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Open Source Textbooks For California
T-1000, appropriately enough, lets us know about a California initiative to compile open source science and math textbooks for the state, in the hopes of saving money. The effort is spearheaded by Gov. Schwarzenegger. "The effort seems very promising, but the state's complex standards and arduous textbook evaluation process will pose major challenges. ... The governator will surely be able to stop the digital textbooks from gaining sentience and subjugating humanity, but there are trickier challenges that will be even tougher to defeat than the impending Skynet apocalypse. Textbooks are a surprisingly controversial issue in California and there is a lot of political baggage and bureaucratic red tape that will make an open source textbook plan especially troublesome. ... [T]he traditional wiki approach is untenable for California teaching material. Individual changes to textbooks can become a source of fierce debate and there are a multitude of special interest groups battling over what the textbooks should say and how they should say it. It would take the concept of Wikipedia edit wars to a whole new level."
I'm surprised that introductory algebra is such a politically polarized topic...
I can only imagine the debates in calculus, what with the ongoing Newton/Leibniz war..
...the printed books we had when I was in school were full of lies. Who cares if these are full of bullshit? So were the old ones. Let's get these kids using some free bullshit and save some money. Of course, instructors who knew the material could teach from Wikipedia, using versions of articles vetted for correctness — a process in which they could participate.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Get it from the source.
How is this open source ? You can already read what goes into a book, so the source isn't hidden. Maybe they meant community contributed and owned ? Copyright is the issue, not authorship.
It is a huge industry that I understand deals in a widely dispursed form of petty graft. I'd much rather we use our public university system (which is well regarded) to compile text books and withhold state funds from districts that insist on going elsewhere. Of course, we would have to pay the UCs something, but we wouldn't have to pay them enough to bribe local school districts. I think textbooks are a racket all up and down the line, but up through the HS level I have a hard time believing that you need or can even attract top level scholars to explain Algebra II (as someone else mentioned) or the Whiskey Rebelion or TekWar.
Ok, I didn't do the whole degree thing. Part of the reason was that I felt what was being taught in the computer science classes was out of date and often flat out wrong.
Whats more, the teachers over-priced book as required reading and I was given failing grades for correcting the errors in them.
So long as teachers choose the subject mater, they can choose books that make them money.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I'm writing an open math textbook. You can find it here. Feedback is appreciated.
As in gubernatorial.
(Yes I know it's quoting TFA which is punctuated to indicate that it's quoting some third source. But it should at least have rated a [sic] if not an outright edit-in-square-brackets.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
http://www.google.com/search?q=link%2C+howto%2C+html
But not from forming a union.
Textbooks are a surprisingly controversial issue in California and there is a lot of political baggage and bureaucratic red tape that will make an open source textbook plan especially troublesome.
No kidding. It's called "bribery", "corruption", and "bureaucratic naivete".
See the seventh chapter of part 5 of Richard P. Feynman's book _"Surely you're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"_, which is titled "Judging Books by Their Covers" for a descripton of the process as of the year he let himself be dragged into it.
(The title comes from an incident where some members of the board submitted ratings for volumes of a textbook set which hadn't yet been completed and so were supplied with the full cover but blank pages.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Open source is about the ability of the community to freely access and manipulate, as long as the changes are documented. Regulation is about the control of access and manipulation. Which special interest groups are allowed to look at it before the public? What idea offends which group? Does the example use gender neutral language? Restrictions, restrictions, restrictions...
If it was creationists who were the special interests groups, it would be in the article. If creationists go anywhere near science there are people screaming about it. Which special interest groups do you think are involved? Maybe the Scientologists will be able to write the text book on psychology?
Proof-based mathematics vs. faith-based mathematics gets ugly, real fast.
I guess that goes for any proof-based science vs. faith-based science. And their appropriate school books.
Although, I must admit, during my differential equations final exam, I think that some of my answers were definitely faith-based.
Good riddance to differential equations! Not that I want to ruffle any feathers, but I wouldn't recognize the "Differential Equation Rapture," if it popped up and slapped me in the face.
Let alone, being able to classify and solve it.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I believe governator was always a play on governor + terminator. And from a quick search, "gubernator" is not even a real word.
Use Wikipedia for what it does best.
Why not use Wikipedia/Wikibooks content as a text book?
Each teacher compiles the list of articles for the class to read, prints them out, and distributes the printouts periodically during the semester (along with a copy of the GFDL license), and that forms the text...
I've been saying for years that it would be a great idea for public schools to invest in the production of open-source-style licensed textbooks. As long as textbooks are being sold by traditional publishers, they get to charge a per-unit price for them. If you want ten million students to read some publishing house's version of Our Glossy History of America or what have you, then you have to pay ten million times n dollars. If you instead invest in having a new textbook written from scratch and placed under a Creative Commons license, then you pay an up-front cost (expensive, no doubt, but probably pretty cheap as line items on the state budget go) and then it can be issued to any arbitrary number of students for no more than the cost of having copies printed up by the lowest bidder. The publisher's markup, marketing costs, and distribution costs vanish from the price.
There are external benefits, too. Some day it might be plausible for schools to save even more money by going all-digital; they wouldn't even have to pay to print the books. If the books are formatted in such a way that they can be printed paper-bound at your local Kinko's (the way most college readers are), students could cheaply have one or two extra copies as their private property—one to highlight and take notes in, or one copy for the locker and one for home. And free online textbooks would be a resource to autodidacts and other schools, not just in the state, but anywhere on the Internet.
The analogy to open-source software is apt. These days, reproducing information costs next to nothing, as long as it was produced by someone who chooses not to charge a per-unit price. Public schools essentially pay rent on individual textbooks issued to students, not unlike the so-called Microsoft tax when you buy a PC. I have nothing against the textbook publishers' profit-seeking activities—they're free to try whatever business model they like—but philanthropists and volunteers really ought to be able to beat their prices.
Yeah, I think the more descriptive term would be "open access." The article does talk about "digital" textbooks, whatever that means... in which case "open source" should mean not using a DRMed digital format.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Mod +5 Funny
Seriously? Use /Wikipedia/ in a classroom?
I'm... staggered that anyone would suggest that seriously. I hope you're joking.
Big-endian versus little-endian!
The special interest groups, that is. Or, at least, simply ignore them -- these texts are for science and math, and no amount of special interest should matter. The only thing going into these books should be facts, presented as facts, and viable theories, presented as theories. Nothing else should go into these books, including philosophy or politics.
Of course there should be oversight, but the panel should only consider matters of scientific accuracy (1+1=2) and not agendas. If the issue raised by a SIG is "we do not agree with calling the numbers 1 and 2", then an endnote in the text may say "some people do not agree with calling the numbers 1 and 2". The SIGs should be given no further consideration than that for deviating from the established science.
As for Wikipedia, I've always assumed that the slogan is a sentence fragment. The complete version is this:
Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, but not everyone should.
Sums it up rather succinctly.
While I took a japanese course one semester, my teacher decided to forgo the required text, a classic 300 page textbook for the course, and gave us this short booklet - probably about 50-75 pages long (I forget). Being Japanese herself, she said that it was the atypical school book in Japan, being good for 6 weeks of study. We got a second one half-way through.
I really liked having a short workbook. It was disposable (paper covers) and much like the Schaum's outlines here (a bit shorter, those outlines cost about less than $15 a subject, don't see why textbooks cost like 8x that and up). It also helped studying because everything in the booklet was relevant to the course and you could keep up with ease.
Math books especially have that problem of being mini-tomes of info. My calculus book in highschool could also cover Calc II and Calc III courses. I don't see why I have to lug all that around at once.
Hopefully this initiative and wikibooks work together:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
Printing copies of the books. You can pay someone to write them but you still need to get copies into the students' hands.
Electronic distribution - aside from the initial cost; replacing lost / damages readers would be an ongoing cost and nightmare.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Your comment needs a link to Feyman's own words.
My favorite was going to the university bookstore and being forced to buy the "Nth edition" of some textbook.
It was brand new, with no changes from the previous editions, other than the ISBN description.
Being new, it was not available used. Hence $120 or so rather than $25 or so.
This will never happen as school administrators are extremely risk adverse. They will never be able to accept the risk that the reason their students didn't do well is that the open source textbook they used didn't meet the state/federal curriculum standards. The state/federal education agencies will also never certify that any text book meets their curriculum standards.
It wouldn't work, teachers hate Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is more than reliable enough for homework needs but it makes the information way to easy to reach for the teachers to be comfortable. They don't really care about what you learn or produce, they care about how much you worked for it. Wikipedia means you don't have to jump through as many hoops and they really hate that.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
I just reviewed the section on World War II.
on World War II
1) These retards have the Battle of the Somme taking place during World War II, when it was rather an affair of World War I.
2) The battle of Smolensk has an article, but the battle of Kursk does not? Kursk was only one of the largest tank battles of all time and the last great offensive in the east... but I guess that's not important.
3) Richard OConnor gets a write up, but not Alan Brooke, Ike, or, Zhukov?
4) The economic underpinnings of the war are not touched on at all. Indeed, the whole history of World War II takes place against a backdrop of the economics of the powers involved, and provides the basic narrative of the struggle. For Americans, where's the talk about how 100 years of protectionism left the USA standing with enough industrial capacity to build 25 aircraft carriers, a bunch of battleships, cruisers, countless destroyers, tens of thousands of aircraft, tanks, guns, and still have enough capacity left over for a speculative bet on the atomic bomb. The great American lesson of WWII is that self reliant industrial capacity wins wars and if any lesson about the war is relevant to the USA today, it is that one.
5) The article about Nazism is, well completely wrong. Given that the head of the SA was a homosexual, and that was known to Hitler and co for some time, its hard to make the argument that the Nazis were more anti-gay than anti-jewish, although granted, Hitler did use Rohm's gayness as one of many charges against him.
All in all, if this is what open source history is, I'd say its crap.
This is my sig.
It won't be a problem after the Singularity. There will not be school administrators around.
A book based on the "lecture notes" principle which also tries to use the available space can typically cover the same subject matter in a clear and concise manner in a quarter of the size and weight.
That would be something Open Source textbooks can address.
I have only one plea: don't make e-books. E-books on laptops aren't as easy on the eyes as even poorly typeset hardcopies.
By taking this step, great harm would come to education and educators. Students would no longer have an excuse: "I left my book at ....". This would mean that educators would be required to spend more time teaching rather than dealing with various accountability issues. As a result, debates would rage about shortening numbers of class-time hours required to complete a given course.
I think we should drop the whole concept and drop it quickly before it starts to gain momentum.
Worse yet, this idea might spread to other jurisdictions.
Please join and log in to: http://www.keep_repressing_education.org/ and help us stop the madness.
*** Don't be dull.***
Therefor all Open Source software is crap.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Uh, no. Teachers hate wikipedia because it's possible that you hit the page on the day some random person decided to vandalize it. So now all of a sudden, you can't rely on your source. It removes accountability. "Teacher, I didn't get the wrong answer, I got the right answer for a different set of data." Then you have the question of do you hold the student responsible for the failings of the source? With proper peer reviewed journals and other published materials, information may still be incorrect on occasion, but there's a permanency to it, so the student can go back to it later and say "Hey look, it says right here." With Wikipedia, the student can just go back through the edits, and try and pawn off mistakes as a result of those edits, with no way to reasonably prove if the student accessed the page while those edits were active or not. This would then undermine the entire research paper process, as students with bad marks can simply argue for having used a different set of marks, with correct conclusions stemming from those. Unless Wikipedia instituted a peer review process for edits, and teachers required students to print out the entry as it stood at the time they used it, with an immediate failing grade to those who failed to turn in the print-out with their paper, the accountability of the source is simply too lacking.
Therefor all Open Source software is crap.
Dude, saying the Battle of the Somme took place in World War II is the Open Source Software equivalent of a beta copy of Windows 3.1 on a 386SX with a faulty DIMM.
This is my sig.
So how is California going to save money now? First it was legalize pot, now it's open source text books. Perhaps not giving illegal aliens free government health care would do the trick. Ya think?
I suppose students will be learning how to manually run libreadline.
Which of course depends on libreadword, libreadsyllable and glibc's ctype.h.
Don't use eglibc, though, it's for embedded "carp" architectures :)
As a student of the LA school system, we got new textbooks in the 9th grade. As our teacher pointed out, our new US history textbook made no mention of Paul Revere even though he was pretty important in US history. Our teachers all hated the new books, and even back then textbooks were very controversial.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
The timeline is really goofy. This press release from last week appears to be the request by the government for content, and they say they want it for fall 2009. Huh!?!? The press release refers to "free, open-source digital textbooks for high school students" and says the government will "develop a state approved list of standards-aligned, open-source digital textbooks for high school math and science." Textbook publishers with books already on the market obviously aren't going to make their books free and open source. Individuals clearly can't start writing new ones and get them done by fall 2009. So the only possibility left is apparently to look for free books that already exist. That's fine (see my sig for a catalog of free books), but I think it's extremely unlikely that there are any preexisting free books that meet the state standards, which, as the Ars article points out, are insanely difficult to comply with.
I teach physics at a community college in California, and I'm the author of some open-source physics textbooks. They're intended for the college level, but I do get quite a few of my adoptions from high schools (see the list on that page). So far, however, zero of my adoptions have been from California public high schools. I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to understand why: California's textbook selection system makes it impossible. Actually most of my high school users are at private religious schools. I assume that's because private schools aren't regulated by their state governments in terms of textbook adoption, and they also usually operate on a shoestring, so free textbooks sound like a good deal to them.
Re the wiki approach, it's a dismal failure at producing useful textbooks. If you look at the catalog linked to from my sig, there are hundreds of textbooks in it, and very few of them were made via wikis. Wikibooks' original goal was to revolutionize education; in reality it seems like the killer app for Wikibooks is video game guides. Plenty of people are writing free books. They're just not doing it using wikis. A textbook is an entirely different kind of project than an encyclopedia.
Find free books.
The Open Learning Exchange (http://www.ole.org) is trying to build a global system to supply open source class material world wide.
Does that mean each teacher can edit them to fit his/her classes and then publish their own version for the school?
It really depends on who is editing them and how accurate they are.
If I were the Governator I would have the California colleges write the Open Source textbooks as part of their required projects, and then California would have open source textbooks written on almost every public school subject you could think of.
It would be cheap to just print up self-published copies using a Laser Printer and book binder. Even cheaper would be to use the Amazon.com Kindle devices to put the open source eBooks on.
I think the State of California can earn money by selling the eBooks and printed books to other states to raise money and help the other states save money as well. Just for the cost of printing up the open source text books plus a little extra to help pay off their debts.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
http://globaltext.terry.uga.edu/
We're working to make 1000 free text books available in at least 4 languages worldwide.
a Bus" method of writing a textbook.
A textbook should be written so that all of the information for the course is in the book so that the Teacher
(or the top 10% of the class) only has to worry about the understanding ("why") part of the course. Missing information means the book is defective.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
I've always thought that teachers disliked the usage of Wikipedia because it doesn't teach people how to research from multiple sources. I had classes where we weren't allowed to use encyclopedias for that reason and had to use only books so that we could cite them with footnotes. If you learn that, then you can learn to create Wikipedia articles rather than just get information from them. (seeder vs. leacher)
This is also being pursued on the federal level by the Congressman who can code assembly.
Maths textbooks have been released using this model for french school for the 6th grade to the 9th grade. This provides an entire school support: lessons, exercises, activities...
http://manuel.sesamath.net/
First, it will be impossible to create open K-12 textbooks in a few months, as a prior poster has pointed out. Second, I predict that any public mandate to create open textbooks will probably fail, or end up getting bogged down in bureaucracy. The State needs to partner with *private*, commercial organizations that are publishing open content. Here's one: Flat World Knowledge www.flatworldknowledge.com; they're publishing in the post-K-12 market right now, but there's no reason they couldn't put their model to work in service of K-12 publishing. The people behind this left the traditional textbook sector because they got fed up with watching the digital revolution pass them but, as their employer (Pearson) continued to non-innovate itself to eventual destruction (it will happen, as a matter of time). How in the world are academic institutions, or the K-12 bureaucracy going to motivate people to write, and then more importantly *sustain* open content? How much money will this cost? Will we see for-profit innovators like Flat World left out of it, even though their textbooks are provided online with a free, non-commercial open license, with Print-on-demand versions of their books available for only $30, *if* the student (or school district wants print. What a deal! Why isn't the State approaching Flat World and saying "help us out", because obviously Flat World has figured out a way to do this, *and* make a profit. What we *don't* need is academics, academic administrators, and textbook writers trying to become publishers. How will these books get marketed to users? Will the content live on interoperable archives? Will it be universally accessible? Who will guarantee regular updates? And so on. The problems in the purely public model are huge. We need the public AND the private sector to cooperate in this arena. This seems the only way to go, *if* we want a sustainable open textbook ecology. Otherwise, we're going to get stuck in a bureaucratic maze that ends up with a lot of dormant and little used content. We need to include *innovative* private sector agents in this effort, so that we can maximize the intellectual capital of textbook authors, as well as those who know how to make a textbook "work" (on-, or off-line), and make sure that everything is interoperable, accessible, and sustainable down the road.
My view is that a text should supply sufficient information to get a handle on a subject or an area of study. It can't provide activity - that's a teacher's job - and besides, if I saw an "active book" I'ld probably shoot it on principle. The teacher's business is to persuade students to think, help them take in and apply information logically and critically, the text's task is to inform the thought process.
Courses where the "material" is in part or as a whole a matter of opinion: history, politics, history, anthropology, history, economics, etc. create a problem for this process for several reasons. The biggest is that special interest groups, i.e. minorities, "authorities," text book authors, etc., each have their own take on things and think it is as reliable as gravity. School boards, being elected bodies, as a rule are not made up of well-educated literate people with a feel for the fuzziness of much of what we (as our own special interest group) take for granted. Consequently, in Kipling's words they are often "lead by the loudest throat." The history of India, which has recently played such a part in California educational debate for instance is so immense and complex that even the inhabitants of India cannot agree on large parts of it. It is absurd to expect the California State Board of Education to be able to identify a good, well rounded book on Indian history that does not peeve someone. They listen to the loudest throats and cross their fingers in hopes the loud ones aren't whack jobs.
I'm not certain this can ever be mitigated let alone fixed.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
They don't really care about what you learn or produce, they care about how much you worked for it. Wikipedia means you don't have to jump through as many hoops and they really hate that.
There is a good reason for that. One important part of school is to learn how to learn and learning that you have to work to achieve something. If you really want something, then you really have to work for it.
Teachers could counter the wikipedia-effect by making every assignment so hard that students had to really work to complete the assignment. But as usual, that is really gonna benefit the brightest ones as the not so clever ones won't even bother.
That causes under 5% of students to perform brilliantly and the rest horridly.
How much you worked for it shows to the teachers that the students really put some thought in to their work. If you worked hard, then you'll be bound to learn something. Everyone is bound to learn by doing. That's why it is implemented in public schools.
I've for past couple of years hated the phrase that "smart have to do less". I've always thought of myself as smart, so I did less. In university I realized how wrong I was. I really wish that everyone would learn that lesson in elementary school. It would save a lot of pain and grief from everyone.
But there *is* faith in mathematics - the true mathematicians take the axiom of choice, while the heretics deny it. Infidels!
Exceptions are like STDs. You really don't want to catch the ones you can't recover from.
As I really like the concept of wikischool and open source, seeing this being implemented at schools doesn't seem very practical for many reason. If you tried this at colleges, the bookstores would loose a lot of money which is what helps fund college to begin with. I do on the other hand see it practical for textbook publisher to start making their books available for purchase though electronic devices such as the ipod, and the amazon kindle. When it comes to textbooks, schools need to make sure that the writers of these books are reputable and not Joe Smoe from down the street writing a book on economics. Lets face it, textbooks are too expensive and that is why websites like half.com and StudentBookSearch.com help students to buy and sell textbooks from each other. Maybe if we could put a limit on how many times per year a publisher can change textbook editions and require significant changes before making old book editions obsolete. Students are tired of wasting so much money on textbooks.