Comments on: Education already has a “public option”

By: karen

karen — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:28:55 +0000

Dr. Zucker, thanks for the thought-provoking comment and the awesome resource at Smarthistory.org. This comment and our discussion on Twitter has gotten me really thinking about the balance of being innovative enough to be interesting and conventional enough to be used.

By: Steven Zucker

Steven Zucker — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 19:09:57 +0000

Karen’s excellent response leads to another issue entirely—what the digital textbook might look like. At Smarthistory.org, we hope that the growing national (and international) discussion sees beyond the familiar organizational structure of the bound book and its analogue finding aids. Open textbooks ought to take advantage of the web’s inherent strengths and allow users to organize material in numerous ways while pointing outward to high quality resources elsewhere on the web. Hopefully, these new resources will seamlessly incorporate multimedia allowing users to listen, read, watch and most importantly respond. Here is an opportunity to directly engage students, allowing them initiate or join conversations both in and outside the confines of the text. Lastly, I strongly agree that it is the faculty themselves that ought to be creating a multitude of high-quality digital resources and public policy needs to ensure this. Take a look at the award-winning site Smarthistory.org and let us know if we can help.

By: Open Textbooks and the Public Option «

Open Textbooks and the Public Option « — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:33:10 +0000

[...] 8, 2009 · Leave a Comment Karen Fasimpaur has a new post discussing comparisons made between open textbooks and a public option for healthcare. Fasimpaur [...]