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According to Cathy N. Davidson, co-director of the annual MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions, fully 65 percent of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet.

For those two-thirds of grade-school kids, if for no one else, it’s high time we redesigned American education.

What she recommends, in fact, looks much more like a classical education than it does the industrial-era holdover system that still informs our unrenovated classrooms.

While the attention of many was focused on the annual BookExpo America (BEA) hoopla this week, there were some interesting developments taking place in the digital textbook space.

After months (okay, maybe weeks) of planning, I’m excited to announce the introduction of the College of the Liberal Arts iPad Summer Research Project (CLAISRP?  Perhaps this is an initiative that is better left without an acronym.) We in the Liberal Arts are already exploring the utility of the iPad for classroom use, thanks to the efforts of Stuart Selber.

If kids can get the lectures, can get the content delivery and skill modeling as well (or often better) by computer lecture than in person, why do we have use precious class-time for this purpose?  Why do we, in the status quo,  replicate in person in our classrooms what is easily available elsewhere, the content delivery/skill modeling, and then have kids apply their learning to difficult problems at home, without us there to help? Increasingly,  education’s value-add is and will be in the coaching and troubleshooting when students are applying their learning, and in challenging students to apply their thinking to hands-on learning by doing and teaming:  so let’s have them do these things in class, not sit and listen.   We know that collaboration is a critical skill set which can’t be developed easily either on-line or at home alone– let’s have students learn it with us in our classrooms.   Let every classroom be a collaborative problem solving laboratory or studio.

What would you say if I told you that there's a new introductory biology textbook being published that is affordable, lightweight and never goes out of date?

As more books and journals become easily accessible online, it’s easy to wonder if brick-and-mortar libraries could go the way of the video store. But research at the university has shown that the more people look to digital resources, the more they consult physical materials as well, according to Judith Nadler, director of the University of Chicago Library.

More than two-thirds of a large group of college students say that tablet computers will change the way students learn, according to survey results released today

Most of the students were not speaking from experience: Only 7 percent of the college students and 4 percent of the high school seniors owned one. Still, 69 percent of the college students said that tablets will transform higher education, and 48 percent said tablets will replace textbooks—at least as we currently understand textbooks—within the next five years.

That attitude may change once they try to study with tablets for an exam. Several pilot projects with tablets have found that students are frustrated with the difficulties in adding notes to digital books

ScreenChomp is a digital whiteboard that users can write and draw on with the touch of a finger. You can draw using twelve different pen colors. All activity on ScreenChomp can be easily recorded and then if you want, edited through Camtasia for Mac or Camtasia Studio. The videos produced in ScreenChomp can be downloaded as MP4 files, making them easy to share on ScreenChomp.com, Facebook, YouTube, iTunes, Blackboard and other video hosting platforms.

Flat World Knowledge, the largest publisher of free and open college textbooks for students worldwide, today announced the release of a new platform called MIYO (Make It Your Own) (http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/miyo). The fully-automated system gives professors greater control over textbook content, and the ability, with one click, to make their modified book available to students free online or in multiple, low-cost digital and print formats.

The new system uses familiar drag-and-drop and click features that allow instructors to easily move or delete chapters and sections; upload Word and PDF documents; add notes and exercises; insert video and hyperlinks; edit sentences; and incorporate other content that is free to reuse under a Creative Commons open license.