The talk around the counter island at my house last night was our telephone company’s recent trial balloon where they suggested that the phone book might soon be a thing of the past.  Apparently, as a result of increased use of digital phone directory services – both on-line and from cell phones – and a desire to save money (and the environment??) phone companies are looking at sending printed phone books the way of the Dodo bird.

It stands to reason that with the increasingly mobile nature of our society and the ubiquitous access to information of all types (including phone numbers) people just aren’t demanding to have access to thick, heavy wads of paper anymore.

Now off the twitter chatter comes this story about the Canadian Oxford Dictionary laying off it’s entire staff.  Seems that they are citing the same shift in demand from paper to digital access as a motivation of their decision.  While they intend to continue to publish, one has to wonder just how long paper copies can be sustained.

This, of course, leads educators to the obvious question.  Just why do we continue to spend millions of dollars in printed textbooks?  They are out-of-date even before they are printed, hard on the environment, static, non-refreshable and bulky, space hogs.

I am not sure of the exact amount spent by our school / district / province on textbooks, but I am sure that it would go a long way towards sustaining a 1:1 program for every kid in grade 7-12 in our province.  Students could then access a whole range of free, authoritative web dictionaries and encyclopedias, subject-based information and all kinds of other data.  As part of preparing our kids for the connected, digital, overwhelming world in their future, they would be taught to assess all information they find using a number of strategies – REAL preparation to work, play and learn in the 21st Century.

I can live without my printed phone book, dictionary and textbooks.

tags: technology, education, whipple, learning, dictionary, phone book,

Photo Credit: Toronto Phone Book, uploaded to Flickr by Pink Moose, Creative Commons License.