Transcript the Physics Textbook in an Learning Era?

Whither
the Physics Textbook
Wither
Active
in an
Learning Era?
Interactive
Overview: Text delivery in introductory college and university physics classes are
dominated by massive, encyclopedic textbooks that take immense individual efforts
to create but which few students read with any care or with much impact on their
learning. Physics education research suggests active learning is much more
effective. How can a text be transformed to be more effective as a component of an
active learning environment?
Edward F. Redish,
Department of Physics,
University of Maryland
Overview: The web is changing how we deliver and interact with textual
information. The way people interact with the web is different from the way
they interact with books. The electronic and graphical structure of the web
also opens many more possibilities for the delivery of information over the
web. How does this effect the way we can and should deliver text information
in the future?
Web interactivity offers many opportunities for text delivery
that normal publishing does not.
A collection of coordinate research-based active-learning materials, attempting to
demote the text from dominant element to a peer among equals.
Narrative /
Text
Interactive
Lecture
Demonstrations
Computer-based
Conceptual
Laboratories
“Thinking Problems”
collection and
resource materials
Teacher’s
guide and
philosophy
Group-learning
Tutorial
Worksheets
Full-lab
workshop
environment
Some ways to make a text more intellectually interactive:
1. Take an epistemological orientation – Instead of simply stating results, a text can try to begin
where the student is beginning and work through reasoning that takes one to the desired
conclusion.
2. Provide well-chosen “stop and think” problems – Include frequent “reading exercises” that
challenge well-known student preconceptions and are good starting points for a class
discussion.
3. Remove the chapter summaries and help students learn to build their own --- This is one of
the most effective tasks in learning to organize the knowledge one is developing. Giving such
summaries discourages the student from carrying out this valuable exercise.
4. Model problem solutions but not algorithmically -- Teaching students that problems should be
approached by rote without sense making is the wrong message. Model solutions should
include thinking about problem structure and mechanism, use of basic principles, and evaluation
of the plausibility of the result.
5. Offer a rich variety of problems – Too often physics texts offer problems that are either too
simple (exercises) or too hard (complex problems requiring a high level of expertise). We
include a wide variety, including
-- conceptual questions,
-- essay questions,
-- estimation problems (Fermi questions),
-- representation translation problems, and
-- context rich problems.
Graphs and figures in the text reflect the active-learning
computer tools used by the student in lab, tutorial, or workshop.
Students in Activity-Based Physics
active-learning environments use
computer tools to take high quality
data quickly and easily in lab,
tutorial, or workshop.
Figures in the text that represent data
are not created by graphical artists
but by the same tools the students use.
Students in Activity-Based Physics
active-learning environments use
video data together with tools for
extracting and processing data
from video such as Videopoint.
Text figures are created to make
the connection to these student
activities.
 Links to active and active-learning components
like those shown at the left
 videoclips
 calculational and graphing tools
 programs for modeling or data collection
 New modes of text delivery
 organizing complex materials in non-linear ways
 New modes of text development
 involving large teams in a development
 creating non-synchoronous, evolving materials
The web permits delivery of non-linearly structured text. This may allow
more effective organization
of complex material
or quickly lead students
to become “lost in hyperspace.”
Shown here are some
materials planned for
online-delivery for a course
on Intermediate Methods
in Mathematical Physics
at the University of Maryland.
A focus on overview and relationships may be able to help students navigate a complex intellectual structure.
Can explicit process and epistemological goals be combined with visualizations to solve the
“lost in hyperspace” problem?
Wikipedia is an example of a web document that permits an entire community
to take part in developing text for a knowledge base.
 We can imagine teams of developers that interact
to create (perhaps non-synchronously) an on-line “text”.
 Current Wikis tend to be “encyclopedic” rather than “pedagogic.”
This needs to change if Wikis are to replace textbooks in the near future.