E-literature seems to have taken the narrative and made it multi-modal. According to learning styles, would it not make sense to make the textbook multi-modal as well?
First Textbook
The New England Primer and The McGuffey Readers, 18th c and 19th c respectively, became the most published textbooks in America. The 18th c idealized the book as the repository of all knowledge (Drucker & McVarish 98); therefore, textbooks were joined by extensive encyclopedias that attempted to categorize and record all human knowledge, such as the FrenchEncycolpedie (1751-1772). The reverence of the word and the book did not last. By the late 19thc “mass media had become a part of daily life…in the guise of news or entertainment, advertisement or information” (142-43).
Textbook
A Ramus textbook presented:
cold-blooded definitions and divisions, until every last particle of the subject had been dissected and disposed of. A Ramist textbook on a given subject had no acknowledged interchange with anything outside itself. Not even any difficulties or ‘adversaries’ appeared. A curriculum subject or ‘art’, if presented properly according to Ramist method, involved no difficulties at all (so the Ramists maintained): if you defined and divided in the proper way, everything in the art was completely self-evident and the art itself was complete and self-contained. (Ong 132)
Is the textbook going extinct?
My writing project for Saper’s History of Text and Technology focuses on the textbook and its development through history. Examining the problems inherent in the use of textbooks, I discuss the potential of creating an open textbook through an online medium such as a blog or wiki.
The Textbook in History Project 