Source: www.nytimes.com
NEW YORK, USA, August 8, 2009: [HPI note: This is relevant to the Hindu Community in the US. It is going to completely change the context of Hindu history teaching in US schools and make it much easier to get improved material into use — with a proper portrayal of Hinduism.]
Many educators say it will not be long before traditional textbooks are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web. “Kids are wired differently these days,” said Sheryl R. Abshire, chief technology officer for the Calcasieu Parish school system in Lake Charles, La. “They think of knowledge as infinite. They don’t engage with textbooks that are finite, linear and rote. Teachers need digital resources that get them beyond the plain vanilla curriculum in the textbooks.”
California’s Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced an initiative that would replace some high school science and math texts with free, “open source” digital versions. This initiative–the first such statewide effort–has attracted widespread attention, since California, together with Texas, dominates the nation’s textbook market. Many superintendents are enthusiastic. “In five years, I think the majority of students will be using digital textbooks,” said William M. Habermehl, superintendent of the 500,000-student Orange County schools. Instead of today’s small classes, he envisions “200 or 300 kids taking courses online, at night, 24/7, whenever they want: brilliant $200 courses by the best teachers in the world.”
Around the world, hundreds of universities, including M.I.T., now use and share open-source courses. But the K-12 digital revolution may be further off. Not every student has access to the technology, and few districts are wealthy enough to provide it–so there are concerns that digital textbooks could widen the gap between rich and poor.
Digital textbooks are only the start of the revolution in educational technology. Most of the digital texts submitted for review in California came from a nonprofit group, CK-12 Foundation, that develops free “flexbooks” that can be customized to meet state standards, and added to by teachers. “The good part of our flexbooks is that they can be anything you want,” said Neeru Khosla, a founder of the group. “You can use them online, you can download them onto a disk, you can print them, you can customize them, you can embed video. There’s no reason to pay $100 a pop for a textbook, when you can have the content you want free.”