The Shortcomings of Traditional Textbooks in the Digital Age, and Our Invitation

It's like the old days on the biblioblogs, with intelligent, engaging and useful discussions across a number of different blogs on a topic of interest and relevance, with lots of exciting suggestions for the future. I'm talking, of course, about the current discussion on the future of textbooks, and what we, as digital pioneers in our area, have to contribute. OK, I know that that sounds a bit pompous, but I think it is true. There are more interesting ideas bobbing around the blogosphere than you'll find anywhere else.

In order, the blog discussion on this topic goes something like this: AKMA, NT Blog, Sansblogue, Anumma, AKMA, NT Blog, NT Blog, Exploring our Matrix, AKMA, with apologies if I have missed any contributions.  James McGrath has a useful breakdown of different models in his post.  In this post, I would like to draw attention to a key difficulty with current print textbooks in our area.

There is an extent to which publishers are conscious of the fact that the textbooks they are marketing have a rather old-fashioned feel, especially in relation to the lack of internet resources.  They know that most modern students are more media-savvy than their professors and that it is a case of digital natives vs. digital immigrants.  In a bid to plug this gap, a good number of big-selling textbooks now have a special companion website (Mark Allan Powell, Introducing the New Testament, Bart Ehrman, A Historical Introduction to the New Testament, Luke Timothy Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament).  This is hugely commendable -- the flashcards, the powerpoint presentations, the summaries -- these are all helpful additions to the student's experience.  But all of these fine websites have a central difficulty:  they are extensions of the single-authored textbook that they are complementing.  On the whole, they simply supplement the textbook with similar material, often authored or constructed by the publishers, or people working with the author and the publisher.  They have some idea of the potential for doing something different on the web, but they do not exploit the potential for linking to, embedding, integrating, engaging with existing resources on the net.  These textbooks therefore remain, essentially, single-author products, albeit products that are supplemented by useful, additional, publisher-supplied materials.

The potential that one sees in these types of companion websites, combined with the shortcomings of these websites, is in fact our invitation to rethink the idea of the "textbook", as I and others have been urging.  The weakness with the textbooks mentioned is that they are thoroughly single-authored affairs.  In some respects, that is, of course, an excellent thing.  I could not have a higher opinion of my colleague Bart Ehrman, for example, who is one of the authors mentioned above.  But in other respects, it is a problem.  The traditional textbook's difficulty is that however strong its author, it is still that author's views that are presented, in all their particularity.  What the textbook of the digital age can produce is something that is genuinely multi-authored as well as multi-media, a resource that encourages the university student to think critically from the earliest point by listening to different voices speaking on the same subjects.

This is where the digital pioneers come in.  Because we have at least some understanding of how the internet works, and what its potential is, we are in a position to do the kind of thing that these traditional textbooks, with their limited companion websites, are aspiring to do.

The "Textyness" of the Textbook in a Digital Age

I must admit that I have never been a big fan of the "textbook", especially at university level.  University students are at the stage where they should be reading a range of primary and secondary materials and over-dependence on an introductory-level single-authored book will not bring out the best in them.  I appreciate, at the same time, that students often want something that will help them out with introducing a new topic and it can perform a useful function in guiding them through the early stages of something complex, and so it is a crutch that I have sometimes recommended, though always with lots of warnings and with a good range of different introductory textbooks too to illustrate the point.

Recent discussions about the possibilities of an online Old Testament Textbook (AKMA, NT Blog, Sansblogue, Anumma, AKMA, NT Blog) might cause us to reflect on the whole scenario of textbook-writing a bit further.  As several have implied already, the digital age allows us to rethink the way we do textbooks and I'd like to support Tim, Brooke and AKMA in that kind of thinking, and then to encourage still more radical thinking about what we are trying to do when we conceptualize textbooks.  I think textbooks have a couple of shortcomings, both of which can be overcome in the digital age.  One relates to the "text" bit and the the other relates to the "book" bit.  In this post, I'd like to address briefly the text bit.

Old-fashioned textbooks are just too texty.  For those of us who have some investment in the digital world, and that is all of us who are engaging in this discussion, we are familiar with the fact that it is now possible to access audio and video material far more straightforwardly than it was in the past.  In our area, there is a wealth of good audio and video material and this is only going to increase with time.  Think, just for starters, about Bibledex from the University of Nottingham, or the several resources available at St John's Nottingham.  I have added audio and video pages to lots of the NT Gateway pages in order to gather together the best of these resources.  The importance of this should not be underestimated.  Different students learn better with different media,   Some respond much more positively and learn much more quickly by listening to audio, others by seeing things represented graphically.  And that is to say nothing of the importance of thinking through how we work with students with disabilities, in particular, in this context, those who are blind or near-sighted.  Newer, digital textbook resources can integrate, embed, link to material that is not just blocks of text.

Let me try to illustrate this point by engaging with AKMA's original post:

Hey, in a perfect world, you could persuade the authors to record their chapters so you could distribute digital audio (and video — or perhaps, a video abstract of each chapter). So at this point, you have a textbook that’s free to consult as web pages, free to download as PDFs, and (again, ideally) free to listen to/watch in digital media.

I like the sound of this because it addresses the importance of integrating multi-media into the newly conceived, digital textbook.  It is the kind of thing that makes me enthusiastic about the way that AKMA is talking.   But my point is that the authors of the textbook in question do not have to wait for the perfect world for this to happen because high quality audio and video resources are already available on the web for free.  Let's say you are talking about the topic of form-criticism and introducing Richard Bauckham's recent contributions about the involvement of alleged eye-witnesses.  You could record your own audio or video about this, in which you attempt to summarize his position, or you could watch and listen to the man himself doing it for you.  Examples of this kind could be multiplied.  My point is not that we should stop producing new resources -- of course not.  But rather that we should start thinking seriously about the integration of good existing resources into our new model.

More on the Future for Online Textbooks

AKMA, Funding Neopublishing, continues to post things of interest on the topic started by Anumma, Open Access Intro to OT. In my previous post on this topic, The Future for Textbooks Online (with thanks to Tim Bulkeley on Sansblogue for an excellent discussion of my post alongside AKMA's), I suggested that we don't have to begin working on projects like this from scratch. There are now so many fantastic resources available on the web that the big issue is not so much how we create great resources but rather how we organize and publicize the existing ones in ways that will be helpful to our students. I suggested as one model the evolving NT Gateway, though I express interest in looking at other related and overlapping models.

Let me add some related thoughts.  Anumma articulates his goals for this project as one that:

• is freely available online;
  
• is historical- and literary-critical in focus (as is a Coogan or a Collins, say; in other words, not a “theological introduction” narrowly reflecting the concerns of faith communities or other readerly social contexts);
  
• is authored by a socially diverse body of contributors.
  

The first two elements are at the heart of a site like the NT Gateway -- it links to freely available materials and is itself free; it is historical-critical in focus; and the resources to which it links are as diverse as the authors that write them (which in fact means that too many of them are from too narrow a group, but that is a reflection, of course, of the state of the guild and something we could do something about in this kind of project).

Now, the advantages of beginning with what is already available on the net are several:

• No re-inventing the wheel is necessary.  Where excellent and diverse resources already exist, freely available on the net, one may as well work to those strengths rather than attempting, at every point, to create new resources.
• There is a huge psychological boost in working with existing resources rather than beginning from scratch.  A new project can be hugely daunting.  Working collaboratively to develop existing resources, to organize, to add, to fill in areas that are lacking -- this can be encouraging and fulfilling.
• It is much, much cheaper than beginning from scratch.
• It is much less labour intensive than beginning from scratch.
• It is easier to harness the great advantage of the internet in being fully multi-media.  You can pull in a range of resources, prose paper, website, podcasts, video clips and so on without the need to develop new websites, to begin recording new audio and new video.
• As children of our age, we are unduly impressed by what is new.  But sometimes, in scholarship, the old is good.  The advantage of a dynamic approach to this issue is that it enables us to draw from the storehouse both old and new.

I suspect that our difficulty in this area is that we are still inclined to think too narrowly in terms of the old-fashioned "textbook".  I would like to brainstorm a bit more about this, but I think it might need a separate post.

The Future for Textbooks Online

AKMA has an excellent post on FOSOTT (Free and Open Source Old Testament Textbook).  It's full of the kind of "blue sky thinking" that we surely need to engage in if we are interested in harnessing the values of the internet and the possibilities it provides for collaborative, educational models for our students.  I have been talking about something similar in relation to the New Testament Gateway for a little, looking to expand and develop it as a resource into something that will work as a kind of uber-textbook for New Testament studies.  My thoughts have been derived in part from my antipathy towards that kind of textbook culture that straitjackets students into becoming over-reliant on just one voice.

In the light of this, I hope readers won't mind my repeating a section from my talk at the SBL 2009 (CARG) on How and why the NT Gateway was Rebooted, Revitalized and Relaunched:

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There are pedagogical and economical advantages, I think, in the kind of approach that I have been describing, of attempting to provide introductory materials for new students and flagging these up in the clearest way possible. These advantages relate to our reliance on a text book culture. Many students become over-dependent on the one text book that their lecturer or professor has recommended. Instead of seeing the Introduction to the New Testament as one person's survey, they take the author's views as gospel (even when the author is encouraging a critical approach to the gospels!). What the text book says, the student should believe. This is frustrating enough at secondary school level, but it really should not obtain in universities and colleges. But what is the alternative? To recommend ten text books?

And so we arrive at the problem of access to good secondary texts. The average student spends a fortune on text books (book costs, source: Jim Linville) and still the bright university student will need more. If you have a large class, even the multiple copies in the library will quickly vanish. Since moving to Duke, I have been moving more and more towards reliance on free internet resources in teaching. There are now so many of them, so many very good ones, that the job is becoming easier all the time. It occurred to me that what I do in my teaching I could do also on the NT Gateway, and to show people where to find strong academic materials for free online. No more complaints about the books missing from the library! No more complaints about the cost of the text books!

This kind of approach brings with it a huge advantage, that students can get used to hearing a range of voices on the range of topics in their curriculum. They can read across a range of resources both old and new. They won't be constrained to hearing just the text book's view on canon, or the Synoptic Problem, or the authorship of the deutero-Paulines. And the more interested they become in a topic in question, the more than can dig down deeper and find yet more resources.

I am not, of course, advocating the end of print resources in teaching but I am suggesting that sites like the NT Gateway can provide a means by which we can think differently about the text book culture. A range of voices, a range of topics, with guidance for the student about how to access them. There are, after all, things that you can do on the internet that you can never do in a text book, like listening to podcasts, watching videos and playing games. In the long run, when resources like this are attractive, free and easily accessible, what will be the impetus to stay focused on the single-authored-text book? (Full post here; full series here).
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Of course those comments were in the context of a discussion specifically about the future of the NT Gateway, and I think the NT Gateway could continue to evolve to make itself ever more useful as a kind of uber-text book for students, but it does not need to be the only portal providing that kind of service, and collaboration could work not purely within sites like this but also between different sites, different projects, different "books" until we are at the point where talking about a textbook sounds very old hat.

Mark Allan Powell on the Synoptic Problem

In my previous post, I offered some enthusiasm for the splendid looking new textbook for introductory New Testament classes, Introducing the New Testament by Mark Allan Powell, published by Baker. Regular readers will not be surprised to see me revisiting something of a bête noire in complaining about the way that the Synoptic Problem is treated in introductory texts, and there is no exception here. I must admit that the personal disappointment on this occasion was a little more pronounced than usual. It is several years now since I complained about the way that the Synoptic Problem gets treated in introductory books (The Case Against Q, Chapter 1), and I have done what I can, through books, articles, websites, blogs, to try to generate some awareness of a major alternative to the consensus view. Sometimes, this has met with success. But all too often, I have felt like Kierkegaard's clown, and no more so than here, apparently having made next to no impact on the way that the debate is framed, let alone the solutions that are offered. Let me try to explain why, and please forgive me for focusing in a major way on something that is clearly peripheral to Mark Allan Powell's interests, as it is to many other scholars. The difficulty for people like me is that the introductory textbook can do more than anything else in embedding ideas in students' minds, and it is a shame if they are not even given the framework within which to explore the problem in a balanced way.

Powell's discussion of the Synoptic Problem (here called "the Synoptic Puzzle", 92-100), presents the Two-Source Theory as the solution to the Synoptic Problem and gives the Griesbach Theory as the main alternative (diagrammed on 97, sidebar on 99). I am grateful to Mark Allan Powell for adding a sentence about the Farrer theory (99) after I drew attention to the lack of mention in the manuscript, but all the books under "For Further Reading" are by defenders of the Two-Source Theory, and there are no arguments provided for the existence of Q. Q is largely taken for granted, and then explained. New students, therefore, do not have any framework within which they are able to question Q at the same time as affirming Marcan Priority.

The website provides some supplementary materials, but here things are no more encouraging. There are Chapter 4 flashcards that give "Two Source Theory", "Q", "M", "L", "Four Source Theory" and "Griesbach Theory". Note that Marcan Priority is treated only in partnership with the Q hypothesis and not separately. Under "Extra Content", 4.5 Proposed Solutions to the Synoptic Problem (also available as a PDF), four solutions are listed, "Augustine's Solution", "The Two-Gospel Hypothesis", "The Two Source Hypothesis" and "The Four-Source Hypothesis". In a summary on the "Status of the Synoptic Puzzle in the Twenty-First Century", the Farrer theory and its proponents are not even mentioned.

Then under 4.6, there is Evidence to Support the Two-Source Hypothesis (also available as a PDF). Given the absence of any arguments for the existence of Q in the book itself, I was interested to see what the grounds would be here. Four arguments are given as "Evidence That Matthew and Luke Were Produced Independently of Each Other". All will be familiar to those who have spent any time studying the Synoptic Problem, alas:

(1) With regard to sequence of events, Matthew and Luke frequently agree with one another and with Mark, but they never agree with one another against Mark. This suggests that Mark served as a basic outline used independently by both Matthew and Luke, who sometimes followed him and sometimes did not. If (as an alternative proposal suggests) Mark had copies of both Matthew and Luke and produced an abbreviation of their works, we would expect instances in which Mark departed from a sequence of events followed by both Matthew and Luke, but that never happens.

This argument is problematic because it is expressed in terms of opposition to the Griesbach Theory. The fact that Luke usually follows Mark's order is not a problem for adherents of the Farrer theory, for whom Luke is prioritizing Mark over Matthew and, like Matthew, using it as "a basic outline". The "never" is also incorrect since there are minor Matthew-Luke agreements against Mark in order.

(2) Neither Matthew nor Luke ever includes the other’s additions to the Markan text.

This is simply an error. The reason that the Two-Source Theory invokes categories like "Mark-Q overlaps" and has to spend time discussing "Minor Agreements" is that there are many triple tradition passages in which there are substantial agreements between Matthew and Luke against Mark.

(3) The likelihood that either Matthew or Luke used the other as a source is reduced by what would then be inexplicable omissions of material.

The argument from omission is always a problematic one, not least given the fact that every theory has to cope with omission at some point. It often simply amounts to a statement of what we would have done if we were one of the evangelists. The only example Powell gives of an implausible omission by Luke is Matt. 25.31-46 (Sheep and the Goats). If I were Luke, I don't think I would include it, with its characteristically Matthean judgement day scenario of divisions into two groups, sheep and goats, wheat and tares, wise and foolish, good and bad, and eternal hell-fire for the second group. But that may not be right; it is always a guess to say why we imagine that Luke omitted any material, likewise with the huge chunks omitted from Mark, including material we might think to have been congenial.

(4) The material that Matthew and Luke have in common but that is not found in Mark is never found at the same place in their Gospels.

This is another error. One of the difficulties for the Q theory is that Matthew and Luke sometimes integrate double tradition material with triple tradition material, especially in Matt. 3-4 and Luke 3-4, but also elsewhere. The reason that there is a category called "Mark Q overlap" is that "the material that Matthew and Luke have in common but that is not found in Mark is" sometimes "found at the same place in their Gospels."

So, once we get to arguments for the existence of Q, they are not especially impressive, which is a shame given that the actual text seems to express some confidence in the existence of Q. All in all, I remain optimistic, though. Where Q is sustained either by ignoring the arguments against it, or by reproducing weak arguments in its favour, it is surely only a matter of time before an Introduction to the New Testament is produced that at least takes seriously the Q sceptical view.

Mark Allan Powell, Introducing the New Testament

I was delighted to receive in the post a copy of Mark Allan Powell, Introducing the New Testament: A Historical, Literary and Theological Survey (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009). In the interests of full disclosure, I should explain that I was asked to write an endorsement for the book and chose not to do so because of what I regarded as its deficiencies in the discussion of the Synoptic Problem (and so it is particularly nice of Baker to send me a copy anyway!). I will explore its treatment of the Synoptic Problem a little more in a future post, but before doing so, I wanted to take a post to enthuse about the book lest my future post seemed to be trying to take out the speck in my brother's eye.

Powell's introduction looks splendid. It is beautifully illustrated, with well chosen colour pictures from Christian art across the centuries. And the layout is splendid, with the text constantly broken up with nice little boxes and sidebars, bulletpoints and charts. It is very easy to navigate, rightly boasting that it is the kind of textbook you can dip into at any point. The discussion is crystal clear, easy to read and usually fair and accurate.

My guess is that it will be a direct rival to Bart Ehrman's Historical Introduction, now in its fourth edition, and now, just in the nick of time, with similar lavish illustrations. It will be a while before I can get a feel for whether Powell could do the unthinkable and replace Ehrman as the first-stop introduction, not around here in the heart of the Triangle, of course, but in places further afield.

One of the values of the new book is a website called Introducing the New Testament, a companion site that features lots of extra hand-out style student resources.