e-textbook anyone?

I am pass­ing on this post by Keene Hay­wood through the New Media Con­sor­tium. The New York Times ran an arti­cle on Sat­ur­day dis­cussing an ini­tia­tive called Beyond Text­booksthat com­bines web-based tools with cur­ricu­lum. The arti­cle quotes a Dr. Abshire, Chief Tech­nol­ogy Offi­cer for the Cal­casieu Parish school sys­tem in Lake Charles, La., say­ing, “They (stu­dents) don’t engage with text­books that are finite, lin­ear and rote, teach­ers need dig­i­tal resources to find those doc­u­ments, those blogs, those wikis that get them beyond the plain vanilla cur­ricu­lum in the textbooks.”

Both the post and the NYT arti­cle dis­cuss how this will take root first with higher edu­ca­tion, then trickle down to the K-12 population.