As Classrooms Go Digital, Textbooks May Become History – NYTimes.com

In this recent article in the New York Times, the case is made for moving away from traditional textbooks:

Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they 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.

I think this is indeed the direction education is going in. But I also caution teachers from idealizing of students’ new literacies skills as in this passage:

“Kids are wired differently these days,” said Sheryl R. Abshire, chief technology officer for the Calcasieu Parish school system in Lake Charles, La. “They’re digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose and extrapolate. And they think of knowledge as infinite.

Let’s be careful not to mistake nimbleness for intellectual rigor, which is a frequent pitfall of ed-tech enthusiasts.  Another cautionary note: it’s important to be aware that the kinds of literacy skills we teach into are research skills, the kind of informational hide-and-seek that is indeed vital in "real-world" life:

“[Students] don’t engage with textbooks that are finite, linear and rote,” Dr. Abshire continued. “Teachers need digital resources to find those documents, those blogs, those wikis that get them beyond the plain vanilla curriculum in the textbooks.”

But, what will teaching literature look like?  Conducting Google searches is markedly not literary.  How will teachers of literature infuse their methods with new technologies?

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