PDC Textbookless Thoughts
Consider using the Internet more heavily and textbooks more lightly.  Many see the future as having courses based on fewer, smaller, even no, textbooks.

  • Textbooks are expensive.  They can cost 1/3 to 1/2 of a course's tuition, or more if the student has scholarship money, most of which does not cover textbooks.

  • Students of today have grown up learning from the internet.  Their brain is tuned in to it.

  • The internet forces students to actively seek out the information.   It enables students to go into depth in areas they find most interesting.

  • The internet has up to the hour information.

The articles listed below discuss the experiences of those teachers and institutions (from elementary to high school to college) at the front of the wave and the advantages of bookless teaching to students and ramifications for teachers.

Examples listed below include

There aren't that many but all seem successful

It is easier to buy books than to read them, and easier to read them than to absorb them.

-William Osler, Canadian-born British physician

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

-- John Maynard Keynes

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.

-- Robert Maynard Hutchins

I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.

-- John W. Gardner

The most damaging phrase in the language is: `It's always been done that way.'

-- Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

More excellent education quotes at
Hoagies Education Quotes
bullet Data Conversion Laboratory Public relations students prefer Internet over textbook
 2/13/2003

Innovative course at the University of New Mexico uses Internet readings instead of traditional textbook -- students give it the thumbs up. DCLnews reports.

When the University of New Mexico asked David L. Geary, a part-time instructor, to teach the "Introduction to Public Relations" course last spring, he discovered something that surprised him. Students were using a new edition of a textbook he had used 10 years before at another school. The new edition was 125 pages shorter than the old edition and cost twice as much -- yet had the same basic material as the 10-year-old edition.

So Geary, who has held top communications posts at the US Departments of Energy and Defense and Lockheed Martin Corp., decided to try something new for his Fall class: He would compile his own Internet-based textbook. ... More

bullet E-Textbooks Offer Light Reading
By Kendra Mayfield Kendra Mayfield
2001-08-23
When students at the University of Phoenix return to school this fall, many of them won't be carrying books in their backpacks. Instead, they will download digital textbooks, multimedia simulations and PowerPoint presentations from portable e-book readers and desktop PCs.

These students are part of the university's plan to phase out traditional textbooks and become a "bookless college." ....  more
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Going Bookless - A Liberating Experience - by Reign Dugas Bouton, Southeastern Louisiana University.  The Teaching Professor November 2003  (pdf) page 3

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Look, Wired News: Look, Ma, No Schoolbooks! Ma, No Schoolbooks!
Associated Press
2005-08-19
VAIL, Arizona -- Students at Empire High School here started class this year with no textbooks -- but it wasn't because of a funding crisis. Instead, the school issued iBooks -- laptop computers by Apple Computer -- to each of its 340 students, becoming one of the first U.S. public schools to shun printed textbooks.

School officials believe the electronic materials will get students more engaged in learning. Empire High, which opened for the first time this year, was designed specifically to have a textbook-free environment.  ... more

Links to most articles

Also High-Tech High
By Kathy Ishizuka -- 10/1/2005
New AZ high school is textbookless, but not bookless
 

azcentral.com
Arizona school goes textbook-free Associated Press
Jul. 11, 2005 11:00 AM

bullet Teacher gleans federal kudos for bookless classroom
His students score higher than school's gifted and talented
 By Jennifer Toomer-Cook
Deseret Morning News      
TAYLORSVILLE — Jerry Mangus' textbook-less teaching has dazzled the U.S. Department of Education.
Mangus, who teaches fifth- and sixth-grade math at Plymouth Elementary, uses only computers to teach fractions and other numerical concepts to kids. He's built computer labs in his school, each of his students has his or her own machine, and their test scores have leaped.  ... more
bullet Beyond the Textbook: Learner-Powered Multimedia
TECHNOS QUARTERLY Winter 1995 Vol. 4 No. 4
By John Kerin and Charlotte Frank
In the information age, the new challenge is to add meaning to the onslaught of data available to us. Educational publishers, in particular, must provide easy access to the global information infrastructure for schools and offices. ... more

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