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Comment by russell | Hacker News Reader

Seth is right on. Textbooks should be gone within ten years, especially the college introductory and public school pablum. I expect there will be some resistance. Textbooks probably count for a lot in the publish or perish race and they bring a nice side income. But decades ago other professors were putting together xeroxed collections of articles. Students are demanding some relief. I cant see anything but the trend snowballing.

I cant help but wonder if the demise of textbooks will lead to other significant revolutions. I remember sweating through problem after problem in calculus so I could do problem after problem on the tests. Wouldnt it be better to give the students Mathematica or similar software? It could do the work, while giving them a tool to get a deeper understanding of the underlying problem.

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Wouldn't it be better to give the students Mathematica or similar software? It could do the work [...]

This is really a tough one. My opinion is no - the sweat is the learning. Skipping the problems would just lead to knowing a lot about math, without actually knowing any math.

On the other hand, it's tempting - and in the Real World (tm), people do just plug their giant, buck-nasty equations into Mathematica and avoid doing all the book-keeping.

I guess the question is: should pilots all just train on auto-pilot, while having only a conceptual understanding of what piloting is about? Or should they learn to pilot manually first, and then use the auto-pilot judiciously? There are legitimate points going both ways - but I vote for the 2nd.

But decades ago other professors were putting together xeroxed collections of articles.

Cohesion is a problem with xeroxed articles. Not to say it isn't with most textbooks, but it can be one of their primary goals, whereas the primary goal of an article is to disseminate a set of ideas in as efficient a way as possible, with some assumptions about prior knowledge of the reader.

I remember sweating through problem after problem in calculus so I could do problem after problem on the tests.

So did I. Part of internalizing the fundamentals of a subject is working through exercises that depend on those fundamentals. You don't get that when something else is doing the work for you. Learning isn't easy, and we need to get over the desire to want to make it so.

If textbooks become a thing of the past, every student will carry a netbook / tablet (which runs educational software, browsers etc) to school.

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