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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.'"
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/
I agree that there are issues with viruses/breakage/hacking/objectionable material etc. But you hold the mistaken belief that the schools aren't already dealing with those issues. My district has something like a computer for every 2 kids (not all are kid accessible, but most are) and we deal with this stuff everyday. In fact, we're probably pretty good at it now, and our students have to sign computer use agreements and so we have policy around it and manage it. You also leave out the fact that if the computer is THEIRS... or will be theirs at the end of High School, they might take better care of it.
As to the cost of school materials, that is the central theme on this thread - everyone is looking at the publisher model here and those models are NOT compelling... the monopolistic publishers (There are like 3 of them, maybe 2 depending on how you cut it) don't want districts to move to online, and so they price their online additions such that it would be cheaper to keep buying the dead tree versions. They don't want to eat their own lunch, and while I don't blame them, I for one have had enough of it.
I'm advocating an approach similar to what California is doing - they are creating their OWN textbooks, free of the publishers. They get real educators, PhD's and everything, to write their ebooks. That is the model I am advocating. Think of it like Open Source for textbooks.
The arguments AGAINST such a model are the same arguments that Open Source faced at its beginning, and still face, to one degree or another, today. But at this point, you CAN run your computer completely on open source software if you want to, and with time, you'll be able to run your school system completely on open source textbooks. And instead of having to choose from 2 versions of your AP US History textbook that come from HM or PH, you'll be able to choose from who knows how many open source versions, all with the ability to tweak the textbook for your curriculum. I realize there will be a transitionary period, and that during that period you may end up having to do a mix of dead tree books and ebooks. But given a few more years, you will be able to basically give up the dead tree versions and the pay for play ebook versions, thus getting to a more flexible and sustainable textbook model.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
History, physics, chemistry, social science. These are some examples of subjects that, if I didn't update myself about since school, would today be outdated data. Perhaps not completely useless, but I never claimed such either.
We are talking high school here though. There is a lot of history that has not changed that can be taught in high school with a 5 or 10 year old textbook. Physics, same thing. High school physics should be the basics (optics, classical mechanics, etc.) not something that was discovered last year. Same with chemistry. Let the colleges and universities teach the advanced stuff since that's what they're for.
Talk to professors that teach first year courses. You'll find many of them will complain that students are coming into first year without an understanding of the basics in science and math or an ability to read critically and properly write an essay.
See my sig for hundreds of counterexamples.
But authors have already been doing this for years.
The project is only dealing with free textbooks, which means it is going to have zero participation from traditional textook publishers. (For confirmation that it's only about free books, see the project's web site, http://clrn.org/FDTI/index.cfm, and the Schwarzenegger opinion piece linked to from the slashdot summary.)
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