E. O. WILSON’S LIFE ON EARTH

E. O. Wilson’s Life on Earth is a new digital textbook for high school biology students:

Our living planet faces unprecedented challenges. The most important tool we have to meet those challenges is education. The E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation has gathered together a contributor team consisting of educators, multimedia artists, 3D animators trained in science and cinema, and textbook professionals, led by naturalist Edward O. Wilson. Our goal is to create a cultural landmark—a portal that will introduce students to the grandest story there is, the story of life on Earth, from molecules to ecosystems, from the origin of life to the modern awareness that we control the environment we live in. Forty-one chapters in nine sections will provide a complete, original, standards-based curriculum to give high school students a deep understanding of all of the central topics of introductory biology.

Contributors Jay Vavra and E. O. Wilson collecting samples in the mountain rainforest of Gorongosa National Park. The Life on Earth textbook team journeyed to Gorongosa in the summer of 2011 to film lessons on ecology and evolution. They return to Africa to complete those lessons in spring of 2012.

Digital textbooks are poised to transform education. The richness and immediacy of vibrant multimedia lessons will transform how students learn and how instructors teach. As textbook developers of long experience, we’re thrilled by the things we can deliver now that were never possible before. We can navigate inside a virtual cell. We can take students by helicopter to the Gorongosa landscape in Africa to explain the succession of plants and animals over time.

Today’s biology students will be tomorrow’s biochemists, explorers, environmental policy makers, park rangers, and informed citizens. E. O. Wilson’s Life on Earth is being created to prepare them for their work.