Digital as an element of findability |
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Basics: Educational materials that are printed cannot be findable because they are outside of the digital online commons. |
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Taking billons of dollars every year out of the economy to print textbooks is not justifiable when billions of students can use a single online source for the same knowledge the textbook would deliver. Before there is any possibility for education to move into the Web 2.0 interlude and beyond, it is altogether obvious that an educational resource must be converted into digital files. If material is not digital it cannot get online, much less by be findable there. Oddly, as is often the case of what really happens instead of what we might suppose, almost all printed material now used in schools and college is digital before it is printed. The way things went with the digitizing of educational resources as the Internet has grown has a reverse twist: the resources got digitized, but because the students were not supplied with computers, the digital stuff has been routinely converted back to print and sold to the schools as books. In early days of the Internet expansion, the first big movement in education was the call to wire the schools. There was something of a tacit assumption at that time that wiring the schools would be matched by the digitizing of educational resources so that learning could take place on the computers inside the schools using the digital materials that had been converted from print. As the years have rolled by, a major reason that schools have continued to use printed textbooks is that what wiring has been done at schools has not provided students with personal computers through which to access an online textbook. A major change is roaring down the pipe: students can very soon have their own mobile devices to access the Net - compellingly calling for a halt of the costly printing and distribution of textbooks and other educational resources. A November 7, 2005 article in the New Yorker summed up part of the financial scope of educational print: "College students now spend more than five billion dollars a year on textbooks, while states spend another four billion on books for elementary and high-school students."
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