How long have textbooks been around

The tech giant might have just introduced a new educational paradigm. It's official: Apple has doubled down on education. In today's announcement of its new iBooks 2 platform, the company also introduced iBooks Textbooks , iPad-based textbooks that it's been developing, so far, in conjunction with textbook giants Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The collection of primers -- which Apple is variously referring to as a "new textbook experience" and "the next chapter in learning" -- leverages the interactive capabilities of the tablet and applies them to educational content. This is big news because it's a big deal. In entering the textbook market, Apple is also transforming it.

Textbooks have remained, depending on your perspective, either amazingly consistent or amazingly stagnant over the thousands of years they've been around. Whether codexes or scrolls, whether scrawled on papyrus or printed on paper, their purpose has remained the same: to contain and systematize the educational experience, making knowledge both portable and economical.

Textbooks have been optimized to render the vagaries of circumstance irrelevant. And they've been that way from the start. Both Donatus' grammar, composed in the fourth century A. In an age when, for many students, classrooms are all too minimum, iPads-as-textbooks will ostensibly do what books-as-textbooks have always done: to serve as artifacts of received wisdom that operate, and educate, regardless of physical circumstances. That bit of ordinariness is exactly what makes Apple's education play so transformative.

The defining element of textbooks, up to now, has been their commodity status: Being standardized, they're also impersonal. Aristotle created textbooks for numerous subjects specifically for educational processes, such as instruction Ellsworth et al.

In the fifteenth Century printing presses with movable type were invented. Books could now be reproduced quickly and easily. Before this textbooks were rare and only available to a minority of people, generally the affluent. This rarity was partially due to the fact that these books had to be hand made. The ability to mass produce books opened up schooling to many more people, creating an increasing loop of higher demand for books. During the time of colonization, textbooks were imported from the mother country and taught as facts for the new territory, even if the facts did not match the history of the region.

These texts served in part, as a form of indoctrination to the history of the mother country. However, when these territories have gained independence, becoming nations through revolution or their succession from the colonizing country, they have changed their textbooks to reflect their new realities Encyclopedia of Education, a. For example, when Canada became an independent nation, textbooks were changed to meet a popular Canadian view that the War of was won in fact by the Canadians, not the British or Americans since they had successfully defended the border from invasion from the United States Encyclopedia of Education, a.

For several centuries elementary textbooks were undifferentiated by age or grade level and were used mainly to aid in memorization. They were created to help the school system when there were few trained teachers or even proper teacher training. By making the textbook the ultimate authority, there was little need to have the teacher exhaustively trained to know the subject matter.

Throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries, textbooks were used mainly as a static means to teach curriculum. The printed textbook has been the means with which knowledge is organized and distributed.

They have served to gather a body of knowledge, a mechanism for introduction to learning and as a reference material Bierman, For at least a thousand years, the goal pedagogically for textbooks and school was the memorization of definitions, rules or other facts Wakefield, In fact, for quite a long period, textbooks were undifferentiated by age.

This allowed for older students to help younger ones, rather than a teacher who may have to work with students from very low grades to upper grades having to attempt to reach each grade level individually.

As time has passed, the textbook has become further entrenched in the educational system. However, current pedagogy has shown a further trend towards more balanced methods of instruction that still include the textbook. Although there are many other learning materials available in this period, research in wealthy nations shows that the vast majority of teachers still continue to rely heavily on the textbook as their core teaching resource Encyclopedia of Education, b.

This is in spite of the fact that the majority of textbooks still have a prescribed style of presentation and knowledge base that is in stark contrast to many advances in pedagogical research, such as Multiple intelligences, personalization of learning and Universal Design for Learning.

However, there is a movement towards understanding of knowledge to take the place of memorization. While lessons derived from textbooks may continue to dominate the classroom, much of the time these are augmented and coordinated with a full set of learning materials, such as audio and visual files, graphics, exercise books and computer access materials.

Even while using basic textbooks, most of these now have an objectives section, to aid student in understating what knowledge they will be able to gain from this chapter and what skills they should garner from this unit. As well, understanding and extension questions at either the start or end of a chapter allow students to synthesize and cement their newly acquired knowledge.

Dramatic changes in technology have changed the relationship between information, students and their access. As well, a concern with the static textbook is that it is not accessible to all students.

One reading level for all is not designed to provide learning to students with learning disabilities or even physical handicaps, such as students who are blind or have low vision.

Show related SlideShares at end. WordPress Shortcode. Next SlideShares. Download Now Download to read offline and view in fullscreen. Download Now Download Download to read offline. Kaiyisah Yusof Follow. Aurat Menurut Perspektif Islam. Projected and non projected displayed materials in Islamic education. Instructional materials in education.

Modernization and reform movements in Muslim education. Normative Order of Islamic Education. Sources of Islamic Administration. Curriculum from the Western and Islamic Perspective. Education today and its systematic approach to the design of instruction. Related Books Free with a 30 day trial from Scribd.

Related Audiobooks Free with a 30 day trial from Scribd. Vanita Moudgil. Tunisha Agarwal. Sananda Chowdhury. Show More. Views Total views. Actions Shares. No notes for slide. The Importance and History of Textbooks 1. Mohyani Razikin Importance of textbooks: Historical and contemporary 2. Contents Introduction Definition of textbooks The importance of textbooks Reasons why textbooks are important History of textbooks The contemporary textbooks Islamic perspective Conclusion Bibliography References 3.

Importance of textbooks cont. Reasons why textbooks are important Textbooks should be books of texts.