a passing grade?

My post from last night surprised me when I read it again today. I'm not usually the type to give traditional textbooks a passing grade.

I was disturbed enough that I talked with Ellie about it. We were back in Valhalla, taking the beagle for a walk.

"Besides all the things we've known are wrong with old-fashioned teaching for fifty years, the way kids and people process information is different now. Nobody has time for huge chunks of information anymore-we're all multitasking and looking for the quickest answer to our immediate question. And that's not a bad thing: IQ scores keep going up, and people keep getting better and juggling masses of information."

Inquiry-type learning, especially when tethered to the power of computers, is much more appropriate to today's kids. Anyway, this is what I've been thinking about as my attention span is eaten away by answering a hundred e-mails everyday. This is not the kind of argument I would typically make for our approach in front of investors or fellow educators. Ellie was supportive, of course. I have to add that Ellie supports me as her companion first and foremost, and she doesn't need much convincing.

If it sounds like I think about learning more like a businessman than a teacher, there's a grain of truth in that. I find that I'm more effective guiding teachers than at teaching. But management and teaching aren't so different, especially if managers take care to hire the right people so that you never have to discipline or fire them.

In any case, I'm interested in how other people think that the peculiarities of the information age affect the way we learn. Do the old textbooks with their sustained and well-structured discussions fit with today's learning and thinking styles?