I'll be brief about this. There are many ways a teacher can promote networking and community participation in their classrooms. We can get their students to explore different blogs, follow experts and professionals on social media, and maybe have discussions with peers online who are learning similar things. However, we need to think about why it’s important to capture this spirit of connectedness in the first place: We want our students to be inspired, enthusiastic, and independent learners.
Teachers need to command the attention of their students by making the material they’re teaching self-evidently relevant, useful, and interesting. As a teacher, I want to act as a bridge helping my students feel more connected to people who are presently active in our local art community. The bottom line is: If your students don’t feel your passion for your subject matter, and if they don’t feel connected to YOU, then you won’t have much of a chance of creating this feeling of connectedness and inspired curiosity in the classroom.
Having open access in the classroom means that we need to teach students how to navigate the sea of information through the Internet and elsewhere. We should talk with students about how to analyze a source of information; how to discern whether or not the information is verified (or verified by whom) and what the slant of a resource or article might be. Now more than ever it’s important to talk about copyright law, the public domain, and why we should always credit our sources. It would be important to teach students how to communicate their thoughts effectively and how to have a healthy dialogue online (essentially, teaching the art of debate). We should tell students about online courses they can take in addition to our class, and recommend educational YouTube channels and blogs they can follow.
Teachers should also encourage students to use the public libraries. They are FREE and always have been!
Speaking of books. Now that we have access to entire textbooks for free or nearly free online, what does this mean for the future of physical textbooks?
I don’t think physical textbooks will become obsolete anytime soon, the same way I believe that books will not be replaced by e-books. A five-year-old slightly beat-up Spanish textbook contains the same information as an open-access online textbook. I can still see the benefit of using online textbooks if they’re available. One of the main arguments used by people who favor online textbooks over physical textbooks is that the information is exactly the same for both mediums. If you can fit all of your textbooks onto a single device, why bother lugging 50 pounds of out-of-date compressed tree pulp between classes? Save your back muscles and the forests.
Despite the cost of new textbooks and their weight, I still feel the interface of a computer can’t replace the quality of learning experienced with the physical printed page. There’s something about the physicality of a book that forces me to slow down and focus on the information more than if I’m seeing the same information on my iPad. If I knew more about what Marshall McLuhan had to say about media, I would be able to perhaps back up my experience with theory. Staring at the light can be bad for the eyes over time. I also can’t be tempted to check my e-mails when I’m alone with a book. It must be the printmaker in me who loves to smell musty old books, or maybe my nostalgia for when I would receive my well-loved, marked-up textbooks in high school.
I think teachers will have to figure out a balance between the two in their curriculum. Some teachers may choose to rely more heavily on an online textbook--which can be easily updated without having to spend hundreds of dollars on a brand new set of volumes--unlike physical textbooks which can get out-of-date. This may especially be the case for the sciences. But for English classes, history, and mathematics, and foreign languages, how likely is it—really—that the content will be evolving in any drastic way? A teacher should be able to recognize possible shortcomings of a textbook and provide their students with supplemental materials they find online, in printed journals, and elsewhere.
Other benefits of the book:
• You don’t need to worry about its battery dying.
• You can mark notes in the text and dog-ear pages.
• You can flip from one page to another quickly or have two pages open at once.
• You aren’t reliant on students having an electronic device to access the book.
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