A Call for a Textbook Purchasing Moratorium

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Call for a Textbook Purchasing Moratorium
I have been calling on libraries to stop purchasing books and journals, and to instead coordinate the open archiving of the content produced by the instutution they serve. This call from Wesley Fryer on schools mto stop purchasing textbooks is in a similar vein - the practice is wasteful and expensive and isn't preparing children for the future. "Education cannot and will not change in the basic, fundamental ways we need and should want it to change in the twenty-first century as long as textbooks, paper, and pencils continue to be the predominant technologies for student expression and individualized access to content". More...