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California To Move To Online Textbooks
Hugh Pickens writes "Last year California spent $350m on textbooks so facing a state budget shortfall of $24.3 billion, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has unveiled a plan to save money by phasing out 'antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks' in favor of internet aids. Schwarzenegger believes internet activities such as Facebook, Twitter and downloading to iPods show that young people are the first to adopt new online technologies and that the internet is the best way to learn in classrooms so from the beginning of the school year in August, math and science students in California's high schools will have access to online texts that have passed an academic standards review. 'It's nonsensical — and expensive — to look to traditional hard-bound books when information today is so readily available in electronic form,' writes Schwarzenegger. 'As the music and newspaper industries will attest, those who adapt quickly to changing consumer and business demands will thrive in our increasingly digital society and worldwide economy. Digital textbooks can help us achieve those goals and ensure that California's students continue to thrive in the global marketplace.'"
So are they gonna provide students a method of using these electronic resources, like a OLPC?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
I haven't lived in California since 2001 but can someone tell me if they already supply every child with a laptop? If not, how do ebooks work for those without?
As the music and newspaper industries will attest, those who adapt quickly to changing consumer and business demands will thrive in our increasingly digital society and worldwide economy.
Is it just me or did anybody else parse this sentence as "Let's not fail in life like the music and newspaper industries and actually use internet for our gain instead of hopelessly fighting it"? Is he giving the music/news industry attitude!? :D
I am the lawn!
'It's nonsensical -- and expensive -- to look to traditional hard-bound books when information today is so readily available in electronic form,'
Yes, but online textbooks if they don't come with a hard-bound textbook are a bad idea. Already in schools whenever there is an internet outage, virus outbreak, etc. The school basically shuts down in the fact that teachers can't enter in grades, etc. But now the teachers couldn't teach. Then what happens if for some reason these textbooks are not cross platform? What if they restrict access to only Windows machines, or Windows and Mac? What happens whenever a student's computer breaks so they can't do the assignment or if they can only afford low-speed internet or that is all that is offered where they live? What happens if their computer is too old to properly render the site? What happens if the computer lab's hours are inconvenient for said students (for example an after school job where they usually work with their physical textbook during down time)? Take the old saying "my printer broke" and multiply it by a few thousand and thats going to be the result of this program if they do not mandate having a physical textbook.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
OK, here's what's going to happen: initially, the publishers will charge low bulk rates to get everyone to switch over. After that, they'll introduce higher, per-student access fees. Oh, yeah, and don't even think about mixing and matching online books from different publishers. Fees for a single book will be so exorbitant, that the only way you'll be able to afford this is to buy the whole K-12 package. Just ask any university librarian about that business model...
Slow down there sparky, one step at a time! Besides, there will be "bootleg" e-books with the real information in them that won't burn at 451 degrees. God forbid the government find out about magn..er..nevermind
The way textbooks are pushing above $100, I'm not surprised. Publishers have made a mint and have tried their best to hamper the second hard market. This is a positive change.
Cue rants (well-deserved!) about textbook monopolies, planned obsolescence, and so forth, in 3 ... 2 ...
A better rant would be the rant of a California resident wondering why the special interests were allowed to drive the state into insolvency to begin with.....
And I thought New York was messed up.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Nope. Not even close, largely thanks to prop 13.
Which is not to say that there weren't reasons for tax reform in CA. Just that prop 13 was a really lousy way to do it, especially given the idiotic ballot initiative process that happily produces spending mandates and/or tax cuts without any accountability.
The whole state needs to have it's government scrapped and replaced.
Do not use computers just as substitute for books, use them to help with visualization not previously possible in books. I.e., animations, interactive materials, etc, etc. I know this is just a first step and too many features at once would delay the project, but it's just something to keep one's mind on.
It is always better to be a first grade version of yourself than a second grade version of someone else.
"schwarzenegger believes internet activities such as Facebook, Twitter and downloading to iPods show that young people are the first to adopt new online technologies "
That's right. I still use my Vic-20 with 300baud modem to dial up the magicians tower BBS. I'm too old to get into all those tubes and interwebs on the google.
They're not expensive if you use them and amortized over quite a few years. I went to a Catholic elementary school. ALL of our books were hand-me-downs of Public school books and at least 2-3 editions old.
Unless I haven't been paying attention, Geometry, Calculus, WWII, the Roman Empire, Mitosis, etc hasn't changed much in the last few years. We were also required to have all books covered. They last quite a bit longer if you do this. I know that when I switched to a public school I had the EXACT same history book, it just happened to be 2 editions newer. Other than a few minor editorial changes, I didn't see anything different to my 7th grade mind.
The problem isn't that books are expensive, it's that they keep buying new ones when the old ones aren't obsolete. Moving online isn't going to help unless they use OSS textbooks. Book publishers are going to love this. Instead of buying a book every year for 120$ they're going to give you a wonderful discount of an online book every year for only 50$.
Use the books until covers are falling off. Mandate that book publishers MUST keep publishing an edition X years after it is first published. This will eliminate 'prebuys' to try and cover all books that are expected to be lost or damaged. It'll also let a school use the same book for 10, 15 years. A $100 text book over 15 years isn't too expensive.
Unfortunately 10-15 years is at least one election cycle and everyone will forget what the person they replaced did and it'll be all shiny text books for all "please think of the Children".
Online books are not a very good idea. Books are still better for reading and studying, and the technology for ebooks is still not good enough to mimic all features of real books. Video, on the other hand, is already good enough to have online lectures. I know, because my university does it, and I took some classes where I only went to the classroom to take the tests. I watched all lectures at my own pace in the comfort of my room, and I feel it made no difference whatsoever. Actually, I am sometimes bored in a classroom lecture and wished I could just press the pause button on the teacher, go for a coffe and come back without missing anything. So, I find online lectures just as effective as live lectures but much more convenient, and the interactive aspect can also be taken care of by using email and online forums. So, I think the Governor should re-examine the issue and maybe get rid of schools but keep the books. I am not kidding.
I think it's a wonderful initiative.... and that we should move towards a way to have all human knowledge available to the collective in such a way that anyone from anyplace can learn about anything... with a global competition to provide the best compilation of knowledge.
That said, it'll probably take a while...
1) to change people's mind about e-books
2) to get it in a form suitable for people to read.. with promising alternatives appearing such as flexible displays, e - ink, etc
3) to organize the knowledge with the efficiency of your local library... yes, you can google, but nothing beats browsing the shelves of a library if you're looking for material... and it's nowhere as neatly organized (in most libraries at least)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
So how do you take the approved textbook into a restricted-text exam? How do you make notes in the margin? Are you supposed to print out relevant parts and bring them to use in class? When you're finished with it, can you re-sell it if you don't need it? What if you want to keep it? Have you bought it, or does the license stay with the school? I'd still rather stick with paper textbooks. It's great to have access to online reference material, but that's not what a textbook is for.
Though the screens are getting better, many people find it much easier to read off paper than a monitor, including people who've grown up with computers, so I don't think it's a habit thing. And all my textbooks are full of annotations, I can't imagine there's a piece of software that makes it easier than quickly scrawling/drawing in the margin of a book, without me having to go out and acquaint myself with a tablet of some sort.
If California wasn't basically broke I might believe this hype (not really), but a better solution might be to set up a cost effective textbook publishing operation. Publishing is one of the areas where you are dependent on heavy fixed plant which has well defined operating costs. Therefore, competition can tend to raise prices because of the costs involved in marketing, sales, administration and (ahem) kickbacks, which are multiplied across every entrant. How about competitive tender to write textbooks, and competitive tender to print them? And, when the concept is proven, competitive tender to make them available on-line?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
And with National Healthcare looming on the horizon, the kids will be able to get new prescriptions for the glasses that they'll need every year!!
You mean like this?
http://www.mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.html
Agree completely that ebooks (and readers) need to move beyond a static representation / recreation of a printed text (though in doing this they need to preserve niceties of fine book typography such as avoiding orphans and widows, preventing stacks, have decent justification algorithms (why isn't there an ebook reader program which uses TeX's algorithm) and use nice typefaces which are legible and readable).
Rather a shame Tim Berners Lee didn't use TeXview.app as inspiration for worldwideweb.app rather than TextEdit.app.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
... who find is very suspicious that a robot from the future that pretended to be our friend is now pushing through legislation to increase our dependence on machines and technology?
It's a trap!
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
I actually think that this is a good idea. I have long wondered why all schools don't use hard bound text books. Most colleges have some form of online text books available to all students. I attended RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) and most of the time, the text books we needed for class were available for free in an online version through our school's library, in addition to being available for purchase in a hard copy.
There were many times throughout my schooling where this kind of thing would have been helpful. For all the people out there, think about not having to carry a LOAD of books to school anymore, and only have to bring a laptop or have all your classes held in a computer lab (or, heaven forbid, the school springs for computers in every classroom). Also, I can't even count the number of times a text book got lost, left somewhere, or simply got destroyed (such as getting wet). These are issues that would not really be an issue if all text books are online.
While getting rid of the option for obtaining a hard copy of a text book completely isn't gonna be for everyone, I think this is a really forward looking idea, and Schwarzenegger should be praised for it. It's just too bad that it took this terrible economy and a state budget deficit for this kind of thinking to surface and take hold.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
This is a good idea, but it won't save any money, this year at least. Now you have to undergo a major project to source ebooks that are suitable, find the proper distribution method, ensure all schools have the technical capability to allow every student to access these books (at the same time no less - so no sharing computers/internet connections). Teachers might all be teaching out of new books, with new errata, and a new "feel". There are a ton of things to think about.
I like the idea, but the thought that this will be a money saver in the short term is, well, short sighted.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
That is exactly what is going to happen, and the era of reusing textbooks year after year will come to and end. With some subjects, it makes sense to get the most up to date material each year -- geography, politics, etc. -- but with others, it does not -- math, basic physics (not college level QM), etc. Why should schools be forced to pay for new subscriptions every year for material that is not changing?
Palm trees and 8
I think that this is a step in the right direction but, being an adult with ADHD, I can't help but think that this will be a problem for hyperactive or inattentive children. When I sat in a room with just my books, it wasn't as hard to concentrate. Unfortunately, medical school was a bit different. We often used digital textbooks (because they were required, free, or we "obtained" them for free) and online learning aids. I cannot tell you how distracted I was, though. I would surf porn, read Slashdot, play games, anything but what I was supposed. Today, I'm a successful doctor, but let me just say how hard it was getting here. I still buy textbooks when I need to because digital versions just don't work for me and my style of learning or ease at which I get off track. We use computers at the hospital for almost everything we do. I'm actually on-call right now, but I got side-tracked while writing some discharge notes.... Argh!
Producing soft-cover books (I've never made a hard cover) is trivial. The cost of these books isn't the printing cost, it's the copyright. Use Open Source textbooks.
Textbooks are a big business. And a dirty one: just see Richard Feynman's experience
There are some courses, like literature, where the primary textbook is something best read curled up in a chair.
There are others, such as some sciences, economics, and anything involving current events or current technology, where textbooks are obsolete before they are printed.
There are still others, like PE, some fine arts, and most vocational training, where traditional textbooks were never an issue.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Who read that tag as "one kind leper child".
1 laptop capable of reading etext along with basic word processing running on an ARM processor will cost you about $200 bucks.
The school, per student, will spend about $30 dollars PER BOOK, PER STUDENT.
The average high school student has 9 book.
9 x $30 = $270 dollars
Each student will cost the school, on average, in print outs, copies, and other non-book related costs and addition $50 a year per student
$270 + $50 = $320 dollars
Now factor in electricity costs and I am will to say that "Doing this would probably cost the same if not 10% more then books. Initially."
That said the quality of material the student has access to is greater along with videos, presentations, and multimedia learning tools that students can watch to assist with their studies.
If student attendance increases just 5% that overall this reduces costs as an un-used text book is a waste of money.
From a licensing standpoint then, a digital publisher, with non-existent manufacturing costs, can license a professionally written textbook at a cost of $5 a student rather then $30. Assuming the laptops are usable for 5 years the cost saving are INSAINE. We are talking slashing at least $200 dollars PER STUDENT PER 5 YEAR PERIOD.
Pro-rating that is $40 PER student savings per year and can ELMINATE the space and need for a computer lab! Giving the student the opportunity to buy the laptop at the end of the year you could even break even then.
This has to be one of the smartest ideas I've seen come out of california in 20 years...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I cann haz siense?
That is all.
The special interests of which you speak are actually part of the CA statute, and have been since 1978
Actually I was thinking of the public sector unions more than anything else. You are looking at the funding side of things but not at the spending side.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I'm a teacher in a state far away from California, but I am interested in moving away from paper novels and eventually textbooks. Right now it's not economically feasible to do so, but I wonder if economy of scale would eventually drop the prices significantly to make it worth the initial investment.
I'm curious what hindrances/benefits the /. crowd sees in moving in this direction.
An important change for education.
While it sounds good, the logistics of providing access will be a nightmare. Simply expecting kids to have internet access / laptops won't cut it; that's a lawsuit waiting to happen. Books, while not cheap, are much more durable and can be expected to last a lot longer. The value of a 10 year old text as a teaching aid is suspect; but the life cycle costs is less than electronic.
Publishers now have a reason to update books more rapidly - remove the production costs for hardcover books and they can "outdate" books much faster; plus try to force per student per year licenses on districts.
Be careful what you wish for, you may get it.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
people with opinions can and do edit content. People with no discipline and over-sized egos can and do break into computer systems and edit content. I already don't like the idea of making my medical records available to the black market online; let alone giving the black market the ability to directly influence my children's learning capabilities. My neighborhood, city, state, country, and society have no business teaching my children anything unless I allow it. Period. No matter how fucked up people think that is.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
My first impression from this is: Arnold is passing off a pro-industry decision as a pro-California one. I am skeptical.
How much does it cost to actually print a textbook? For the time being, paper books are superior as a display medium, and it doesn't look like that's going to change in the next five years. (ten... maybe?)
But there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to print the online texts. Heck, a state as large as California ought to be able to commission its own textbooks as works for hire and print as many as they want.
If the marginal cost of actually manufacturing the book is so close to the price they're paying, then I really don't see how moving to online books helps in the near term, electronic devices for displaying texts just don't stand up to the kind of abuse that k-8 students will heap upon them without even realizing it. If the prices really are close, though, then maybe the textbook companies really aren't ripping them off...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Various pieces of research (such as http://www.sigchi.org/chi97/proceedings/paper/koh.htm) show that reading from a screen is not as effective for learning based activities as reading from paper. The major problems focus on reading from the screen being slower than reading from paper, the perception of text on-screen less accurately than paper and higher fatigue when reading from a screen than from paper due to the backlit screen. Furthermore, prolonged usage of screens can lead to eyestrain, a common argument for restricting children from watching T.V too much, and with most children already watching hours of TV/Games/YouTube etc, do parents really want them spending another 6+ hours per schoolday (plus homework) stuck in front of a screen?
just creating the website, putting those books online and maintaining them.
I would like to find out what the annual costs of maintaining such a system will also be.
I'm working on my PhD in History, and to help pay the bills I teach both classroom and online history courses. The institution I teach online courses for recently moved from requiring students to purchase the course text to providing them an online version with the class, while offering students the option to purchase custom hard copies. Students can purchase the full, hardback, color version, can select monochrome versions, or get paperback or plastic comb bindings. Sounds great, right?
Not so much.
The vendor provides students with a login ID and password for each student to use, which gets them access to the book for six months after the end of the course. The textbook website has integrated learning tools, skills assessments, maps, images, audio and video, etc... along with the text, which is properly paginated to go with my desk copy. Again, this stuff all sounds great. In practice, there are problems.
Students complain that it takes them double or triple the time to do their reading. Sending them login ID and password was a catastrophe, because they were provided by email, and not all students gave us the correct email address or knew that they had a school-supplied email address. This led the school to just embed a link to the text in our courses, which killed much of the interactivity built into the online text.
This ignores other problems. Student computer type and age, patch level, apps, skill level, whether they have their own machine, comfort with updating their computer, etc... have a huge effect on whether a student can successfully use an online text. I teach students that range from high school age into their sixties. Most of them are not comfortable troubleshooting problems, communicating problems, or even understanding that they have a problem. There are students whose parents won't let them install Flash or other media players on the family PC.
Unless Schwarzenegger is talking about providing all students with a Kindle DX (in color) or some similar device with free wireless broadband to access their texts, we're talking about huge administrative burdens, tech support burdens, and even financial burdens for families. The support ecosystem is just just not available for most folks to successfully use an online text for all of their courses.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. -- Jerry Pournelle
I see this as a quick fix, but it's using some strong medicine.
Putting it into .pdf form (or whatever form they might fancy) will only inhibit the ability to think. You can't write down notes in the margins, even if you can highlight sections of text. This is analogous to freehand drawing vs computer aided drawing (creativity vs productivity). The single exception I can think of is taking pictures out of the .pdf's (if the DRM allows it).
By suddenly moving away from textbooks, we're moving further away from an old part of the brain, which has aided us in learning ever since humanity learned to tell stories from wall paintings. In general, computers can inhibit the brain processes that aid us in mental growth, mostly because it prevents the mind from subconsciously dwelling on a topic for extended periods. Computerized reading devices (Kindle-type products) would fare much better, but those require an investment that California may not be willing to buck up.
I'm not saying this can't work, but I am saying that it would work for people who have adapted to it (which most of the system there has not). What I'm also saying is that creativity within the 'new school' students will plummet. For people to adapt best to this change in learning mediums, they should start from a young age. You can expect old dogs to learn new tricks works, but does it work well enough?
Something I will stress though: there will be people who cotton to this new medium fairly well, and there will be those who won't. I personally would feel that (if I were a child again) I would end up in the camp who wouldn't, mostly because of the subculture that will show up around this policy change. (I went through textbooks very quickly as a child, it wouldn't be in my interests to be "stuck with" the rest of the class simply because of DRM issues)
There will be good aspects to this though: social life will figure out ways to conform to these electronic resources. Instant messaging is proof of this.
Say what you will about doodles being good, or doodles being bad, or even a philosophical debate over things like television and such; but not everything that technology's subcultures has brought us has been benign. While this new policy does sound benign to the regular person, it will affect people both positively and negatively. It needs to be respected as a dual-edged sword, instead of a stress-borne whim.
There are no perfect answers, only the right questions. More questions at http://foresightandhindsight.blogspot.com/
If Hogwarts had e-books instead of dead-tree books, then Harry would never have been able to cheat in Potions class from Snape's childhood crib notes!
Please! Think of the children!
Why would anyone put all the weight of teaching materials out on the Internet when he won't pay for a descent level of redundancy to the Internet? California only pays for a primary link between site to site. If schools want a back up path, they have to pay full price for it. And this comes at a time where many are laid-off and budgets are slashed. Schools in California are taking one on the chin right now. This whole cloud computing idea is worthless when the links aren't up to par. Having a book in hand outweighs an Internet that you can't reach.
And when the school year is over, the books are passed to the younger students. Only when the material is updated, students will get new books.
If there is another system that hasn't had to raise spending in 30 years, I'd like to see it.
Gas prices have gone up, but the state can't raise taxes to pay for them, so they cut transportation services.
Costs of living have gone up, but the state can't raise taxes so they fire teachers.
CA has a system that is guaranteed to fail. I lived there for a long time, taxes are incredibly low, and services are incredibly shitty. Education is lousy (CA is below average in per-pupil spending, though above average in per-capita income), infrastructure is dangerously inadequate (CA is dead last in funds spent for transportation).
While the rest of the country was booming in the Clinton years, CA could'nt raise any revenue, and now they're paying for it.
Unless I haven't been paying attention, Geometry [...] hasn't changed much in the last few years
A proof of the Kepler conjecture (face-centered cubic is the closest packing of spheres) showed up about a decade ago.
Calculus
There have been several different formulations of calculus in terms of different infinitesimal frameworks, in addition to the traditional limits framework.
WWII
History gets longer every year: Cold War (Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Apollo program, breakup and reunification of Germany), Woodstock, Bosnia, WTO, EU, World Trade Center, Afghanistan, Iraq. And we appear to be heading for a Korean War II. And there's still research into how each side won or lost.
I am jealous of these people posting relead XKCD and Cyanide comics, so I will post a related episode from SMBC.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1535#comic
Ok, not soo much related probably. But, who cares? no one read this messages anyway.
-Woof woof woof!
I look at this as a opportunity for Kindle to sell the idea of using them instead of books. other than Amazon making a bundle on book sales, they would have a kindle in every students hands. Course if they broke the school could sell the student one for a profit.and the family could transfer the books to the new device. All I see with this idea is PROFIT, PROFIT, PROFIT
How about, instead, you 1) make kids pay when they damage books and 2) don't buy new editions every freaking year. Do algebra or "reading" really change that much from year to year that you need to buy a new edition each time it comes out?
Online textbooks will save you money in not having to buy paper textbooks. Instead you most likely have to buy a crapload of computers. And, oh, by the way, that's not a one-time cost, since computers break down, become obsolete, etc. Plus you have to deal with the issue of kids who don't have access to a computer/internet at home.
There is bankruptcy for municipalities, so they could possibly go bankrupt. I don't think it's ever been contemplated at a state level, though, or if that's even applicable to a whole state.
But then there's this:
I'd be doubtful that the bankruptcy court could do anything but modify terms of debts and contracts, and altering laws - even those pertaining to the tax codes - is probably not possible. Not a lawyer, though.
Could this start pushing some books out of the richer schools and into the hands of people who need them?
-
I've never seen a book crash.
I've never seen a book show a mysterious error message, or ask me to contact my administrator.
I've never seen a computer I could replace for under £20.
I've read - hell, I own - books older than the oldest personal computer in history. They still work.
I've seen plenty of books get wet, but once they're dry they're fine. Even if the pages are a little stiff.
I've never seen a book come delivered on the understanding I don't pass it on to anyone else once I'm done with it.
I've never seen a book which would stop working as soon as there was a power cut.
Nah, this is a silly idea. Technology for its' own sake is seldom the best answer.
There are many and growing examples of school districts abandoning text books entirely. The basic premise is that K-12 textbooks fundamentally contain public knowledge -- the only thing that is proprietary is word choice and presentation, much of which is discarded by the teacher anyway. Thus, the first way to get beyond textbooks is to allow teachers the freedom and control to serve up their own contact. Vail School District in Southern Arizona has developed a wonderful program called "Beyond Textbooks" that emphasizes teacher collaboration and curriculum sharing. This has countless ancillary benefits, all in addition to the most basic: saving countless dollars on textbook purchases.
Fact is that book will, in five years time, be as shitty as the other outdated data in the world.
Outdated in five years? Really? What exactly is being taught in high school these days cutting edge genetics or something?
Because Shakespeare hasn't changed in nearly 400 years. Classical mechanics, optics, Newton's laws, etc. haven't changed in hundreds of years either. I have a calculus book from the 1920s and it is still as relevant if not better than many calculus textbooks today. Kids should be learning fundamentals in high school. How to do math, how to read critically, how compose essays, etc. Books teaching those will not be outdated in five years or even fifty-five years.
The way I see it, textbooks will never go away. Much like our dependency on oil, textbooks help fuel the profits way too much for ALL involved.
Manufacturers wouldn't make them unless there was serious profit to be had, or major demand. Today, there is both.
Schools wouldn't buy them unless there was serious profit, to be had, which any student who found themselves pissed off in the book buyback line when offered a paltry sum of $10 for a book they paid $75 3 months ago.
Sorry, just don't see it happening until Congress outlaws the use of trees for printing.
A paper textbook has its advantages, for example: it doesn't require power (electricity, that is); it doesn't require an expensive electronic reader; it is not covered by DRM (I can lend it to a friend w/o RIAA et al. coming after me); and can be annotated with a pencil!
textbooks in any form are outdated anyway. any good teacher can come up with his own examples.
So no more little johnny getting his homework done in the car, or when he's stuck at grammas. And now we have to queue up behind his sisters and brothers while they do their homework on the one machine at home. That being said, and I haven't read the article, but the only way this would make any sense is if the state basically buys less books with an option to use an electronic one, somehow encouragine more people each year. You can't deny kids book access, and there are still quite a few people that don't own a computer. Especially in California which has a lot of low income immigrant workers. Education should be the great equalizer, not a divider between the haves and have-nots. This would actually be a great opportunity for the Kindle people to develop a cheap yet sturdy eBook platform. I would imagine that a massive sale like 'every student in california' be a pretty good bargaining to get a good deal. If they could sell it for ~$100/ea its probably well worth it. Or offer some sort of yearly lease or something else.
When I was a schoolboy in Communist Romania, textbooks were usually hardcovers, and were passed from a generation to the next for, I'd say, 5 years each. This is because children are not very good at caring for books, and especially textbooks. Many parents prefered buying new copies (I still have mine, and plan on using them with my boy, given that the quality of education lowers). As I think of it now, the approach seems quite OK.
No like this:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
Each state could even maintain their own wiki and have it the school board approve changes before they post. Why are we paying millions in tax dollars to publishing companies again? Can't they just die already?
The state can hire some people who know their stuff and get them to write the books.
One time sale.
Eternal use.
When the books need updating, pay another group of people to write the updated version.
Are you saying that the only people who would write textbooks work for publishers alone and for residuals only?
She works in the Palm Springs school district and so far the results are mixed and expensive.
Basically the school dumps down $35,000 of tax payer money into laptops that the students try to steal which break when you drop them. The software is all internet based so that means no filtering. For some reason the I.T. department can't figure out how to firewall all addresses besides the 2 or 3 needed for the programs. She was told it had to do with some activeX controls. This means the kids log into myspace, facebook, and other inappropriate web sites when no one is looking. This includes a few sites where a chick in her class thought it was funny to show a pic of herself topless. My wife didn't report it because she could be fired on spot. She tried banning htem after I told her how to filter them with a hosts file. The kids just google for proxies to get around that. This is a problem because the lawyers feel the teacher is 100% responsible 100% of all the viewing on all 30 laptops.
Anyway as a math teacher the students really need to practice on paper and its hard to graph functions and slopes on a computer as the students do not understand the concept. What is good about them is that students can finish their work early and then be done and browse the net. With books they have to wait because they can distract other students if they do any other activities.
My wife kind of likes it because its less work for her. Computer grades everything wtih a submit button. In practice she has had the lkaptop key stolen once or twice and had to put her classroom on lockdown to get them back and the issue of inappropriate websites keep becoming an issue. Schools do not have a budget for a real competent staff who could configure their routers tighter than a virgin's ass with blocking search engines and non educational websites.
http://saveie6.com/
Are you a troll? Or just confused?
Who writes in the margins? Public schools at least try to minimize that, because the books get reused for several years. You don't want next year's kids reading this year's notes. Actually writing the notes is more of a benefit than reading something someone else wrote last year. How does PDF inhibit the ability to think?
What's the difference to the brain in reading computer text vs. book text? Are you thinking that students won't be tempted to visit iTunes or chat while reading a book? Think twice - that notebook next to them is always on, they'll do it regardless. Plus kids are getting used to doing things online - it makes sense to move away from textbooks as long as there is some sort of "appreciating of dead tree reading" being taught somewhere. Maybe moving away from that old part of the brain (if that's not something you just pulled out of your butt) is a good thing and will benefit us. Go make a study and let us know what you think with science behind you, not superstition.
What? This is public school, starting from a young age. You are probably thinking this is college. Not the case.
You are correct about one thing - some will benefit from this change, some won't. Public education is like that, since you can't serve everyone's needs completely within a reasonable budget.
Your entire rant seems like a knee-jerk reaction to new technology. Would you kindly read it again and tell me if I'm really all that wrong?
Fundementals of Financial management
Basically a free book with ads online, a printable PDF version for a small fee ($9.95), a slightly larger fee ($14.95) without the ads and a modest printing cost for the full book ($24.95).
I got the printed book version. Pretty nice book to. It has no bar code but it does have an ISBN and it is marked "Not for Resale" But at under $30 including shipping I don't really care if I can resell it or not.
This business model seems to be new in the area of text books but I like it and hope it takes off. - SR
Run down infrastructure, run down education, and low taxes? Beaches as well? A wasted boom? California sounds a bit like Australia, except for the low tax bit. But we don't have a recession yet. Housing is 6-8x yearly income ... so I'm stocking up on tinned food, and practicing my dueling banjos.
People are talking about DRM and how it will be expensive and such..
Why doesn't the government commission the creation of new electronic text books and then give these out for free?
_That_ would be a cheap solution.
for most subjects there has to be a large contingent of teachers competent to write the basic textbook materials.
make it competitive. take best of breed. augment a teachers salary abundantly for the years their textbooks are used.
if they paid an extra 20k per year of textbok use it would utilize the teachers, lower the costs and make it fit in with school procedure/style better.
this is one area where the state should be able to do better than private industry. if private industry wants the contract, set a price and make them meet it. be prepared to walk.
Bankruptcy is the best thing that can happen to this state.
In grade school you are not expected to carry books home. They give out Readers or Workbooks which are cheaply printed and have just the take home materials in them. The textbooks stay in the class and get pulled out for reference and in-class use.
There is no good case for Textbooks at the grade school level.
California needs to negotiate a periodic license fee for a variety of material with optional updates. Purchase interactive white-boards which are simply big LCD displays with fairly cheap touch screen capability (doesn't need to be very accurate). Display lessons and material on these... with handouts as needed for supplementation and home study.
Grade school kids don't need textbooks at all. They need good teachers who can engage them in the lessons.
Junior High/Middle schools also do not need Textbooks but do need some form of personal access. Here they should have built-in units in the desks. Scratch resistant good touchscreens and a durable keyboard pad with a very basic OS that can handle accessing media, local network resources and a word processor nothing more. There is no access to the OS itself except the login prompt.
They don't need full access to the internet (or filtered access). Set up a proxy server that pulls in copies of various websites (wikipedia, discovery channel, etc) on a weekly basis. The teacher gets the same whiteboard but with full access to the internet to pull up current events or additional materials.
Again, handouts go home. These can be bulk printed to reduce costs each semester with a local printer. Each child still has the same access to learning materials as they've always had based on their families priorities. They can still stay after school to use the media desks, the library (with additional media desks) or ask the teacher questions.
High School takes Junior High and simply swaps out the media and provides more applications. High School doesn't need anything additional - never has. There are still computer labs for doing things on a computer - these are not computers, they are media desks.
Savings would include the Textbooks, all test taking materials and any costs related to Scantron type machines, any multi-media devices, a whole host of games and other learning materials that could be applications rather than physical items.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Interesting. I wonder why states don't simply print their own textbooks (beyond the screaming of, "unfair competition" from the publishing industry)? I mean, the states set the curriculum guidelines, why not go a step further and create and print them as well? Then the state can decide (based on budget, etc.) if the state textbooks need an update, or not.
... California buys their books statewide. So there's no particular need to worry about the East Podunk school district getting screwed over in comparison to, say, the LA school district. In fact, there's nearly a nationwide market in books: Texas and California decide, and the rest of the states go along with what they've decided, or cough up more money for their own versions. Guess which option most states choose. So California, does, in fact, have a lot of clout over publishers.
Furthermore, the entire curriculum could be on a CD (for those without internet) and distributed every year.
The biggest issue here is changing the infrastructure of the delivery of the information. Let's look closely at the lessons of the City of Munich and apply them at the state and school board level. Get rid of proprietary software for most users. Stabilize to a Linux-based platform (LTSP/OLPC?) and be done with huge hardware upgrade costs. Reduce (mostly eliminate) viruses. Give out older machines with OpenOffice and Linux to disadvantaged students. Level the playing field.
That's how you effect real change, but the reality is that it takes a huge will to do it. Long-term, the savings are permanent and irrefutable.
Knowledge is good.
*** Don't be dull.***
There are some excellent textbooks available online, with renowned authors standing behind them. Please start discovering the wondeful world of Textbook Revolution!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
With any luck, this will minimize the damage that Texas can do to the science curriculum of schools nation wide. You want stupid shit in your science book? Click the stupid shit radio button. You want real science? Click the real science radio button. We will be reporting your choice to national accreditation agencies. Have a nice school year.
Of all the courses to institute online texts, the sciences? I had nothing but issues with online material when I took Chem and Physics in college. The biggest issue wasn't the texts, though, it was the helper apps that came with it. In both courses, we submitted our homework online, which was automatically graded. This became a real issue when dealing with units, as the parser had the most obtuse formatting requirements. You'd end up with answers that looked like this when typed in:
(3)((NH[4])[2]SO[4]) ---> (2)(NH[4]OH) + (5)(SO[2])
I realize that's not a valid reaction, but it illustrates my point. I spent more time figuring out the damn formatting than I did solving the problems.
Problems came in sets of 5, so if you screwed up the formatting of one, you had to do them ALL over again (and they always changed the problems slightly). Same problem when dealing with complicated units in physics problems. The physics parser couldn't even handle spaces gracefully.
y[2] = 3.689 {(ft)*(lb)}/{(sec)^(2)} ---correct
y[2]=3.689 {(ft) * (lb)} / {(sec)^(2)} ---incorrect
I got so sick of the formatting issues that I wrote a little helper app to handle the formatting for me.
In some classes, though, having no textbook at all wasn't an issue. One professor taught all his courses via Powerpoint, so he just removed key words from the slides and printed out two hundred pages per student (400-student classes) at Kinkos (college bookstore charged a lot more to print copies). $20 a student and we were set.
Online texts may well be the future, but when it comes to math/science/engineering, the texts just aren't ready. Social sciences, sure (I took a few archaeology courses online with only a few issues stemming from Blackboard being the biggest POS in existence), but not hard sciences.
Open source textbook resources might be a way around dealing with uber-expensive licensing models. If even a fraction of the vitality seen on some open source projects were to be expended on open source textbooks, teachers would have some great resources at their disposal. The availability of a variety of approaches to explaining some of the basics (like middle school algebra) could make all the difference in the world to a kid who doesn't "get it" from the explanation in a single textbook. And those texts that need to be updated frequently, would be.
Furthermore, local control of the learning materials would be enhanced, as parents, teachers and school districts could decide what material is best-suited to their kids, rather than having some faceless group of ivory-tower bureaucrats in a far-off city deciding that for them.
Here are a few of the resources I found in a quick search -- I'm sure there are other projects out there.
> the internet is the best way to learn in classrooms
at least students will know about the birds and the bees now.
Poor underprivileged and poverty stricken students. No computer, no degree, no hope.
What if we just scale up FreeGeek, say to eleven?
I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but if you start with the FreeGeek mission statement:
[The FreeGeek mission is] to recycle technology
and provide access
to computers, the internet, education and job skills
in exchange for community service.
And you tweak that a little bit and get:
The California Universal Technology Enablers (CUTE) will
recycle technology
and provide access
to computers and the internet
for students
in exchange for community service
Any student would have the ability (maybe it will be a part of their computers & technology homework?) to spend time in a FreeGeek-ish community center helping to recycle technology and build computers for reuse. Students who do not have a computer at home would be able to receive a computer through this service. Students under a certain age would not work directly with the recycling aspects due to safety concerns, but they could help out with other tasks.
I'm not exactly sure how the Internet access problem would be solved, but in high-density enough areas some kind of ad-hoc mesh networking might be possible (although AFAIK community mesh networks tech isn't quite ready yet).
The problem is that in order to make this plan work you'd need a lot of time and energy from the community. And you'd need it to happy in not just one town, but in each town or part of a big city all across California. People would need to step up bigtime to make something like that happen, and with the current finances of the state government these community organizations could have trouble getting off the ground without initial injections of cash.
coding is life
No, really, please.
Buy my house.
One of the problems with online textbooks is that they lack any sensile association. Sensile associations help people remember. Remember the smell of that musty textbook, and you have a much better chance of recalling what was in that musty textbook. Remember the feel of that shiny textbook page, you are more likely to recall what was on the page. If we cut out the sensile area of recall, all the evidence I've seen points to lower retention and poorer learning of subjects.
I'm participating in the CLRN Free Digital Textbook Initiative as the author of a physics book. When this was discussed on slashdot recently, I posted skeptically. The same day, I got an email from Brian Bridges, the director of CLRN, saying that he'd seen my slashdot post, and he wanted to reassure me that it really was going to happen. They'd already made a list of potential candidates who they wanted submissions from, and I was on it. I had to go through my books and figure out how they correlated with the list of topics (Word document) that the state standards say are supposed to be covered in high school physics. Then there was a process where I had to set up an account on their server, fill out some online forms, and upload the Word file showing how my topics correlated with the standards.
There does seem to be somewhat of a fog of uncertainty surrounding this whole thing. One thing I've noticed is that although Schwarzenegger has named three top-level state education officials who are supposed to carry this out, some of these people are actually his political opponents. In case anyone hasn't noticed, this is all motivated by the hellish California state budget situation. This article has some useful information about California's dysfunctional textbook selection system, and a previous, unsuccessful free-textbook effort called COSTP, where the state tried to produce a history textbook via wikibooks.org. The present effort seems to be doing a pretty good job of eliminating the bureaucratic obstacles; Bridges sent me a detailed email explaining how to fill out all the forms, saying what it was safe to leave blank, etc.
One thing that I wasn't very clear on before was whether they envisioned this as something that would involve traditional textbook publishers, individual authors who'd put their own stuff on the web, or both. Although I'm sure they don't want to arbitrarily tell certain private entities, like the traditional publishers, that they can't participate, it seems clear to me now that it's aimed at the nontraditional folks like me. Note the word "free" in the name of the initiative. No traditional publisher is going to give their book away for free in digital form. It's true that the big college and high school textbook publishers are very actively involved in an effort to distribute a lot of their books in digital form, but not for free. From what I've observed at the community college where I teach, the idea seems to be to get students to rent DRM'd textbooks. When the student stops paying the rent, they can no longer use the book. This would have the effect of eliminating the used book market, which the publishers hate with a passion. (That's the reason they bring out new editions so frequently.) So no, I don't think any traditional publishers will participate. The general picture really does seem to be that they're doing this as an alternative to the traditional publishers. Further circumstantial evidence comes from the fact that the state has already tried to do a collaboration with wikibooks. One big question in my mind is whether there will be a giant push-back from the traditional publishers to keep this from happening. Seems like a no-brainer if it really advances to the stage where their market is threatened.
A lot of the slashdot posts so far have been about the issue of how students will access the books. Since the initiative has "Free" in the name, I don't think we're going to see too many barriers to access here (rentals, DRM, logging in to a web site to access the book, etc.). Taking my own books as
Find free books.
While they are expensive and get outdated, one of the biggest problems is that people aren't held accountable for the books. They destroy or lose them and the only thing that happens, in most cases, is that they get another copy. Schools order way more than they really need, and often times just sit in a closet somewhere, while other schools in the district have to order more new books because nobody knows what is actually already available. A better solution is to implement a usable tracking system, preferably one that supports both physical and electronic formats. Implement policies within the districts that hold students/parents accountable for the textbooks. If you lose/destroy the textbook, you pay for it, after a price adjustment for normal wear and tear.
Put Microsoft over a barrel for once.
California should tell Microsoft they have to pay for the textbooks and the netbooks that they will be used on.
If Microsoft agrees, then the netbooks will run Windows. If they won't do it, then the netbooks will run Linux.
At stake are generations of school children who will grow up with a familiarity and probably preference for the operating system their textbooks were presented on.
I think Microsoft would pay big money for access to that target market.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
First they need to solve the problem with publisher's copyright.
In Brazil, my home state (ParanÃ) made a project of open textbooks. The government pay teachers to write copyright free textbooks
for hight school. For what I heard they have a good quality control and they are distributed for free in public schools. They are also freely available in PDF, but they are in portuguese.
From what i've seen, eBooks aren't significantly cheaper than paperbacks and usually not much less than hardbacks.
Hopefully the californian system is big enough that they can recruit teachers within their own ranks to create their own open set of books, then they can drop the licensing costs which will otherwise surely cripple the system.
"Or are they going to supply the kids with Kindles or something?"
Get the struggling newspapers to fund that endeavor. Or just Amazon as a tax write off.
When I was in school, Pluto was still a planet, and nobody heard of a Kuiper Belt.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
This is just a way for the gov to bargen down the cost of the books by telling publishers "we dont realy need you". next month (hopefully) the publishers will half the costs of the books and all will be as before.
Basic used hardware: under $100 for something in the 1GHz range
Old CRT monitor: $20
USB drive to transfer the textbook / notes from school (instead of monthly Internet access): $5
Anyone with rudimentary access to freecycle or kijiji or the local classified ads can easily find a practical "work" system. At $125 or far less, this is well within the reach of anyone but the most poverty-stricken.
A professor at a college will write a book then require his and future classes he/she teaches to purchase the book. There is something fundamentally wrong with this.
If I write a book, require my students to buy and read it then "teach" from it, isn't this restricting free thinking?
Furthermore a professor gets a base pay and also publishing rights and a paid for audience.
As foreseen by Cory Doctorow in Little Brother !
Gotta run! I'm late for Harajuku Fun Madness!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Dude, we're talking K-12 textbooks here, not college. So:
There is no "book buyback line", and they didn't pay 75 bucks at the beginning of the semester. They got it issued to them, and they'll turn it back in at the end of the course. What's more, the state of California is a seriously big textbook buyer, and they can no doubt get good terms from publishers based on the enormous amount of business they'd be bringing. The question is purely whether, all things considered, it's cheaper for the state to provide a cheap netbook (which they'll have to do) and electronic course material; or the traditional textbook. They seem to have done the math and found that the electronic version is cheaper.
... we can now ensure that kids and adolescents have vision problems as a result of staring at screens for too long. In addition, we will spend at least twice the money to start this program while pretending that we're saving money.
Cue utopian-fantasy programs that will not, or at least should not, ever see the light of day - and yet, it still pacifies the angry population. Somehow.
I can admit though - it would be interesting if the schooling system could implement things like: checking your kids progress or grades online, seeing what they're going over in class (at any given point in time) - tools that would help both the children and their parents. While these things are indeed possible at the moment, perhaps a more efficient system would benefit everyone - and also encourage more parents to be actively involved in their child's education.
1. Google textbook name + torrent. 2. Follow link. 3. Download.
mmmm...forbidden donut
And it can be bigger then this:
http://harns.blogspot.com/2008/07/so-obvious-and-yet-so-not-done.html
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Agreed. I think the tech in everyone here is not going for the best solution, just the most complicated one. For the purposes at hand why does it need to be a computer? As for the costs? Aside from the charitable donation angle, California can pair with the newspaper industry, for both are trying to solve a similar problem with a similar solution. Hell they can pair with other states that are likewise having budget deficits. Why does the costs of ebooks have to be born just by California?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
That's all this is. Shifting the cost from paper to silicon. There's no long term savings -twenty percent of laptop computers are damaged or destroyed by students in a three year period. Allow them to take them off-campus -factor in another ten percent for loss/theft. Then there will be the inevitable five percent that just fail from a hardware standpoint and will have to be replaced or repaired. Then there is the cost to provide Internet access via 3G wireless or some other means -don't expect the parent's to pay for that. Textbooks last a lot longer and are essentially maintenance-free -plus the libraries at schools will charge for loss or damage to the books. So basically it comes down to no savings for the taxpayers and it's just a way for Schwarzenegger to look like a hero -in real life.
Sig this!
that they'll use peer to peer for downloading teir textbooks ? ;-)
Schwarzenegger believes internet (sic) activities such as Facebook, Twitter and downloading to iPods show that young people are the first to adopt new online technologies and that the internet (sic) is the best way to learn in classrooms ...
Close. The Internet is not necessarily the "best" way to learn, but it is a method easily dismissed by most teachers and administrators. Administration, however, spends more time trying to figure out how to BLOCK these technologies instead of trying to figure out how to successfully implement them into the curriculum.
"While they are expensive and get outdated, one of the biggest problems is that people aren't held accountable for the books."
The problem I have with the "cake and eat it too" statement above is that one of the commonest complaints about publishers is that they make frequent, but trivial changes and release a new edition. Then someone usually asks, how often does math or science change? So really the question that should be asked is, how often does a given subject matter change, and is it applicable to a particular audience?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
, and just as valid, If they replaced the 'analog' printed books with digital CD/DVD media, with the book 'content' in a standards-based, open format.
While still having the benefit of massive cost-savings in terms of paper and binding, and printing, as well as not being 'heavy' (I'm sure the books for an entire semester would easily fit on a handful of DVDROMs), there would also be the benefits of:
1. The student actually gets to keep the books after their term ends, or optionally sell them to an incoming student.
2. The college isn't forcing any specific brands of software or operating systems on students
3. Far easier to make a backup copy, in case the originally issued discs get damaged.
Now of course, the book publishers may not like this, because they don't get to charge over and over for the same content.
As a solution, I suggest that instead of having to separately purchase books, an amount be added to the tuition (not nearly as much as the current purchase-new cost of printed books, since the publisher would be avoiding all those costs) to cover 'book fees' for each student, which gives them the right to access any book which they either currently taking a class for, and once the have taken the class gives them the right to keep a copy (of that specific edition) afterwards. They can either pay media(blank DVD) and duplication costs to a college service, or they can do it themselves. There's no loss with them giving copies to new students, because new students will have paid the fees anyway. There's no worry them selling them anywhere else, since who buys textbooks except college students?
This would make sense, while priving benefits to the students, the publishers, and the colleges. Unfortunately, that pretty much guarantees nothing like it will ever see the light of day.
Getting rid of the physical book format eliminates a lot of costs, as well as tremendous barriers to entry. Anybody can now write and publish a school textbook that California can use. This presents a wonderful opportunity for Creative Commons licensing.
I have a hard time understanding why any state would buy copyrighted books. It seems to me that states would be better off if they commissioned for hire textbooks and published those books with a creative commons license. Once the books were available to all for edit and modification, people could refine the content and modify it for the future.
This might not work at first for politically charged stuff like English and the social sciences, but it would be really interesting to try with math, the hard sciences, and the practical arts.
The debate over content would be really fascinating to watch!
Paper based books are still the preferred way of reading materials, but e-books perform two very unique functions for us:
Foreign newspapers: Students get to read foreign newspapers translated to English daily. It is difficult to do this with traditional papers. Some foreign newspapers are not even offered in North America.
Text to speech: Dyslexic students love voice assisted reading. It helps them just enough to encourage them to read harder materials than they would on their own.
Yes, they are expensive, and they are not spill resistant, but this interesting bit of technology does have it's uses.
I am skeptical about an e-books ability to replace all printed texts.
-ted
in place of those pesky text books that use a proprietary docking port for data loading. Don't give em network access and have them all be the same. Advantage is that students always have the current textbooks on the things and the schools have a unified format for ensuring that all students have the same text books based upon their classes.
In the event of breakage or other hardware failure, simply have a location where students can take them for replacement on campus. This ensures that the units given are then loaded with their textbooks and any reading assignments while getting the failed unit in for repair/replacement.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
How about harnessing the power of something like WikiBooks -- but rather than using online access, school districts could print relatively inexpensive paper copies using a contract printing service. Those who don't have the money to afford Internet-enabled devices can use what's tried and true, and the various districts wouldn't be saddled with supporting more infrastructure when they can barely handle what they have already.
Note: I only used WikiBooks as a for-instance; currently, most subject areas seem a bit half-baked to be used in schools.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
High school students these days if I recall *have* to do community service to graduate.
Not all school curriculums require community service. Personally, I find service-based education to be hypocritical, because: a) education is mandatory (in the US), and b) requiring voluntarism really negates the entire notion of voluntarism. If you are volunteering to do something, but are only doing so because you are forced to, it really isn't volunteering anymore now is it?
Service-based education is a waste of my child's time. I don't need a community to teach my child what its standards are through forced labor, thanks.
There was a time when the idea of calling Internet access a "utility" rubbed me the wrong way. But as times have changed, I'm starting to agree more and more with taking that view of it. After all, electricity wasn't something it was fair to assume was in everyone's home, at one point in time. What about those poor school students back then, who wouldn't have sufficient light to read their textbooks by and do homework by after the sun went down? Was it fair to issue them printed books, forcing them to make do with candle-light or oil lamps?
I know where I live, there are quite a few people living in "ghetto" neighborhoods, who barely have money to keep their roofs over their heads, yet they've got broadband DSL Internet access. That's because they receive it at a subsidized rate. (There's that little regulatory fee you pay each month on your AT&T DSL bill that goes to that sort of thing.)
And sure, they may not be able to afford a *new* computer, but come on! A quick look on Craigslist on any day of the week will net you literally hundreds of "for sale" ads with people trying to unload a perfectly good used Dell, HP or other desktop PC complete with monitor for $50-75. Practically everyone I know into computers as a hobby has at least 1 or 2 extra computers sitting in a closet or garage that they'd happily DONATE for free to someone in need.
Well good job on all the above but an important question needs to be asked in all these E-initiatives. Who's in charge of making certain that quality standards are being upheld in the creation of educational material?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
If done properly, an electronic textbook can provide a far superior learning experience over the conventional paper variety. Graphical material, especially images, are expensive to print, but an electronic image is trivial to reproduce even in very high resolution. Lots of images, almost needless to say, can highly augments the learning process. More important, electronic texts can easily (hence cheaply) include animation and other multimedia content, which for subjects like science and mathematics, can significantly stimulate learning. Paper textbooks can only be supplemented with multimedia content through very cumbersome external methods.
The electronic textbook is an opportunity to elevate common education to a new, an far better, standard.
That isn't a huge problem ... having tech support for every single kid in school as long as there are no short-fuse requirements.
Hey teacher, I couldn't study for the final because my computer crashed.
technology soes not help a person to learn how to THINK.
THINKING helps a person learn via practice how to think.
Tax set to 1% of assessed value.
Assessed Value may only increase 2% per year.
When ownership changes, then the assessed value is reset to the market value.
Goto step 1.
This is a sensible and fair system that keeps people from being taxed out of their homes.
CA's problem is not lack of revenue, it is spending too much.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
If there is another system that hasn't had to raise spending in 30 years, I'd like to see it.
I don't have a problem with spending going up. Obviously that's going to happen. Inflation if nothing else.
I have a problem when spending goes up by several times the inflation rate. NYS just passed a budget that increased spending four times over the inflation rate, using BHO's stimulus money. Before the stimulus money the state was flat broke and looking at cuts. Once they got it they decided to have a massive spending increase, thus kicking the eventual insolvency further down the road.
California has been doing the same for years.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
No special e-text readers are needed. Any O/S that can view a web-page can view the books. Chapters are broken out into readable (printable) sections. It works in Corporate America....
~RG
I dont know that eliminating text books will save any money in the short term (long term it will, with cheaper and cheaper computers and handheld devices).
But what excites me is the idea that, now, "books" can be updated constantly. Sure, the existing book companies are going to want to control this. But eventually (maybe immediately) teachers are going to start making changes to the texts. Ultimately, these learning materials should be written 100% by the teachers who actually use them (and tested by actual usage by the kids with immediate feedback and changes to the teachers). The book companies arent going to like this and they will suffer the same fate as the record companies will face... change their business model or die.
don't get me wrong, I love books. But books are probably better suited to things that dont change, like stories, and not so much learning materials that ideally should be constantly updated.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
Well, if it works it'll create an new avenue through which to assault some of the corruption degrading our education systems. Text-book publishing is a giant scam. Removing the heavy overhead of print-based publishing could significantly increase competition. Perhaps schools will be able to focus on purchasing content rather than page-count. Is it too much to hope that we won't see quite so many products purchased without proof-reading? Maybe we'll see an end to needing to drop $150 for a "revised 5th edition" copy to replace the old "5th edition" copy of a book because it updates 3 typographical errors. Wouldn't that be a trip? That's not even getting started on the potential for interactive content presents over static text and diagrams.
I've attended an online university for some time, and they recently decided to move to eBooks because the university covers the cost of the texts.
Ebooks are TERRIBLE for study. You have to be in front of a computer to study, it is hard to highlight and annotate, it is a strain on the eyes, and it is not as easily portable as people think. I had to resort to loading them on my iPhone but that became a problem when I realized there's really very little out there that allows you to bookmark PDF's and I ended up scrolling through dozens of pages to get back at where I was.
I suggested to my university that they invest on subsidizing a good PDF reader, even if it's the Kindle DX. I have yet to hear from them.
The funniest part to me was that they cited "inflation" as the reason why they moved to eBooks. I think that's silly, since inflation affects ALL prices, not just conventional or physical ones.
Don't do it California! We all know the only reason the Governator is pushing tech like this is to get more information online for skynet to absorb. And when skynet takes the internet from us we will become hopelessly uneducated and helpless to resist.
I am currently a Junior at College and I have witnessed fellow classmates file sharing movies, music and textbooks. Students and even some instructors, download and share copies of the text books used in class. Some students never buy the ink and paper versions and just download a copy off a p2p network or some site.
I also had a phenomenal physics instructor who prints and sells his own supplemental materials for his classes. His materials are still a work in progress, but in some of his classes we almost exclusively use his materials, which I often find equivalent to or greater than the standard textbooks. His 'books' costs anywhere from $7 to $30, far less than the standard $70 to $130 text books. He is also working on publishing all his materials online for the students to use.
My neighbor didn't check before he started digging in his yard. (In Illinois we'd say someone didn't "call JULIE". "JULIE" = Joint Utility Locating Information for Excavators in case you're wondering.)
The DoS ate my homework.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Why are they even paying for texts in the first place?
I would be enough geeks like us could write better math, science, and possible other texts then are sold old-style.
Time for Open Source texts to kill off the Text Book mafia system...
What better way to conduct revisionist history - with literally no paper trail! Someone's in the running for a Big Brother Lifetime Achievement award for this idea.
how to help kill that pesky second hand text-book market. Now people will get to pay full retail _every_ year with no cost-cutting options.
Genius - keeps the IP business alive and kicking.
School textbooks in California face a far more complex problem than the up front cost of books from publishers. We have some of the toughest and byzantine textbook requirements in the country. This has contributed to us paying ridiculous prices for textbooks since fewer publishers want to even try selling the state new books. To compound this problem the textbook review process has been co-opted by a variety of special interest groups which increases requirements of publishers even further. This factor has also led to a lobotomization of actual content in textbooks, these SIGs demand history be white washed and reading material not be too stimulating. If we can break down the book approval/purchasing system into a more rational one we'll immediately save some money since we'll have actual competition between different publishers for our business.
The costs of paper books is a bit of a red herring. The emphasis in these sorts of comments tends to be on the paper part as if paper was somehow amazingly expensive or a fundamentally poor medium. The printing and materials cost of textbooks is a tiny fraction of their cover price. Our approval process puts up large barriers of entry for publishers meaning that only larger publishers with a plethora of reviews and revisions will ever get adopted. This added overhead increases the non-printing portion of the book's production cost which in turn is added to the cover price. If we just switched from a paper version of a book from ABC Publishing to the online version the only money saved would be the physical production price which is relatively small. A $100 would end up turning into a $90 book.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Many people have complained that textbooks online are not going to be cheaper, easier, or as friendly as printed books.
If I had a pdf of a text book that I could legally print out and give to my students, then I could print them myself, and still provide them with books for a fraction of what their current text book costs.
And I could fix them - if say, someone spilled juice on pages 8-20, I could reprint just those pages, or when someone spots a typo, or just plain wrong information, then I could update just that part.
Plus those students who can read an electronic version can have a copy for home and leave the printed version in class.
And they could keep a copy for their entire life, if they ever wanted to refer back to it.
Have any of you even read TFA? Of course not this is slashdot... The second link contains more interesting information, so I suggest everyone checks it out. But for the lazy...
Across the state and around the world, well-respected educators have designed customizable texts to meet the unique needs of their students. Federal grants have funded research that is free for public use. And now California has put out an initial call to content developers, asking that they submit high school math and science digital texts for our review. We hope the floodgates are open. We'll ensure the digital texts meet and exceed California's rigorous academic standards, and we'll post the results of our review online as a reference for high school districts to use in time for fall 2009.
First of all, this is for math(s) and science textbooks only. So don't worry about cuddling up with your English lit stuff on the couch, you can still do that. Second, this is an open call for submissions which will be up for approval. This most likely means that if there are honestly no satisfying submissions, this idea may get scrapped/postponed.
I think if these were down to earth, non-drm, popular/flexible format based ebooks that are not stuck in online-only mode and are downloadable, then there shouldn't be too many problems. Yeah, I'm curious about many of the infrastructure issues, such as delivery, storage, etc... as well as the business model that will be behind the acquirement of these textbooks. But many of the comments I've read here seemed to be really ignorant of the above paragraph which I think negates half of the concerns I've read about so far.
Last year, the state earmarked $350 million for school books and other instructional materials. Imagine the savings schools could realize by using these high-quality, free resources.
So reading further, and seeing the above statement sheds some more light on my first quote. It sounds like the state is expecting the submitted learning material to be "donated" for the cause of education. Meaning no publishers and no money involved in acquiring it. So all that's left is storage/delivery/viewing infrastructure. This is looking more promising now (just hinging on the availability of quality free educational content).
However, there are those who ardently defend the status quo, claiming our vision of providing learning materials to students for free would risk a high-quality education. ... That's nonsense. As the music and newspaper industries will attest, those who adapt quickly to changing consumer and business demands will thrive in our increasingly digital society and worldwide economy. Digital textbooks can help us achieve those goals and ensure that California's students continue to thrive in the global marketplace.
Again, more mention of FREE.
I don't live in California, but I recognize that the education system in the entire country is in shambles. I'm personally glad to see ideas like these being pushed around, and not only that but actually looking like they'll get implemented and not just talked about. While it's not mentioned explicitly, this sounds to me like it's talking about k-12 education. So all of you who only remember the university environment, please realize that k-12 is different. The textbooks were never yours to begin with. Hell, I'm from Florida and sometimes my school didn't have enough textbooks to give one to each student to take home. So yes, we only used them in class. Homework was improvised... photocopy, worksheets, etc...
Sure, I'm a computer geek...I spend countless hours every day reading online resources. But you can't replace the textbook. It's much easier to focus on what's on the page without being distracted when it's in book form, it never runs out of batteries, and it's just easier to use. There is no eReader in existence that comes close to how easy it is to use a book. Whenever there's a paper that's really important, I still have to print it out...to get a physical copy of it that I can feel and write notes on in the margins. I just cant focus on it when its on a computer screen and I can't interact with it in that way. Adobe's markup options are not the same. I'm not the only one. I know a lot of people who prefer to print off their PDF's before giving them a thorough read. Switching over to e-textbooks is a death sentence for learning.
I can promise you we didn't get into the Kepler conjecture when I was in high school
I seem to remember my chemistry teacher mentioning Kepler in the unit on crystal structures.
The calculus stuff you mention is probably really interesting to number theorists
The proponents of some other formulations of infinitesimals claim that their non-standard analysis makes teaching pre-calculus and calculus I easier.
but I doubt it really matters to your average high school student (who, realistically, is probably not taking calculus anyway)
I guess my perception is distorted because I took the AP track instead of the average track in high school. An AP math student takes algebra I in 8th grade, geometry and some of algebra II in 9th grade, the rest of algebra II and some trigonometry in 10th grade, more trig and pre-calculus in 11th grade, and calculus I in 12th grade.
I can understand some subjects benefitting from textbooks but things like math can be taught from a blackboard by a competent teacher (I guess that might be one obstacle though). There are plenty of free online worksheet generators, so that shouldn't be a problem either.
My goodness...so many people talking about the cost of books being spread out over years vs printing costs every year. It's almost like y'all haven't been following the budget crises in CA at all...they expect to be a 'penny wise and pound foolish' because they need the pennies now. All ideas that save money now are viable regardless of whether they will cost more next year. Also it is expected they will make the major changes to things that have large groups behind them (such as schools.) That way if something goes wrong, they can be corrected easily.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
After reading over many of the comments, I was struck by the parallels between the possibilities of online textbooks and the realities of genetically modified canola. Monsanto has made quite a bit of money profiting from publicly-funded canola research. They have a patent for their GE canola, and will sue for infringement of this patent if they discover their GE seeds in your field (how do they know? They just steal some and hit you with a law suit later). There's actually an article on Slashdot regarding this strange phenomenon: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/01/03/30/146227/Can-I-See-Your-License-for-those-Plants-Sir?art_pos=3
But the best part is that this company has rights to investigate your fields three years after you purchase their seeds (to make sure you didn't keep any).
Monsanto sells GE canola. Monsanto also sells Roundup herbicide. Funny thing, the GE canola only "works" if you use Monsanto's herbicide. The company is also working on creating a self-terminating GE plant, so you can't replant their seeds even if you wanted to.
It's a scary thing, and it might be exactly what this online textbook turns into:
1) Use the company's secondary resources to ensure your primary resources work.
2) Reselling, saving or recycling the material is prohibited.
3) Being sued when you attempt to save a "textbook" or resell it.
When you -own- the books, you don't mind marking it up. Whether you do it for easier note-taking, or better information absorption, or whatever, it's still helpful. Books from the past are also entertaining to look at, because you see "oh, so that's how good my handwriting was" and things like that. It's much more personal. PDFs would have a very hard time matching that, simply due to the nature of the technology.
The difference between reading on a laptop vs out of a book is the same difference between going outside and staying inside. Yes, the outside is 'always there', but a stereotypical nerd doesn't usually go there without a task to do, right? When things are out of the mind of the individual, they tend to do different things.
Go make a study and let us know what you think with science behind you, not superstition.
Try gardening, and tell me that there's not a part of humanity that isn't connected to the ground. Hunting is the same way, and there's no reason why story telling is any different. This is practical experience, not superstition, and science can back it up; I simply haven't bothered to do my own empirical tests on my own observations. (study the effects of color on the psyche sometime!)
College-goers can most likely afford a Kindle-knockoff sooner than the average grade schooler. The incentives are there, as well as the reasoning (fewer books to carry everywhere? why not?) It doesn't mean it makes good sense if it throws their study habits out of the window though. At the age of middle school, things like History, English, and Math tend to be very book-bound. If I had to make textbooks obsolete, I'd start at that age, on those subjects, because it's at that age that study habits can be built from the ground up.
Your entire rant seems like a knee-jerk reaction to new technology. Would you kindly read it again and tell me if I'm really all that wrong?
I enjoy new technology quite a bit, but I'm observant enough to see that it can also be more than what we bargain for. Newer isn't always better, as old, good technology (the functional good, not the sentimental good) can attest. Perhaps it was a knee-jerk reaction, and for that I'll apologize, but it doesn't mean I'm wrong, or that your judgment of my post is wrong.
I simply don't enjoy wallowing in an intellectual quagmire. "What's the difference" is a world of difference for people who care.
There are no perfect answers, only the right questions. More questions at http://foresightandhindsight.blogspot.com/
The "rm" thing was a very basic example, perhaps a poor one to use on this audience.
If I handed you a laptop and didn't explicitly give you root.. how long would it be before you rooted the system? We're talking about kids here, I definitely would have rooted it, or at least tried my best.. and If I have physical access, it -will- happen.
On one hand, +1 for enabling hackerdom, on the other hand, it's a PITA for the school boards that will have to run tech support for said laptops.. even if you, the student, keep it intact, they will still want to nuke and wipe them after every student... and I've had the fortune of working with the local school board (I work for the ISP that does their transport).. They are good people, but their infrastructure is woefully out of date, and they usually have a lack of personnel available for tech purposes.
Sure, we can just dump a crap load of inexpensive Kindles/laptops/PCs or whatever and walk away.. but, as much as I hate to use it, think TCO.
With a book, you pick it up, look at it.. if it doesn't smell bad, you shelve it for next year.. about a 10s per book job for a relative unskilled worker.
With a laptop, the easiest thing to will be just
wipe the sucker and hope all the H/W still works good. While not a highly technical job, it still takes someone that knows what they are doing.
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
Having had experience with printing for years printing on demand is considerably more expensive than conventional offset printing at least when such large numbers are involved. This is assuming, of course, that they will be printing hard copies of electronic textbooks which they almost certainly will.
Of course, whatever vendor provides the service will almost definitely charge as much, if not more for this service than a traditional text book publisher would. The real problem here is that publishers seriously overcharge for their books. But ultimately that is the fault of buyers, in this case the schools, who don't bother shopping around and don't make any demands of the publishers. There's no need for expensive 4-color printing. There's no need for hard covers. Take a look at textbooks overseas and it because quite apparent how wasteful and overdone American textbooks are. And let's not forget that for many courses there's no need whatsoever to always acquire the latest edition.
I have friends who are already forced to use online textbooks for class and they hate it. They're accessed via a restrictive, convoluted interface. And it's far more difficult to read a computer screen than a sheet of paper. If you're ultimately going to just print the thing out why not provide the damn printed textbook to begin with?
And lets not forget that the last thing kids need is yet another distraction. It is already bad enough with my the college kids in the class I taught screwing around on chat and social networking sites during class. Imagine how much worse it would be with kids in elementary and high school. Then there's the maintenance of the computers themselves. Even college kids completely trash their machines. The university where I taught provides many, if not all, of their students with laptops and by the end of the year most of them are trashed because they're so battered.
In every possible way I can see this is pure stupidity and a complete and utter waste.
This is about high school textbooks, which you don't own. If you mark it up too much or cause other damage, you have to pay to replace that book. I like real books, but we're not talking about all books here. They will still be around as long as there is demand.
I garden, I don't hunt, and I'm well aware of the influence of color. You're saying humans are somehow attached to books - they have only been around since the invention of the printing press. I find gardening to be completely unconnected with humanity. We had to adapt to the world and developed agrarian society in response to the need for food. We didn't tend plants for decorative purposes. "Connected to the ground" in terms of needing food, sure. Creating a jungle-like oasis by surround our houses with greenery to recreate the natural environment of the undeveloped territory in which we lived for hundreds of thousands of years makes sense, however irrelevant. But "moving away from an old part of the brain" because we're moving text into the digital realm? The same place lots of people get their news and entertainment already? Weren't we moving away from an old part of the brain when we invented books and replaced scrolls? Or when we invented scrolls and stopped writing on walls? Or how about when we started writing on walls? I could make the same arguments against wall-paintings, because it was a disturbance which forever changed the course of human history.
Can science really back that up? If so, the people behind this plan need to know, and if you have anything of the sort to share it would benefit all of California's high school science students to do so. I'm fairly certain the "To Kill a Mockingbird" required reading won't use online texts - students will be handed a book. The publishing industry will fight against that like crazed badgers, since we are no longer talking about textbooks. You can't hand out millions of digital copies of an actual meant-to-be-enjoyed book and NOT have some serious problems with that industry, and that's not a part of this plan. Textbooks are, which are meant to be consumed by schools.
We're not making books obsolete. We're replacing high school science texts and being able to accommodate fixing things like typos and other errors that happen. Typically it is 5-10 years before those things get fixed, depending on the state, because of the textbook purchase cycle. The opportunity is here to fix that. Even if all textbooks go electronic we're not making books obsolete.
There is a difference, of course. Some people like a real book, others don't care. You'll have people on both sides. Based on the discussion at hand, none of your other points are relevant. Notes in the margins don't matter - that's a personal preference of yours, books have nothing to do with wall paintings and story telling, "creativity will plummet" is completely unsubstantiated, "start from a young age" contradicts the idea that older students will be better able to cope with t
"I'm confused by the subject line you wrote, "I'm participating in this as QA," versus the question asked in your post. Are you participating in QA? If so, then I'm not clear on why you're asking the question, rather than sharing your experiences. "
No I'm not in California QA. The title modification is an old tradition going back a number of years before I had an account. It makes my post distinctive (read easy to find). I also either make it humorous or related in some way to the subject of my post. In this case the matter of QA. It doesn't make "me" a member of QA. I'd put something like that in the subject if I was.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Several years ago I taught American history and world geography in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. The school did not have enough textbooks for every child, so only the one with real learning disabilities got their own text that they could take home. Everyone else only had the textbook that I handed out at the beginning of each class and collected at the end. I had a cart that I used to transport 30-35 of each text from classroom to classroom. (It was a heavy-duty cart that lasted the entire school year.)
Additionally, though I chose the better of the two American history texts that the school owned, I did not care much for it and made extensive use of photocopied handouts from "The American Pageant", a text I purchased from Amazon.com with my own money.
My niece who is entering 9th grade had an advanced math text of her own this last year, but no history text at all. My other niece, entering 7th grade, may have had textbooks but never had to bring them home because all homework assignments were on photocopied handouts.
Too bad for the textbook publishers, but they are in the same boat as newspaper publishers -- they are rapidly losing all their customers.
Received this in my mailbox. It's just a peripheral but it is a demonstration of how the right tool can make the learning process easier. Part of the success of the California project will be matching the right tool with the right problem.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
A Sony PRS 505 can be had for $200.00
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
I think this is awesome.. people already use netbooks/laptops/e-ink books, they already use computers and internet extensively, so this is just a great extension, and as others have pointed out, in a pinch, you can print out what you need more cheaply.
- add into the mix open source educational information, which must be on the horizon soon, and you get the best of everything at a much cheaper price.
I'm always surprised at how Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to actually be a decent governator who really is trying to do the right thing for as many people as possible. He's the only republican who I can point to and say "that guy is actually doing the right thing". Kudos to him.
Has anyone considered the possibility that someone might decide to hack into the system and change history? or change all math texts to a base 12...
And where is there any mention in the article that students would actually print out the textbooks?
What I find interesting in this discussion is that everyone is obsessing over the technology aspects of the decision (which I suppose is natural for fans of this site), but nobody has speculated about the impact this might have on the existing highly corrupt process of textbook selection. For some background, see "Lies My Teacher Told Me" (ISBN 978-0743296281) and Richard Feynman's account of his aborted attempt to sit on a textbook selection committee for the state of California (http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm). The material may be a bit dated, but I'm not sure how much change has taken place since those anecdotes were written.
We'll see how disinterested Microsoft is.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
The High School English book I teach from coses $59.00. We use the book for seven years. Cost of the text is spread out over those 7 years. Cost to student $9 or so. In Indiana, we charge the parent for the books their child[ren] use/s. There's the initial outlay but much of that is recouped through the annual rental fees.