Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/61389
THE INTER ACTIVE Those who bet print media will never become obsolete may want to rethink that wager. With the cultural shift from static print to dynamic digital media growing stronger every day, the demise of the printed page may come sooner than anyone expects. by Tricia Bisoux illustration by Derek Lea AGE When Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, opened its first technology- enhanced classroom in 1989, complete with projector and computers at every seat, statistics professor Malcolm Getz was delighted. He could now integrate Excel spread- sheets directly into his course at Vanderbilt's Owen School of Management, rather than send students off to fend for themselves. Since then, Getz has developed new interactive components to his course, including adjustable diagrams, PDFs, sampling distributions, and simulation tools. In the mid-1990s, publisher South-Western, part of the Thomson corporation, expressed interest in Getz's project and worked with its macromedia director to create a more stylized interface for Getz's materials. Today eStat, Getz's interactive digital textbook for accounting, incorporates 40 simulations and 500 spreadsheet problems, with navigation tools and links to glossaries and other content. "With a digital textbook, it's quite easy for a student to deal with a data set com- prising several hundred observations, figure out the variables, and evaluate the results. That's impossible to do outside the computer," says Getz. Professors like Getz represent what Kurt Gerdenich, South-Western's director of technology, calls "digital evangelists"—those educators who are not only using digi- tal content, but also creating fully interactive learning environments for their students. "These are the people who are willing to change their lives to use these tools to the fullest extent," says Gerdenich. At the moment, early adopters such as Getz are still in the BizEd Goes Digital Although BizEd is primarily a print publication, it's not without a digital component. The content of all past BizEd articles are available in its online archives, which can be found at www.aacsb.edu/publications/archives. But in an issue where we explore interactive digital media, it makes perfect sense to take our use of digital media one step further. This month only, our readers can download the January/ February issue of BizEd directly to their desktops. With the help of BusinessWeek and the California-based company Zinio, a searchable, interactive version of this issue of BizEd is available via e-mail. To receive the issue electronically, as well as a complimentary issue of BusinessWeek Digital, visit www.resourcecenter.com/digital/bized and click the "Get It Now" button. That will install the Zinio Reader, which is necessary to view the content, to your computer. Finally, set up a user name, e-mail address, and password in Zinio's secure environment. Readers' e-mail addresses will not be shared with outside companies. The digital conversion of BizEd will then be e-mailed directly to you. Enjoy! Frank Moretti, executive director of the Columbia Center for New Media, Teaching, and Learning (CCNMTL) at Columbia University in New York. "The whole dot-com era was really a step backward for new technology because behind it was the assumption that instant success was possible in every field because of a theoretical decrease in overhead and increase of market size," says Moretti. Now that the dot-com fervor has been quelled, he says, people are ready to view interactive technologies with an objective eye and focus on the true value of the Internet as an informational resource. More important, access to such an abundance of informa- minority. The use of digital content requires a completely new way of approaching the classroom—one that many educators aren't quite ready to embrace. Even so, the digital component of the educational materials market is growing, as more options become available and technology becomes more advanced, less expensive, and easier to use. It's time for digital technology to come into its own, says tion is cultivating a public that's growing increasingly accus- tomed to navigating digital environments. Slowly but cer- BizEd JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2004 23