for the students).  Taking this to be the purpose of teachers, then a single repository of all the information the teacher wants to transfer as knowledge to the students would still be valuable.  To that end, I believe that textbooks are still relevant in today’s classroom.

Website:

Reynolds, Rob.  “The Relevance of Textbooks.”  Feb 2, 2006. http://www.xplanazine.com/archives/2006/02/post_9.php>

This entry was posted on Monday, February 6th, 2006 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Personal Readings and You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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One Response to “Relevance of Textbooks: Personal Reading”

  1.    Amy Marsh’s Edublog » Blog Archive » Response to Chris Bauer’s Personal Reading Response Says:
    February 7th, 2006 at 11:10 am

    [...] I completely agree with Chris’s response to the article he read titled “The Relevance of Textbooks.”  I believe that textbooks are still very important in today’s classrooms because as Chris stated, “The textbook provides a common denominator of information for each student’s knowledge to be built.”  While a good teacher does in fact transmit knowledge to his/her students, a teacher needs a source of information to be able to transmit such knowledge.  Furthermore, even though the price of information has dropped significantly, a textbook is much more “user friendly” for students.  Unless there was a webiste and/or program specifically designed for the class, online information usually requires lots of time searching.  With textbooks, all of the information that students need is contained in a common place, available for them anytime and anywhere.  What’s more, some students do not have computers at home, and if they needed to study or complete homework assignments, they would not be able to do so without a textbook.  [...]