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While the eTextBooks initiative is a wonderful stride forward from our old paper textbooks it’s still essentially a re-constituted content delivery system that wasn’t designed or intended to change the one-way process of educational exchanges.

But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.

It’s a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they’re inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy.

You’d be crazy to work in a school today. You don’t get to do what you want. You don’t get to pick your books, your curriculum. You get to teach one narrow specialization. Who would ever want to do that?

If the new trend in textbooks is moving them to computer screens, the switch could have negative consequences as many suggest that people skim more, process more shallowly, and may retain less information when reading online, Daniel said.

he readers’ goals are different: Individuals reading an e-book for enjoyment aren’t required to pass a comprehension-based test afterward. While they found that learning is possible from both formats, learning from e-textbooks takes longer and requires more effort to reach the same level of understanding, even in a controlled lab environment. At home, students report taking even more time to read e-textbooks as well as higher rates of muti-tasking (e.g., Facebook, electronic chat, texting, email, etc.) than do their peers using printed textbooks.

In their preliminary findings, the scanning pattern produced when the student read a textbook showed consistent reading from line to line down the page. But the scanning pattern from reading on the screen was less intense.