is changing but, books aren’t going away.
A good friend of mine, Helen Cassidy, creates custom book sets for high dollar clients. They are beautiful. Some of her books have been commissioned to sell multi-million dollar media ads. People want that touch and feel of something built from scratch to be held in their hand. I don’t think anyone is going to give up books completely. At the recent VA-Association of Colleges of Teacher Education conference I talked about the resurgence in the art world of “Book Art”. I explained that I didn’t think books would go away in 2030 but I did think their role was changing. This is part of the Emergent Reality #3: Seamless Connections In and Out of Cyberspace in our recent book, Teaching 2030.
This is because we, as a society, have separated information as the meaning of the word “book” from the actual physical object, book. Books are still important and meaningful but, we haven’t figured out how yet. In separating information from books we have also changed the meaning of literacy. Now, youtube videos and audio are the new literacy. Kids can learn advanced biochemistry through multi-media instead of giant books that describe the activity of the brain. Now kids can actually see it. At the conference described how I couldn’t have done my Ph.D. 10 years ago because I didn’t have the patience to go to the VCU library and look for articles in the stacks. Now, I have almost too many references.
In the future if a teacher or student wants information, they will go to the internet but, if they want to know what it means to read, they might find themselves with a book.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Couple of points to ponder. If we don’t visit the stacks, we might lose touch with the history in which our fields are built. I found the articles written in 1901 to be the most interesting & raised the most questions for me. These article are not avaiable online. By losing touch with history, we very well might lose any assemblencd of coherence.
Kids can’t actually “see” biochemistry. They can see animations-which do have some advantages, but what happens when we have a generation of scientists whose imagination is stunted because they’ve been shown everything rather than having to do the difficult mental work of imagining?
Have you heard a recent NPR episode about how books are changing? It’s all about how publishers are trying to stay relevant by incorporating interactivity into their books…witness the 39 Clues Series from Scholastic. http://www.npr.org/2010/12/15/132057619/kids-books-make-the-leap-off-the-page-and-online I’ve got to say that this approach is not what you were talking about, but similar…and it definitely hits a home run for my students. They love the back and forth between the books and the new content on the website. I haven’t experienced the Amanda Project and my students aren’t reading it, so I can’t comment on it. The company they cited most frequently was http://www.fourthstorymedia.com/.
I just know for myself how much the Kindle has changed the way I think about reading. I’ve been reading Kindle books mostly…and now I’m reading a traditional print book. I can’t tell you how habitual it’s gotten for me to look up a word that I don’t know when I’m Kindle reading. I hadn’t noticed until I went back to the print version…now I’m frustrated when I don’t know what a word means and can’t just scroll down to the word and let the cursor do the rest.
It’s a revolution out there and so very exciting.