Do You See What Joe Sees?

The Youtube video, Joe’s Non-Netbook, appears to be a cheeky, student-shot video that mocks the huge discrepancy between students’ preference of learning through technology and the traditional textbooks that dominate classrooms. The video appears to be an authentic, in-class joke amongst students, but the surprising element is that it's actually the teacher behind the camera, egging Joe on to explain his problem with the useless textbook. In the good old days, a good teacher would always defend a textbook as an important learning tool right? Well, meet a contemporary teacher named Chris Lehmann.

The set-up is a smart satire on the gross limitations of a traditional textbook, in which Joe cannot access the information in the ways he expects, because the learning tool he assumes is a computer (by default), is merely a book. The students’ wry jokes about the lack of hyperlinks and system preferences in a conventional textbook are supported when the camera pans to reveal all the other students learning on laptops. The video’s entire cast (and the director’s commentary) lead the viewer to believe that the most logical learning tool must be a computer, but apparently Joe’s is broken.

The further implication is that books are broken; or at least no longer the most effective way to learn. Now, plenty of educators and researchers would agree that reading about a subject is not the most effective method of building knowledge on that subject, but I would say that this video specifically targets textbooks and hits the mark. Textbooks are an outdated mode of transferring knowledge. At one point in modern history, textbooks became a portable, cost-effective medium to transfer a (then) considerable amount of information. Following this, laptop computers became produced and priced for the masses. Factor in the exponential amount of information multiplying on the Internet, and you have to laugh at the limits of conventional textbooks as compared to computers. And, viewing this video, laugh I did. I appreciate the inversion of expectations and would expect that this video would get plenty of LOLs from my students. I’m would be tempted to show this to some of my more traditional-minded colleagues, but the outcome would more likely be a series of WTFs?

Ultimately, when I return to school this coming Monday morning, I’m pretty sure I won’t ‘laugh out loud’ at the number of textbooks we use, more likely I’ll cry. Because I recognize that we are not often using the best available tools to educate our students for a future that will undoubtedly, explicitly, involve advanced forms of technology. I don’t blame books. A textbook is a tool that had its primetime and has been surpassed by a newer, more advanced tool. This paradigm may be challenging for those of us who grew up learning from, even loving books, but this is clearly the outlook of Joe and his classmates (even his teacher). After all, Joe does not recognize the object he’s holding as a book, to him it’s a non-netbook.