XplanaZine

Ellen Haynes from the University of Colorado gave a nice presentation this past weekend at the 2003 SOCALLT Conference on what needs to be improved regarding electronic workbooks and lab manuals in Higher Education language products.

She mentioned online products by McGraw-Hill and Prentice Hall, and provided some insightful and interesting conclusions. I will list a couple of the negative conclusions below to make my point that follows.

• The materials are not effective with all learning styles
• The materials are impersonal and monotonous
• There is limited feedback for the students
• The materials may not be convenient (they are not portable)

Now, this is a case of sitting in a room, scribbling notes, and realizing, suddenly, that you are caught in a strange time warp. All of the things Ellen had described as being wrong with electronic workbooks were the exact same things that have always been wrong about the original paper workbooks — they are boring, tedious, of limited use for students, and very inconvenient for lugging around. Heck, I remember, around 1986, when I decided the workbooks were fairly worthless to my classes and stopped assigning them as required components of the course.

Here we were, discussing the problems associated with “technology,” and I suddenly realized that the problems being discussed was not related to technology at all. Rather, the difficulties being thrown around were attributable directly to a misuse of content. We were taking content that most of us agreed was dull (if necessary) and were putting it in a new environment in hopes that, through some miracle, technology would make it better. In fact, technology has only made it worse. You can’t put content with static DNA in a dynamic environment and expect good results.

So why is this happening? Why are we using old content in such a counterproductive manner? I know reusable objects are the best way to maximize our development efficiencies, but bad code is bad code and reusing inferior, or inappropriate objects is ultimately a big net loss for any project or product.

In this case, the problem seems fairly straightforward. The “reusable object” I’m talking about is the workbook content that publishers are now posting, in almost identical form, in Web-based platforms. The publishers own the content and it’s relatively easy to take the existing content and digitize it for Web use. But. and this is important, the original content was never intended for dynamic use on the Web. Instructors keep asking why the workbooks can’t be more like the CD ROM’s that ship with textbooks. Simple. Those CD ROM’s are created from the beginning with dynamic content for a dynamic environment.

So, while it may be economical to repurpose workbook content on the Web, its long-term results are pedagogically and, potentially, economically disastrous.

Trying to do the same old thing in a new environment puts pressure on an environment that was not designed to be accountable for that kind of pressure. The key is doing better information design that will let the information be reused easily and with great results regardless of the environment in which it resides.

What that will mean, of course, is that content holders will have to re-write some of their content. It goes against the wisdom of their traditional models of profitability. On the other hand, if they don’t their market share could erode dramatically over the next decade.