Tuesday, October 8, 2013
FREE TEXTBOOKS?!?!?!?!?!?!
During this week's MOOC talk, a line was said that piqued my interest. It was to the affect that college students shouldn't be paying for their textbooks. If its knowledge that is available to the public its wrong to charge for it. Then to change a little bit evry few years and charge more for it is a crime.
I was so happy to hear a professor say things like that. It made my day, that a person on the other side of the financial battle I go through support my cause makes me relieved. I spent $300 on books this semester, and didn't get all of the books I was required to. I had to choose some text books not to get and just get the code for the online homework. Its crazy that I have to pay so much, on top of tuition just to be successful in an already difficult environment to thrive in.
Textbooks to college students should be free. The students already realized this, the teachers are catching on, and its time for the publishers to go out of business or find a new cheaper way to distribute textbooks.
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I love that this line from this week's MOOC Talk caught your ear :) (I'm a professor, though not one that teaches semester-long courses and thus requires students to buy textbooks--I'm a librarian.) Another reason I am growing to have more and more disdain for the textbook as a genre is because of something I encountered in a journal article I read last year, where the author of the article is critical of the textbook as a genre because it decontextualizes information (i.e., presents supposedly-neutral "facts" completely detached from the contexts in which the facts came to be discovered). Here is a (longish) quote from the article on this topic:
ReplyDelete"Constructing information as a neutral, abstract thing also opened it to manipulation by technical and administrative processes-it could be accumulated, sorted, classified, and filed. [...] But like newspapers, reference books, and library catalogs, school and college textbooks consist largely of uniform packets of information that have been taken out of context and then recombined. Textbook reading, like reference book and newspaper reading, takes place in discontinuous segments. Rather than start at the beginning and read through until they reach the end, many students and teachers dip in and out of their textbooks, fitting the pattern of their reading to the demands of the curriculum rather than the other way around. Again, the voice of the author is muted; textbooks take on a disembodied, decontextualized life of their own" (Chrstine Pawley, "Information Literacy: A Contradictory Coupling", The Library Quarterly, Vol. 73, No. 4, Oct. 2003, 431-433).
My apologies for quoting a scholarly article in this blog comment (thus making it more of a "heavy read" than is typical for blog comments), but I love how she articulates *why* the textbook as a genre doesn't do learners any favors, at least when it comes to properly understanding information (including the contexts in which the information came into existence).
Which is all to say--I totally agree with you: the concept of the "textbook" is criminal and artificial (i.e., lacking in authenticity), and professors should make a conscious effort to move away from relying on them.
Did you see the article in the October 18 Times Union?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Online-materials-close-book-on-texts-4905095.php