Arizona high school shuns textbooks for laptops

http://www.sermonaudio.com/newsimages/20127.jpg
Teacher Becky Ogle, standing, holds her laptop
computer as she explains how to use an Excel
spreadsheet to a freshman class at Empire High
School in Vail, Ariz., on Tuesday.

VAIL, Ariz. - 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 Inc. — 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.


"We've always been pretty aggressive in use of technology and we have a history of taking risks," said Calvin Baker, superintendent of the Vail Unified School District, which has 7,000 students outside of Tucson.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8999733/

I'm not too crazy about the idea. One major advantage of paper textbooks is that you can write in them directly. That's especially important for science and math classes, where it's often handy to be able to draw little diagrams or fill in steps in mathematical derivations. You can do that stuff on a computer too IF you have the right software, but it's a lot more trouble.

Obviously they switched to laptops because those textbooks are notorious for "crashing".

Fucking stupid idea if you ask me. Then they'll be whinging when they've blown their entire year's budget 4 months into the year on repairing the things. And who ever heard of a paper book 'crashing' when it's tipped off a desk or has water spilled onto it?

Morons.

University of Texas library will eliminate books and replace them with junkfood and barstools


Come on are colleges becoming so dumbed down that groids can’t even understand how to open a book? SDM

Bye, Bye, Library

http://wwwimage.cbsnews.com/images/2005/08/22/image791461l.jpg
Book-free: The last few carts of
books await removal from the
Flawn Academic Center at the
University of Texas in Austin.

When students wander into the former undergraduate library at the University of Texas this fall, gone will be the "Quiet Please" signs, the ban on cheeseburgers or sodas, the sight of solemn librarians restocking books.

The fact is, there will be no more books to restock. The UT library is undergoing a radical change, becoming more of a social gathering place more akin to a coffeehouse than a dusty, whisper-filled hall of records. And to make that happen, the undergraduate collection of books had to go.

This summer, 90,000 volumes were transferred to other collections in the campus's massive library system - leaving some to wonder how a library can really be a library if it has no tomes.

But a growing number of colleges and universities are rethinking and retooling their libraries to better serve students reared in a digital age.

"While libraries are still focused on their physical collections, they aren't the sole purpose anymore," says John Shank, director of the Center for Learning Technologies at Penn State Berks College in Reading. The advent of the Internet and the digitization of information has transformed the way students learn, experts concur, and libraries are scrambling to keep up.

"For most children coming of age today, information and information technology are really merging so that they don't see any disconnect between the two," says Frances Jacobson Harris, author of "I Found It on the Internet: Coming of Age Online."

To underscore that point, last week a new public high school in Vail, Ariz., become one of the first to opt out of supplying textbooks altogether in the hopes that students will be more engaged in learning. Especially designed as a textbook-free environment, all students were assigned laptops instead and will read and turn in most homework online.

At UT, the biggest challenge has been changing antiquated notions of a library's role in learning. "While most people have been hugely supportive of this idea, some have been sort of grieving over this iconic loss of the undergraduate library. I think what they are really grieving is the passing of the book as the means of scholarly communication," says Fred Heath, vice provost for the general libraries, adding that UT is the nation's fifth-largest academic library with more than 8 million volumes.

So to ease some of the apprehension, administrators took the word "library" out of their vocabulary when referring to the Flawn Academic Center.

When classes start Aug. 31, it will be filled with colorful overstuffed chairs for lounging, barstools for people watching, and booths for group work. In addition to almost 250 desktop computers, there will be 75 laptops available for checkout, wireless Internet access, computer labs, software suites, a multimedia studio, a computer help desk and repair shop, and a cafe.


http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/08/23/tech/main791462.shtml

What?!? There's another thing: if anyone thinks they can do as thorough research on the 'Net and using 'multi-media resources' as they can in a proper university library, they're just delusional.

The Internet is the antithesis of proper research: run a few key phrases and such and hey presto! You're an expert! And that just isn't good enough for a tertiary level student, nor even a high school student. For one thing, answers that are too easily arrived at don't really stick in a person's head, but just go in and out when no longer immediately needed.

One more thing. When you plagiarise off the 'Net, your instructor generally knows. When you plagiarise off the 'Net and then change the words around slightly so as to dodge the plagiarism charge on a technicality, it's even more apparent to him/her that you're plagiarising from somewhere... and I predict a whole lot more exasperated instructors on that campus, if they haven't all given up on their students already.