Quote Originally Posted by Goggles View Post
I can't think of any good reason why textbooks shouldn't disappear. That's the last kind of book that should be preserved. How many heavy textbooks get printed, hauled around, abused and destroyed while going virtually unused? I just finished an engineering degree and the fraction of a given textbook that's even assigned to be used in a course is tiny, let alone the fraction that students actually look at. On top of that, they go out of date almost yearly so that the publisher can waste another 1000 tons of paper printing (and selling) negligible revisions. The sooner the whole textbook system is virtualized the better, IMHO. Printed textbooks are an incredible waste and inconvenience.
One student's outdated textbook is another publisher's opportunity to make a profit on the new printing.

Computers are very useful and make the recycling of lectures/lecture notes a breeze. There is almost nothing that gets obsolete on a yearly basis, even in higher education. The differences from year to year are mostly in different problem sets, so that the students don't just copy the previous year's solutions.

As far as computers vs. cursive, it seems like a no brainer to me - one is very useful the other not so much. Of course, when the question becomes computers vs. critical thinking the priorities should be the other way around. It's a matter of prioritizing the right things, so it depends on the context. The exact same thing can win or loose depending on what it competes against.

Many years ago I witnessed how my grandfather (a farmer) was amazed that my father (an engineer) doesn't have a pocket knife on him. The exact words were 'What kind of a man are you, not to carry a knife". My father, had absolutely no need to carry a pocket knife at all times, since his job was to design machines for the weapon industry. Though he could tell you in his sleep how to make an opamp from a fistfull of transistors, capacitors and resistors.