Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 11, 1992 TAG: 9202110100
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER
DATELINE: PULASKI LENGTH: Medium
SCHOOL CHIEF SAYS TEXTS MUST ADAPT QUICKLY
It may take a new kind of textbook for schools to keep up with the changes sweeping the world, Pulaski County's superintendent says.Books may have to be used with laser discs, satellite downlinks and computer technology to stay ahead of the way "names are changing and countries are changing," according to William Asbury.
"Textbooks are always going to be important. Libraries are always going to be important," he said, but the ways people get information may change.
"They're putting textbooks on laser discs now," he told the county School Board at a recent budget workshop. This allows whole sections of information to be changed and updated instantly instead of going through the long paper printing and book-publishing process.
Last year, the School Board delayed the adoption of new textbooks that would have been used in the current school year to save about $90,000 in a tight budget.
The budget may be even tighter for the coming year. But, even though some textbooks are deteriorating, Pulaski County teachers are not pushing that hard for new ones simply because many would be obsolete as soon as they arrived.
However, Pulaski County is a step ahead of most school divisions in adapting its students to the computer age. Through a $2 million bond issue approved by voters in 1990, the county's school system has become the fourth in the nation to put computer classes in every grade.
Asbury said a keyboarding course is being considered as a basic required course by about fifth grade, when pupils' hands have developed enough to master it.
"Our kids are going to be very sophisticated in the next four or five years," he said. "By the time these kids get to sixth grade, they're going to be ahead of us in their ability to access information."
Literary agent Richard Curtis, writing in the magazine Locus, has noted that publishers are adding "display rights" to their contracts with authors now. He said that apparently refers to books published not on paper but on a computer monitor or a screen, projected from a disk, cassette or cartridge.
But publishers also are foreseeing what Curtis calls a Readman, the visual equivalent of a Walkman audio-cassette player with earphones that can be heard by people walking or pursuing other activities.
Increasing advances in computers and miniaturization may allow electronic viewers the size of paperback books in which card-sized cassettes can be inserted to project books page by page onto screens. Publishers are taking the idea seriously enough to include language covering it in their contracts.
Ben Bova, a science fact and fiction writer who was guest of honor at the annual RoVaCon in Salem a few years ago, calls them "cyberbooks." He has even written a novel with that title (TOR Books, 1989) about their development.
"No paper!" Bova has one of his characters saying. "You don't have to chop down trees and make paper and haul tons of the stuff to the printing presses and then haul the printed books to the stores. You move electrons and photons instead of paper. . . . The whole thing can be done electronically. . . . Shop for books by TV. Buy them over the phone. Transmit them anywhere on Earth almost instantaneously, straight to the customer."
Pulaski County students may be getting the first glimpse of that projected future.