Introduction - Future of the Textbook - FaCET

The Future of the Textbook

Introduction:

Welcome to our online seminar on “The Future of the Textbook”. We hope this seminar will encourage and enrich the WKU conversation on course materials as we are faced with a changing economic and technological environment. Articulating our points of view is a first step to critical analysis and priority setting as we decide what to do for our own courses.

We invited a number of persons representing varied points of view to submit essays on what they see as the future of the textbook. We are very appreciative of our 4 authors for stepping forward—Thank you! We hope that reading these diverse points of view will stimulate your thinking and lead you to express your point of view.

We suggest you start by reading the discussion questions to give some form to your own thoughts as you read the essays. Each is 2 to 3 pages of text.

To give “equal time” to our authors, we would like to suggest that the first two days (Monday and Tuesday) we focus more on our first two authors.

• Jane Fife provides a thoughtful essay on pedagogical issues to start us off (Pedagogical Considerations).
• For those not familiar with these technologies Rob Wyatt gives us a tour and a vision of the latest and coming tools (The Future is Now).

On the next two days (Wednesday and Thursday) we’d like to give a bit more attention

• to Forrest Halford’s essay (Outside the Classroom) which encourages us to consider issues outside our classroom and
• to Guy Jordan’s in which his frustration with publishers led him into a grand experiment in his classroom (Beyond the Textbook).

Friday is for wide-open discussion and a chance to pull together your thinking on the topic.

Having said this, if you want to jump in and address all the pieces from the start, feel free to do so. The conversation is king.