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Linux Textbooks?
whymw asks: "I am a computer science instructor at our local community college where I teach an introductory level Linux course. Due to worries about Microsoft licensing, my director is interested in moving other courses such as office packages to the Linux environment. However this question keeps poping up - 'What would we use for textbooks?' There is little to pick from and I see this as a major barrier to widespread adoption of Linux in the classroom. Do we need to create a linuxtexts.org? Should openoffice.org fork off a textbook project? By the way, I said TEXTbook, complete with labs, assignments, and hopefully a testbank." Linux has to make it into the education market at some point. If there are no Linux textbooks out right now, what recommendations would you have from the current crop of off-the-shelf books?
What is wrong with using non-textbooks and writing a lab manual with exercises. I have taken computer classes before that didn't use textbooks -- and I've taken classes that did use awful textbooks, where we would have been better off using a non-textbook.
As far as OpenOffice goes, I've just started using it after using Word for a long time, and I find it intuitive enough (and enough like Word) that a textbook on using it would be a waste of paper.
There are plenty of good FAQs out there, which are good learning resources. And isn't it the job of the instructor to design assignments, labs, and testbanks? In subjects other than the sciences, this is certainly the case, so I don't really see your concerns being a problem.
Teach them to use the docs or man-pages or whatever :) Teaching someone to find information on their own is an indespensible skill.
When I went to school, the focus was often on learning how to find the relevant information and apply it. What you are describing sounds suspiciously like rote-learning.
Our instructors, for the most part, designed and wrote all of the exercises and tests we did too (this was the Computer Engineering Technology program at SAIT in Calgary, Alberta). Additionally, if you rely on textbook exams for testing, you will see a lot of plagiarism and cheating - better to write the exams and exercises yourself and vary them class by class.
Rather than buying textbooks, convince the school to pay you to write them, along with creating test banks and exercises. If they own the copyrights, they can print off as many as they need and save a lot of money in the end (especially if they are a large school).
Many of my classes had textbooks, but a lot of them relied on in-house developed texts, especially when suitable textbooks didn't exist.
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I used to have a very good chemistry teacher who managed to teach us without textbooks for three years. He just made us write about three to four A4 sides of notes - so by the end of the year we had the equivalent of a textbook anyway! It also meant people actually learnt it rather than a textbook just getting dusty on a shelf.
Video Game cheats, hints a
The basic business model of Microsoft and friends is to sell software for a cost with lousy documentation and support so they are only too happy if there are a lot of 3rd party texts like XP for dummies (actually that title could mean a lot of things).
On the other hand the business model of Linux distributing companies is to give the software for free and earn on support so it doesnt really make sense for them to support 3rd party textboks which make the user self sufficient
Mind you here I am talking about lay users not programmers . Programmers would in any case get their support from usergroups not Red Hat
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