My teaching team and I went through the process of ording books for next school year. Seems like there will be a point when books as we know them no longer exist. Inevitable, I'd say. I wonder how many people sat around and complained when books started coming out in type set??? Who moaned over coffee that, "I just can't read the thing! I miss Friar Larry's hand-written scripts! What is the world coming to?"
Even writing on a blog is different than simply staring at a blank MS Word page...so many distractions on the screen.
I did see a website fomr plastic logic or something like that about a reader that actually looked a bit more like a pice of paper yet was really a large screen an some sort of computer device that could hold tons of document types. I was trolling through the website and couldn't tell exactly what it was or even if it is or will be real.
Back to my groups discussions about books....we'd thought about ordering a traditional anthology of World Literature for our students, one for each. This is of course enormously expensive...would be close to 10,000USD all in. As we talked through it, we all liked that there was one source with excellent literature (we have a sample copy) and a huge variety, too, from poetry to short story to drama, non-fiction, you name it. And of course a great fit in that it truly contained World Literature...
So yeah, of course we could probably find 100% of the stuff in the book on the internet--and then what? have the kids read it online? Download and print it out, and make a million copies??? Mmmm...I think we're just not at a place yet where reading on line is the best environment. I do think that as we carry thoughts about that forward and what is a good reading environment, the concept of what it means to read might change. How is meaning constructed visually? Other things than letters of course suggest meaning.
Anyhow, we've decided to preivew the anthology we liked by ordering a couple of "class sets" which include 10 student copies (a class of ten students? Only imaginable in the mind of a money grubbing publisher....so you have to order the expensive "class set" package and then order many more individual texts), a teacher's edition, and "software licenses" whatever that might mean....they're not clear on their website if the software license includes access codes, CDs to install on a certain number of computers, etc.
At the very least, I imagine we'll be doing a lot of photocopying. It certainly will be interesting to see how and what students are reading 30 years from now.....
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