Down the road, at Cienega High School, students who own laptops can register for “digital sections” of several English, history and science classes. And throughout the district, a Beyond Textbooks initiative encourages teachers to create — and share — lessons that incorporate their own PowerPoint presentations, along with videos and research materials they find by sifting through reliable Internet sites.

Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.

So in honesty, the Times isn’t pronouncing death but reporting that “many educators” are.  The article quotes a chief information officer who shares, “kids are different these days” echoing the now commonly debunked myth of Prensky’s digital natives and digital immigrants.

But what is clearly dying in the classroom is the old way textbooks were used.  It’s not so much the death of  ‘what’ but the death of ‘how.’

Cetainly, having a texbook for each child, in each subject in the k – 12 grades, which they lug home in their already oversized backpacks is likley going to change.  With this chane, savvy educators see an opportunity to find a way to mre thighly blend disparate classroom resources into a more consistent learning pedagogy.

Ang while some of this is hapening in the k-12 world, where it will continue to have impact is the undergrad and graduate world.  WIth tuitions already stretching the fiancial aid limits, and faculty salaries and expenses being squeezed, we’l seee pressure from two vantage points.

The Times article quotes a school superintendent about charter schools who says:

“I don’t believe that charters and vouchers are the threat to schools in Orange County,” he said. “What’s a threat is the digital world — that someone’s going to put together brilliant $200 courses in French, in geometry by the best teachers in the world.”

As a learner, the choice may be to opt for the better and cheaper course.  As an administrator, the cost savings of being able to license such a “$200 course” replaces the pain and cost of finding an adjunct.

For educators, the “best teachers in the world”, the opportunity exists to start packaging your own courses and licensing them to other schools.  With the current set of multimedia publishing tools so readily available in software, with open source and open course programs, and a little cooperation,  “textbook” history has a whole new chapter.