Digital materials: restoring natural learning?

Trent Batson of Campus Technology posted an interesting article last week entitled Paper-Based Materials Distorted Ways of Learning that argues that digital materials, as they disrupt previous models of teaching and learning, are actually restoring older, more organic ways of learning, including the original concept of the Socratic method:

Why did we develop a default learning model and beliefs so contrary to current reality? We had adapted to what we could do over the whole time that we had only analog materials to work with. A student writing a paper on paper had a hard time showing that paper to the rest of the class, so, over time the natural collaborative learning style popularly known as Socratic became distorted by the limitations of analog materials. Collaboration was no longer the norm. Humans had lost something.

There's a lot of food for thought and fodder for debate (including ye olde laptops-in-classrooms debate) in the article, as well as some questions for educators to ask themselves to help evaluate whether analog or digital methods are more appropriate and effective at achieving the goals they have for their students.

Bush's Jan. 10 Speech and the Future of the Book

Bush and books--especially future books--don't seem to have too much in common (although we all know that Dubya has read three Shakespeares). Nonetheless, the President's January 10 speech on the Iraq war has been given an exciting and innovative treatment by the Institute for the Future of the Book in collaboration with Lapham's Quarterly.

Operation Iraqi Quagmire (President Bush’s Address to the Nation and the Baker-Hamilton Report) is an experiment along the way. The form in which these texts are presented is an early prototype of a new style of Internet document that puts the conversation of readers on equal footing with the text. For more on the ideas and experiments that have informed this project, visit the Institute’s website and the if:book blog.

These online versions of the Iraq speech and the Iraq Study Group Report use a customized version of WordPress to permit participants (by invitation or application) to engage in Talmudic-style discussion of the main text, paragraph-by-paragraph. The possibilities for legal education and research--casebooks and treatises, for example--are enormous. I would love to see the platform they're using made available for development by others.