The Future of the Book

Apple's iBooks Author hit the wires last week, with the education world alternately praising the innovation of the self-publishing model, and condemning Apple for taking a piece of the action (or for "Unmasking the Death Star" ... depending on whom you ask).  More on Author, and its impact on the independent school world, anon.  This new development in publishing has me thinking of a piece I saw some time back, IDEO'S "The Future of the Book" 


The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.


So it's a think piece, and unlikely to come to fruition in the immediate future, but the possibilities offered by interactive text will have far reaching impacts on the way business is done in classrooms.  I am a proponent of textual annotation, and spend an appreciable amount of time each year talking about how to do it well.  To conceptualize the process, I tell my students to "Read 360"-- reaching back in the text to uncover recurrent themes, or meaningful repetitions of, or improvisations on, a phrasal formula.  While this approach helps them to engage meaningfully with the text, I realize that the process only produces reading in two dimensions.  To a socially networked thinker, the linearity of a singular plot arc and a text bounded by its covers is severely limiting.

How will traditional education feel when books give us the ability to reach beyond these limits to engage as a part of a reading public; to place a text in the larger framework of a cultural or organizational conversation; and to engage with a non-linear narrative that comes alive as a collaborative artifact?

How will teachers adapt to a marketplace of knowledge that asks them not to be distributors of content, but rather networked guides who help their students discover the necessary tools and ways of thinking to cut through the noise of information on the internet? 

The time is near to leave behind linearity and embrace dimensionality in our curricular frameworks.