The New Textbooks Will not be Textbooks

Screenshot from Free Ride, a simulation tool to learn
about gears. It's a learning tool I found charting "my own
path" in a social learning exercise in a MOOC last fall.

Earlier this month Esri's David DiBiase detailed the why and how of Esri's work with publishers in The Future of Web Maps in Next Generation Textbooks. I'm all for more and better maps for student use at all levels, and this work is a key step in the right direction.
I'm excited to look a few years further into the future when the whole idea of a textbook will be formulated for many teachers and learners.

Texbook Use

Textbooks, as I understand it, grew in part to "to contain and systematize the educational experience, making knowledge both portable and economical." That quote is from The Atlantic's Megan Garber, in an introduction to Apple's iBooks 2 platform in 2012. Over the years, textbooks in print or otherwise, have provided instructors and students with curated, perhaps personalized, material from an expert to guide teaching and learning. In the United States, school districts and even whole states select texts because they help standardize and scale educational content. I don't expect to see that change any time soon in the primary and secondary schools.