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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.'"
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.
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.
So here is a new point of study for you, the affect of lobbyists, PR/marketing, large publishing houses and greed upon the cost of free electronic textbooks. There are many people who derive large incomes from the old system and the greed combined with the intelligence will motivate them to do one particular thing over and over again. To become involved in free open electronic textbook projects and poison them, make the collapse in infighting and arguments, become buried in pointless arbitrary differences in technicalities, it other words do every deceitful pathetic thing they can do to keep the whole greater than $100 text book gravy train going.
So the simple first step to doing it, is expecting that this will happen. The simplest solution is forcing the full declaration of all vested interests by any person or organisation that wishes to contribute and publicly shaming those who contributions are disingenuous and motivated by greed. So the initial effort must be focussed on creating a tightly governed process with set achievement points and firm guidelines, with a real focus on eliminating spoilers from the project. Failure to do this, will result in failure on the project, not because of it's lack of value or the achievability of the project (wikipedia is a good example) but, because of the unending greed and venality of a few asshats.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen