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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
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...
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".
The whole reason the Gubinator is talking about online books is because CA has a budget deficit that is bigger than the GNP of a lot of countries. It's a pretty safe bet they aren't buying each kid a laptop. And before someone trots out "oh, it's only a one time expense of $250 or $300", remember, the books are neither going to be free to buy or freely redistributable, and you are dealing with children who are pretty good at losing stuff, forgetting stuff, and trashing stuff. This is one of those "look at me I'm tech savvy" feel good initiatives that is either going to go absolutely nowhere, or is going to further the gap between the haves and the have-nots
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
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
As a high school teacher, I can tell you the most common "notes" a student puts in the margins are "Roger kills Piggy," "Lennie kills George," and "Gatsby dies."
An important change for education.
My first impression from this is: Arnold is passing off a pro-industry decision as a pro-California one. I am skeptical.
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
This is actually starting to happen on my campus. Right now we have one set method of providing online courses through a learning management system (moodle) and a pilot of streaming the video and slides or providing downloadable audio podcasts of lectures. We are piloting another system this coming fall that should be more scalable.
The problem is a bit two-fold. My department has been tasked with managing and supporting all of these applications. We have a skeleton staff as it is, and with the budget cuts it's getting harder to justify the money to hire student assistants (even through financial aid). Right now I've been placed in charge of mapping out our help desk for these applications with three students and myself doing the support work for 1,700 faculty and way too many students (about 30,000? I don't remember the number). College departments are coming to us to put materials online because they cannot afford paper. They have no interest in actually progressing and moving into the 21st century, but are forced to digitize materials due to lack of funds. If it were up to some of these departments, we'd still be using chalk on slates.
The other part of the problem is actually maintaining the systems. We have three system administrators who have to balance time with supporting the servers running the applications and our internal office networks. These people, unfortunately, also get "borrowed" by whatever department on campus needs to supplement their IT staff (or lack thereof) when doing academically related projects. All of this with a shrinking budget and absurdly high expectations from the University.
All this talk and movement of materials online is great. It provides more access to students exactly in your situation that would prefer learning at his or her own pace and time. Our campus is a major commuter school and apparently 80% of our students work on top of full loads of classes, with something like 60% of those working full time. Being able to do course materials (for the most part) without coming on to campus is a big plus. However, people also need to realize that doing this also shifts the pain of funding books monetarily onto departments that are already stretched to capacity.
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.
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.
It doesn't HAVE to be that way. I'm on a local school board and I'm looking into this issue for my own district. Many, if not all over time, of the books may end up being "free"... MIT already produces books that are freely distributable, and there are other outfits starting up to do the "free" thing... here is one of them CK12.org One of the really cool features of a system like this is that teachers can modify their textbooks to suit their curriculum, allowing them to custom build textbooks if they wish
The economics of this proposal is compelling. If the books can be put on a netbook, I can save money day one by buying each student a cheap netbook (say $300)... My district already spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on textbooks each year. They go for something like $100 a pop. Granted, you can use them for more than one year - we generally get about 7 years of real useful life out of them. Then again, I can buy a netbook for a student, let them use it for the 4 years they are in high school, and GIVE it to them at the end and it still doesn't cost me a dime.
I'm a tech guy, so I understand there will be issues with support/breakage, but it isn't going to be very much more expensive than the "breakage" we already have in textbooks. And you can lock the desktops down to a great degree, such that the students don't have admin privileges. Install Defender and AVG and you have a pretty good package.
Also, if you are using local copies of books rather than relying on an Internet connection to get them, you can pretty much put that "digital divide" issue to bed. Students can sync up when in school and get assignments and other background materials from their WiFi connection, and while at school, or in the public libraries, use the Internet. For those that have it at home, it is a convenience, but not a necessity.
Finally, you now don't have to wonder if a student has access to a computer to write papers and do computer based assignments. They all have them. And thus, the "digital divide" problem, if not solved, has gone WAY down.
Overall, the proposal has a lot of merit and I'm hoping the rest of the nation can benefit from California's efforts here. It would be good to have a state like California to lead this effort, and then allow other districts in other states be able to leverage what they do.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!