The Vanishing Textbook
I remember being in elementary school and how everyone was extremely excited about going to the library to check out books. My friends and I looked forward to this day all week; we could not wait to check out our favorite books. We would check out the same books over and over again, no matter how many times we had read them. There is something about that old musty smell you only get from the pages of a library book. As I progressed through the educational system, I still looked forward to going through the books, even though I did not care for the subjects.
Today, things have changed tremendously. E-books are the hot new thing replacing textbooks. School districts and universities across the country are ditching textbooks and replacing them with e-books. I worked with e-books before and did not like them at all. For one thing, you cannot tell the student to turn to page 75 in their textbook. When I am lecturing students, they always ask for the page number, so this was a real source of frustration. I love to highlight pertinent information in the textbook so I can refer back to it later. You cannot do this with the e-book. Some e-books don't do a good job of laying out the material so you can easily locate the information. Instead of receiving my instructor manual for one of my classes, I got a CD; the publisher was no longer printing the instructor text but putting everything on a CD.
How will I get that feeling of joy flipping through my instructor's textbook? How will I inhale the aroma of the pages? Where will I put all of my bookmarks? How do I substitute the magical moments of highlighting information with my favorite highlighter? I know the textbook will be completely phased out someday, just like the typewriter, land line phones and other great inventions of the past. Technology keeps changing the world we live in and we must embrace these changes or be left behind. But there will always be a place in my heart for those old musty pages of my books.