I went to an interesting speech by the Director of the USDOE’s Office of Education Technology yesterday. In the presentation, he contrasted textbooks and Wikipedia as information resources. He said that textbooks have “authoritative content,” but face “distribution problems.” ( I think he meant usability problems. He mentioned the heavy backpack problem.) Wikipedia, he went on to say, has wonderful distribution, but a problem with a lack of authoritative content. (He cited what I thought was not a very representative example.)
I had just presented a session at which I’d made the claim that textbooks aren’t very useful to most students today. (And I worked in textbook publishing for almost 10 years, so you can imagine how much it hurts me to say that.) On the other hand, my view on Wikipedia has shifted over the last year or so. I now think it is a pretty good resource.
Then on my way to work this morning, I heard a piece on NPR called “A Look at How the U.S. Understanding of its Own History Changes.” It traced the treatment of the Mexican-American war by textbooks over time. As you might imagine, it varied considerably. (Heck, we can’t even agree on the cause of the war we’re in right now.)
So, what does all this mean? Perhaps that no one source of information, including textbooks, should be considered to be “authoritative.” Some of the most important things we can teach kids in this age of information are to be critical information consumers, to use multiple sources, and not to treat anything as unquestional “fact.”