Rich Rice posted a link to this article in Boston.com, “Arizona school will not use textbooks,” to the tech-rhet mailing list. I saw a similar (more in-depth?) article in The Arizona Daily Star, “All-laptop high school to open in Vail.”
I guess my first reaction to this is “it ain’t gonna happen,” at least not entirely. Sure, there’s a lot of textbook info you could replicate electronically, but there’s a whole bunch of information that is either most practically available or only available in good ol’ fashioned books.
And I don’t understand why it’s an “either/or” kind of thing, either.
I totally agree with you re the “either/or” thing. I get so frustrated when so much of the rhetoric around the pedagogical uses of digital technology performs that ridiculous exclusive binary, or assumes that one technology will “kill” another.