07 January 2010

Misplaced confidence



The 7 January 2010 Nature podcast has an interview with Per Ahlberg, one of the authors describing some wonderful new old tracks – new to science, but dating from 397 million years ago. They’re fossil tracks of early tetrapods – which is the lineage including amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and bird.

About four and a half minutes in, Ahlberg says:

This is going to be in the textbooks fifty years from now.

And I thought, “Wow. He’s confident.

“I wouldn’t be so sure that textbooks are going to exist in fifty years.”

It will be a shame if we are still relying on “dead tree” compilations of old research to teach students fifty years from now.

A good summary of the tracks and their importance can be found here.

4 comments:

  1. Good thinking. Why isn't their a push in Academics to get of textbooks? Especially with the concerns of environment, economics, and accessablity?

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  2. In the near term, there is Kindle and the SONY eReader, but there is no economic benefit to using them. eTextBooks are in the same price bracket as paper books.

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  3. Follow-up post on these points coming next week!

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  4. I bet it has something to do with the initials C-E-S! Talk about techno-envy!

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