Slashdot Mirror
Virginia Begins Open-Source Physics Textbook
eldavojohn writes "The Commonwealth of Virginia has issued a request for contributions to an open source physics textbook (or 'flexbook' they termed it). They are partnering with CK-12 to make this educational textbook under the Creative Commons by Attribution Share-Alike license."
It's about time, can't wait to see the result and more of the same for other subjects. Education for everyone, free-ish. This is how it should be.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Ass, but www.textbooktorrents.com saved me a bunch of money.
Why pay for rev.2 and rev.3 when you bought rev.1 and are getting reamed by changed question numbers?
I saved my friends about 2k$ this semester from what I found there.
F = dp/dt, not F = ma.
Second entry: define Lagrangians
Third entry: define Hamiltonians
The mechanics section is done. Now attach 500 pages of exercises that should be intuitively obvious given these entries.
I hope it won't be Wikipedia style...
Physics without calculus is a bit pointless. Any idea if this is focused at honors/ap, or...?
Kick out spdf and welcome the era of open-source text books. Hooray!!
Is Project Gutenburg not going to lend a hand in this?
slashdot rocks
f=ma
KE=(1/2)mv^2
E=mc^2
This is a good idea. Base it on a standard description of each concept like an old fashioned text book, but also allow:
- Discussion threads with students and teachers. (moderated, Slashdot style?)
- Contributed examples, again by students and teachers. You could do something like the PHP documentation, where the best contributed examples are prominently displayed at the bottom of the relevant page.
- Interactive tools to illustrate particular concepts.
- Copious linkage to similar resources.
A successful project like this could easily spawn similar projects for the other sciences.
Open source? What could that possibly have to do with a textbook? Is it compiled? Why don't they just say: Virginia Begins Creative-Commons Physics Textbook
Due to gravity being "just a theory," the state of Virginia will be requiring the textbooks to include alternative theories as to why objects with mass have gravity -- chief among them, the concept of Intelligent Falling.
If this sort of thing catches on, how will the current textbook publishers be able to maintain their $200 per book prices?
I wish my kids could be in a class where
they measure the speed of sound with a microphone and oscilloscope.
How do we get more people like this to teach 8th grade (and high school) physics?
Why reinventing warm water?
Go to Light and Matter for a high quality book set about physics.
By the way, CK-12,org already has one.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
As the leading authority on invisible God-based phenomena, I will be editing that chapter. Disagree with me only if you hate freedom and love terrorists.
How will it be accredited? My understanding is that only textbooks that are accredited by some particular organization are allowed to be used in accredited schools, in order to retain their accreditation.
In theory, this is a great idea. Virginia wants to have a core set of physics materials which will stay current, and then allow teachers to choose several "electives" from "contemporary and emerging physics topics" to enhance their curriculum.
The thing to keep in mind is that this is their first step; the "flexbook," in its first form isn't going to replace the printed textbooks. After all, they want version 1 to be released on Feb. 27, 2009.
--
Yeah, I RTFA.
http://harns.blogspot.com/2008/07/so-obvious-and-yet-so-not-done.html
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It won't be worth anything without the following link. In fact this one link could be the entire Textbook. http://news.slashdot.org/search.pl?query=physics Of course this would create an entire generation of sarcastic, dark humored scientists who all know everything leads to 42.
ed duval the very last person
Sounds great until the "Intelligent Design" movement starts forcing their opinions on "physics" (aka, mind of God) into this book.
The battle has not yet begun...
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
.........for they are the Choosing ones."
I wonder how long it is before the DOJ gets in the middle of THIS one(at the behest of textbook giants).
This is great news, as I am headed back to school this semester. Hopefully, innovation and reason are not squished into paste by the big textbook manufacturers in a bid to protect their scamming ways.
And, yes, I hope it is not Wiki format.
Considering the religious and cultural makeup of Virginia, I look forward to an accurate physical description of our 6,000 year old universe.
Hows this different from wikibooks? http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Physics_bookshelf Of course, most of the books are very incomplete. The problem is having many books fragments the audience and writers, requiring a lot of duplicate effort when you could just go to wikipedia, which is a single compilation of knowledge. I think a wikibook will only work if one or a few people write the whole damned thing, as a traditional book. The only point of wiki is then to fix the occasional error. The advantage of the book over wikipedia is a cohesive structure, consistency, and progression of complexity. You'll lose a lot of that by having different people write different chapters.
universities won't like this. ever taken a course where the prof wrote the book used in the course? this would take money right out of their pockets.
NO! This is an Outrage!! This is blasphemy!! Any honest fool knows that the best way to provide education,a or anything else for that matter, is to allow the unregulated invisible hand of the free market to solve everything. The magic of the markets can do it all, as long as they are unfettered by big government socialists! This project is Economic Terrorism!!
This is unfair government competition in an otherwise productive and creative industry. Just look at the high quality and low costs of textbooks and courses currently on offer! Just look at the amount of engineers graduating from our universities! The free market has brought us prosperity, happiness and profit and can bring us so much more if only the government would cut more taxes and ... ....what?... they what?...when?...how much?..... ........
Pay No Attention The Trillion Dollar Nationalization Project Behind The Curtain. The Market Will Continue To Solve All. This Is Simply A Temporary Accounting Measure. I Repeat. The Magic Of The Market Is Absolute!
May the Maths Be with you!
I want the book to include the theories of intelligent falling, and a sticker on the cover saying that the theory of gravity (both the original and the refinement known as the theory of relativity) are only theories.
And the Lord sayeth on the 2nd day, "Let there be suffient mass for nuclear fusion," and Lo! did the bountiful Earth swoop in from Heaven to orbit the newly formed sun.
Ahh, a definitive open source physics textbook so comic book writers can stop having Superman lift a mountain which under the small surface area he can cover, regardless of how strong, would simply crumble around him or the pressure at his hands would be so great the rock would go molten and he would effectively melt through the mountain he was trying to hold up.
Perhaps ships blowing up in space will finally be silent the WAY GOD INTENTED THEM TO BLOW UP!
Perhaps Cyclop's eye beams will finally push him back with equal force that they shoot with and maybe the death star's super cannon will no longer be a laser but some particle stream of sub-atomic explosives that penetrate the planet and rapidly conver the conventional matter it comes in contact with into some exotic and unstable form of matter that goes boom. BIG BADDA BOOM!
Perhaps with a good solid physics text book people will learn to wear their seat belts, realize that driving a motor cycle isn't as safe as driving a car, and learn that the LHC cannot destroy the universe...
This all, of course, is completely dependant that:
A: People are literate (yes there is a difference between knowing how to read and being literate)
B: People writing the book can write
C: People start actually taking physic courses
D: Pay attention in said courses
E: Have a teacher that actually teaches rather then babysit like 99% of teachers in North America (YEAH THAT MEANS YOU TOO CANADA AND MEXICO. GUATEMALA -> PANAMA IS OFF THE HOOK... FOR NOW...)
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
1. TFA states that this is for K-12, NOT college...so all the 'screw the Univ. for making me pay $200 for a textbook comments' are misguided
2. I like this idea as well, but let's not forget that an open textbook than anyone can edit about SCIENCE is bound to attract hordes of Intelligent Design trolls...imagine it...every church in Virginian tells its members to go home Sunday afternoon and edit the wiki-text book about evolution...this is big, big trouble
3. I'd rather see this opened to a pool of teachers, professors, scientists, etc that have been vetted for their qualifications.
Thank you Dave Raggett
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/about/about/index.htm
In the late 1960s, I was taught high-school physics from the PSSC (Physical Science Study Committee) Physics textbook. The curriculum and textbook were put together by an NSF-convened panel. All the curriculum materials (textbook, supplementary readings, teacher's guides, experimental equipment) were made freely available. I still have two copies of the textbook produced by different publishers and with different covers but identical inside.
Although it was demonstrably superior to other physics curricula, the PSSC program was ultimately a failure because publishers, who couldn't make much money selling the PSSC textbook due to competition, eventually dropped the book and pushed hard to get their proprietary, therefore more heavily marked-up, textbooks adopted by school boards.
-Tom Duff
That would be so damn cool, you could rattle on about Genesis and how the earth is only 6,000 years old etc etc etc....
Maybe add an occasional "fact" in the book that makes the yahoos look even crazier, something like Ezekiel came up with the buoyancy principle, or Jeremiah came up with the first Battery cause god told him to invent it.
Also change the names of certain principles and also say the left and right hand principles are evil because they are satanic hand signs.
A bunch of Pastafarians could have a huge amount of fun writing such a thing.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Having lived in Lynchburg for a number of years, there are plenty of folks there who would demand removal of all sorts of things such as the true age of the universe if they had any input at all into the process. If instead it was written by experts, they'd be complaining to their representative about the state spending money on teaching atheism.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I got preview of some content for the text-book:
Oh, Bruce! And I thought you were so rugged. (Sob)
I've always been paranoid about my closed-source textbooks phoning home...
'a';DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM DATA WHERE name LIKE '%'... if you're reading this, it didn't work.
If it's in Virginia, I suspect the book will be one page long and will read:
GOD (See "The Bible.")
/ kidding
// sorta
Which raises the question, "Why will a school district need to customize its physics textbook?" Local value of C? Of G? Of pi? Or does the head of the high school physics department just want to chime in with his opinion on the existence of the Higgs boson?
While TFA mentions its reasons, is the point of this exercise really just to give a school district free and malleable source material that they can distort to suit their whim?
The Open Library project has barely any users, let alone book contributors or code contributors, and that isn't even restricted to something as special-interest as textbooks. If they can't get the open model to work for the written word, I doubt Virginia (not known as a bastion of openness or science) is going to have any impact worthy of the name. I hope I'm wrong, but I won't hold my breath.
Now these guys have an idea for openness that looks far more interesting. Grids of Beowulfs of games. I can see that succeeding. (Can you imagine a MMORG that's also in the Top500 list? Or a planet-wide FPS? Can you imagine a LAN Party where the "server" is spread over the entire LAN - all that extra power available for tougher, more sophisticated games?) I'm willing to bet that more students at more Universities would be willing to be involved in a world-wide game engine than any number of textbook projects.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
1. TFA states that this is for K-12, NOT college...so all the 'screw the Univ. for making me pay $200 for a textbook comments' are misguided
The K-12 books are bought with tax money. They're not free.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
It looks like this is just supplemental material, and not an all-encompassing educational solution. At least that's what this sentence - "Participating educators will create and compile supplemental materials relating to 21st century physics in an open-source format that can be used to strengthen existing physics content." - seems to say.
I went to high school in Virginia, and my HS Physics teacher told us that the reason that astronauts on the space shuttle in orbit around the Earth floated and people on airplanes flying around the Earth did not was because of "air pressure" (I kid you not).
So yeah, they need something like this... if the teachers will READ it.
On the plus side, my physics teacher was HOT, hence I forgave her for her idiocy. :)
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
an open-source physics text book cannot work. Physicists just can't agree on even the most basic aspects of their science.
Kansas is working on an open-source Biology text. Expect a fork in 3...2...
You RIAA brain washed dupe.
Theft is "the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's freely-given consent." Your example is theft.
Copyright violation is "the unauthorized use of material that is covered by copyright law, in a manner that violates one of the copyright owner's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works." What CC suggests is most likely copyright violation, but that depends on the terms the book is released under.
THEY ARE NOT THE SAME.
Please stop modding idiocy like this as Insightful. It isn't. You're doing the RIAA's work for them when you allow their twisted definitions to gain mainstream acceptance.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Only this weekend I hear on NPR a professor in California wrote a Chemistry book and released it under CC license. He felt the chem books available were too expensive, generic, and with just pretty pictures.
Still, what you're talking about is copyright violation and not theft. Yeah, it's illegal. But it's a different illegal. Like how jaywalking and vehicular manslaughter are two different things. It would suck to be guilty of one and tried for another. It's the shell game the RIAA is foisting on the public trying to equate the two. And whenever I see it - I point it out. As loud as I can.
And FWIW, if I was still in college I'd be doing exactly what you're doing. You get awfully sick of eating Ramen noodles while paying up to $200 per book, with each class needing at least one book and sometimes up to 3 or 4 - each semester. Especially when the only thing that changes between revisions are the example problems so you can't even sell your old books off at the end of the semester. I believe it's morally correct to not support someone's extortion racket - "pay us huge bucks each year or you can't do your homework." That's racketeering, and I'd oppose it just as you do.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
F=ma
I don't know whether their servers got overloaded or what, but that page is now essentially empty.
because they get hot and expand.
:o)
Pay more taxes so teachers can have better salaries, small classes and less time spend on paperwork and more on teaching.
Oops, you voted for the guy promising you a tax cut before any money has actually been cut and instead of saving what little money there is for a rainy day spend it all and more on tax cut only to then find himself involved in a war with no end.
Good teachers get burned out by the system created by voters who can't see anything but that 300 dollar tax refund.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This won't change any of that. The "commoners" have had access to cheap/free information for decades, but they choose to reject it. It's not as though the theory of evolution is some big secret that no one knows about, for crying out loud. Don't expect people to turn off the television and start thinking just because textbooks are being published under better licenses.
every church in Virginia tells its members to go home Sunday afternoon and edit the wiki-text book about evolution
If EVERY church in Virginia is just a tax-exempt Republican campaign office then we have worse problems than bad textbooks.
Not in Illinois. My daughter (well actually me) pays hundreds of dollars a year for high school text books. This year for instance we paid $100 for a physics text and $90 for a history text. With public schools systems under increasing financial stress I wouldn't be surprised to see more states doing this.
Project 2061 From the American Association for the Advancement of Science laid out the things kids ought to know throughout K-12 back in about 1989. F still equals ma, even in 1989. AN open source physics book could work well or it might initiate time travel back to 1984;) Could be anyone's guess.
Not quite open source, but publicly available for several years:
Tex's French Grammar
I'm especially fond of your ironic sig line:
"I really want it" does not mean the same as "I need it" or "I deserve it"
You do actually need it to pass.
And since you are essentially paying into an extortion racket, there is no moral dilema in avoiding doing so. All these assholes do is change the sample problems with each book revision. There is no content change worth shelling out another couple hundred dollars each semester.
For example, let's look at an Algebra book. How much new algebra has been written in the last 1000 years? Now how much of that would you expect to see in an introductory text? The answer is zero. None. All introductory Algebra texts cover the exact same thing.
So, the dilema - how do you make a new Algebra book every semester? A publisher makes money by selling books. How to do that? Simple. Change the homework problems. There is no new Algebra information, no new content, so they change the homework.
This is unethical. It's extortion. "Pay us or you don't graduate." So yeah, it's nice to see people solving the problem. Remember, what is legal and what is moral are often times two different things.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
This happens after I move from Va to Fl...
what was I thinking?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Why can't the state pay addison wesley for the rights to Sears and Zemansky University Physics .. and then make it freely available?
It'll F up competition though.
Although I certainly like the idea of open source books and content, and on the web, CK-12's user interface is horrible! Have any of you tried it???? Unnecessary animation, dreadfully slow reaction, strange web design elements that put a tremendous load on the browser, no way to go "back" from where you came, etc. I used the scroll wheel to move up and it was still trying to scroll it several SECONDS after I let go of the wheel! This is on a fast dual processor machine!! Well, at least it is not IE only.
"Ahh, a definitive open source physics textbook so comic book writers..."
Since Scott Mccloud did such a good job explaining Chrome. Have him do a physics textbook too.
BTW ID proponents are the least of the worries in the making of a physics book. The plain "don't know beans about...but I'm an expert" have to be watched too.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
They already have this, it's called Wikipedia. You may laugh, but I got a B in a mid-level physics course using Wikipedia instead of the $150 book.
A friend of mine started a project like this a few years ago and has come a long way. To the extent that he's been hired by the Shuttleworth Foundation to flesh out their books to cover more grades and more subjects.
If this kind of thing is of interest (and I'd argue it should be; to everyone) I recommend you take a look at FHSST.
http://www.introecon.com/
You are confusing spending money on projects and management etc etc with salaries going to the actual teaching staff. BIG difference.
It ain't about shoveling money into "education" but getting decent salaries for the TEACHERS.
But hey, proof me wrong, give up your job and become a teacher. Show me that you take the salary cut.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
With several authors working in an open source fashion, the problem will be defining a qualified editorial team to proof-read and tweak the text so that the work as a whole remains coherent. Anybody who has ever worked on a collaborative project with academics should immediately realize that it is not trivial.
Getting everybody to get their manuscripts in on time (or at all) and then applying some sort of style guidelines will be work enough. Sending it back to the author to deal with edits and peer-review comments and getting a timely and reasonable response will be even more difficult.
That being said - still a worthy cause!
Case history, so to speak: a certain 10th Edition of a Calc text retails for $200 right now. W/ his professor's blessing, my son bought a used copy of the 9th edition for $25. The textbook publishers demonstrate a greed rivalled only by the *IAA. The sooner they are brought down, the better.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
They primarily chew tobacco in East Virginia?
There's a vast difference in "stuff is out there somewhere" and something being created under the umbrella of the educational establishment specifically for use in schools. Of course, there has been plenty of inexpensive or free excellent material out there on any number of subjects for years. As it happens, I publish some of it. But having it available for the small minority who will look and having something created for the explicit purpose of supplanting the crap that dominates the field now are very different. Especially since this is a step towards schools not requiring students to buy said overpriced, blanded out crap, which since textbooks now cost many college students over a thousand dollars a year, is also an important step towards lowering the barriers to education and reducing government costs and student debt.
And, again, speaking as a publisher, I welcome this with open arms. I'm quite secure in my stuff being unique and worth the money and I *know* that the same can't be said of much of what's out there. I've done work on the stuff from folks like McGraw-Hill and the sooner it gets forced to be more competitive, the happier I'll be.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Uhhhh, me too, hey, I need a chill pill too! /meraiseshand
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.