Slashdot Mirror
Open Textbooks Win Over Publishers In CA
Unequivocal writes "Recently California's Governor announced a free digital textbook competition. The results of that competition were announced today. Many traditional publishers submitted textbooks in this digital textbook competition in CA as well as open publishers. An upstart nonprofit organization named CK-12 contributed a number of textbooks (all free and open source material). 'Of the 16 free digital textbooks for high school math and science reviewed, ten meet at least 90 percent of California's standards. Four meet 100 percent of standards.' Three of those recognized as 100% aligned to California standards were from CK-12 and one from H. Jerome Keisler. None of the publisher's submissions were so recognized. CK-12 has a very small staff, so this is a great proof of the power of open textbooks and open educational resources."
Thankfully common sense has prevailed. This is one monopoly that the world should be glad to see the back of.
After having just spent a little over $600 on text books, I am quite interested to see how this plays out.
...of insolvency.
Makes that free stuff all the better.
Open source textbooks!!!!!1
I assume all the students have computers to read the textbooks? I guess a laptop for each student is cheaper than the cumulative cost of the textbooks depending on how long they keep the same textbook around
But I hope we don't resort to wiki textbooks which anyone can edit.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
In 1964 the eminent physicist Richard Feynman served on the State of California's Curriculum Commission and saw how the Commission chose math textbooks for use in California's public schools. In his acerbic memoir of that experience, titled "Judging Books by Their Covers," Feynman analyzed the Commission's idiotic method of evaluating books, and he described some of the tactics employed by schoolbook salesmen who wanted the Commission to adopt their shoddy products.
http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
I actually posted before you from my kindle, but amazon deleted it.
That's a great story. Thanks for that.
The text book industry is such a ridiculous racket it sickens me. Hopefully this becomes a standard thing across the world that colleges eventually adopt. Honestly, the only times I did open a textbook in high school and college was to do the problems out of the book. The Internet resources were more than enough to service my educational needs, in many cases it was actually far better than the crap in the textbooks.
Instructor materials and supplements were not included. So, this is basically a setup/joke.
Traditional textbooks are purchased because of the ancillary material that comes with them. This includes, support, Web sites for both students and instructors, assessment software, assessment preparation material, copious student assignments and solutions, automatic grading software, prepared lecture material, etc.
I have never seen open textbooks work in a subject area that requires frequent updates, such as fundamental computer concepts, or modern application software (office suites...). I do think, however, open can be somewhat successful solid subjects, such as calculus. Note that I bring up these subject area because a LOT of books are sold in these area. But, even in something like a math course, open textbooks run into the "staleness" issue. That is, students do the assignments or tests and then the solutions are passed on to the next year's students. Publishers do quite a bit of work to change problems. Do not underestimate the amount of work and editing/QA involved in such an effort.
If you think students are lazy these days, you should see the instructors. They demand new end-of-chapter problems, new quizzes, new tests. And they want it all automatically graded electronically. This can't be delivered by open textbooks.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Makes my day complete
your first fail.
Not necessarily. Said it was their first post and their day was complete. Didn't say anything about it being the first post of the thread.
Assumption Fail.
For those who don't want to read the excerpt, here's the best (and most telling) bit: Of all those on the committee, only Feynman (I believe) actually read any of the books. Two books, followups to another textbook that had been submitted, had not even been finished, yet many of the committee panel gave them some of the highest ratings.
I wish I was as cool as Richard Feynman.
I was checking the comments to see if anybody had mentioned that yet, as I was going to say the same thing myself.
I *highly* recommend that link, as well as the book from whence it came, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. In fact I think that book should be required reading for any self-respecting nerd.
I read that.
Part of the hilarity was one of the highest ranked books by the panel contained only blank pages (the publishers hadn't finished it yet so they just submitted the cover).
Everyone gave it high notes except Feynman --he was the only one who actually read it.
I think it would be great that at the time of graduation a person had an entire electronic library of reference material. This could make it possible, if you are in 8th grade and find that you are rusty on some of the information from last year, just run a search.
So if there are special restrictions, and they want to retain copyright, then give it a Creative Commons license.
Creative Commons BY and BY-SA are not the only licenses for Free textbooks. Nor are they even the only licenses for editable Free textbooks.
But definitely don't call it open source. Open source specifically applies to software.
The GNU General Public License defines "source code" as the form of a work designed for editing. The GNU Free Documentation License defines "transparent" in a similar way. So "open source", said of a work other than a computer program, means that the work is both Free and available in an editable form.
I was at the symposium where the results were announced, and I wrote up some notes about it here. It was actually a pretty interesting panel discussion, with open-source types side by side on the platform along with reps from the publishing industry and the computer hardware industry (which is drooling over the opportunity this represents of selling more computers to schools so they can access electronic books).
The slashdot summary is not particularly accurate.
What Pearson submitted was just a consumable biology workbook, so it's not especially surprising that it wasn't judged as developing all the topics on the list.
The story isn't really that the traditional publishers tried and failed, it's that they essentially sat this one out. Pearson did a half-assed token submission, and the other publisher that had a rep at the symposium, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, didn't submit anything at all. They're clearly highly allergic to the "free" part of "Free Digital Textbook Initiative."
Find free books.
But I hope we don't resort to wiki textbooks which anyone can edit.
What do you have against Wikibooks, especially if you use the revision as of a given date that the instructor has approved?
(Side note: A quick reminder: These are K-12 textbooks, not college-level texts.)
Here are some positive things to think about, which assumes the books will be available electronically--making them easily printable and available from anywhere. These comments come from someone who grew up in a family of K-12 teachers:
1. Being able to "take a textbook home" without having to carry it will almost certainly lead to more at-home study and better students.
2. People who choose to do home schooling will benefit from this. And, by using the same texts, there is an opportunity for a smooth transition to/from home schooling.
3. Schools with budget problems might see a big win here.
4. The moderate hassle of keeping track of textbooks which are loaned to students each semester/school-year/etc. will be mitigated.
I am sure there are some others.
As for the problem of teaching aids, I believe an on-line repository allowing teachers to contribute aids they have developed for themselves for others to use would quickly fill this void. In my experience, K-12 teachers are almost always willing to contribute their efforts to help fellow teachers.
Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
and not line up on the baseline --- look at the CK-12 Calculus textbook (http://cafreetextbooks.ck12.org/math/CK12_Calculus.pdf) --- and of course Arial is the perfect choice for running text and it's perfect appropriate to use Computer Modern for equations in text, but Times and Symbol to label graphs....
Would someone please teach these people about typography?
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
The best "textbook" I ever had in college was in my Multi-variable Calculus class. The instructor had reviewed the available options and came to the conclusion that they were all overpriced junk. So, he (hand) wrote up all of the notes for the semester, with charts, graphs, and everything else. He even had a few sample problems for each lesson. He then bundled the whole thing up and had the bookstore copy it and sell if for $5, basically to cover reproduction costs. The entire thing was loose-leaf paper pre-punched for a standard three ring binder. In the end, that entire book was about $7.
The thing is, without the massive costs which go into textbooks, they can be cheap. And, even better, if my book gets lost, damaged, or stolen who cares? It's five bucks. I also have the option to mark up my book in any way I want, and I am not worried about the resale value at the end of the class (which will be about a tenth of the books original cost to me, unless the school changes editions and the bookstore staff just laughs at me).
For K-12 schools, this will be even better. Instead of handing a kid a $50 book, which he is going to destroy; you give him a $5 reproduction, and require him to put it in his own $2 three ring binder. When he loses it, you just give him another copy. He can even write in the book, and keep it at the end of the year. If your students have computers, you can even go so far as to give them digital copies.
The only thing which needs to be checked is the quality and accuracy of the information. But, the State (at least California) is already doing that. And, like many Open Source projects, you can have the advantage of lots of people looking at it before hand. There just isn't a downside to having Open Source books, unless you are a textbook publisher, in which case they suck. But, as far as I care, they can join the buggy whip manufacturers on the sidelines of history.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
By any account, no one read it, including Feynman. He couldn't read a book w/ no pages, could he? Or is this a new kind of Chuck Norris joke?
Isn't knowledge human software?
Sorry to confuse matters :-)
Insert
Lets be honest. This is great news, but the only reason they're doing it is because California's economy is in the crapper. When the economy picks up, I wouldn't be surprised to see DRM-disposable books being sold to students at school.
Someone else criticized the typography of the C-12 textbooks. The graphs are worse. I'm reading their "Calculus" book. The axis scales on the graphs tend to be very tiny. You have to zoom way, way in using a PDF viewer to read the axes. At which point the graph lines show serious jaggies. Tables of numeric values are left-aligned, which makes it hard to compare values.
There's very little motivation. The text just jumps right in, throwing formulas at the kids.
The language is painful. "Recall that a particular pair of numbers is a solution if direct substitution of the X and Y values into the original equation yields a true equation statement." This is formally correct, but it uses the concept of evaluating an equation as a truth-valued Boolean statement, which is beyond the scope of this text.
On pages 15-16, the book discusses depreciation. One problem says "Assuming the rate of depreciation of the car is constant..." What they mean is that the price declines linearly (into negative territory?). A "constant rate of depreciation" is usually understood as a constant percentage rate. (The financial community uses "straight line depreciation" to refer to linear depreciation.) This also could have led to a useful discussion of exponentials, compound interest, decay, and inflation, but they don't go there. They change the subject and go on.
The text assumes that the student has some specific model of graphing calculator, but doesn't say what it is. (Incidentally, the whole course is a PDF file formatted for printing, not HTML with applets, which might be more useful.)
There's a section on fitting a curve to a set of data. It tells the student what buttons to push on the calculator, but says nothing about what's going on inside.
The terms "open interval" and "closed interval" are used, but not defined before use. The text also uses capital letters like N to indicate sets of pairs of reals on page 68. This is a confusing usage from more advanced math. I think that some of the theorems were cut and pasted from another source, and don't quite fit the text.
When the text finally gets to integrals and derivatives, it doesn't start by pointing out that they're inverse operations. Both are presented separately. The text would be better if it started off with a completely graphical presentation of what's going on, instead of starting with derivations.
This text has all the stuff on the checklist, but presents them incoherently. This is not a good textbook.
Why don't they just select that blank textbook for all science programs, thus eliminating most of the stupid problems in all the other textbooks.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
You can read it in its entirety at
http://www.gorgorat.com/
And then you should go buy it and give it to a friend.
No one really learns anything at the primary/secondary level anyway (aside from basic stuff like how to read, basic math. etc.). If you really want to learn about any given subject, you have to go to college--period. Schools are too burdened down with issues of conformity, discipline, teaching to too broad a spectrum of students, etc. In public schools at least, you can be a really bright kid--but how are you going to learn anything when you're sitting right next to several moronic hillbillies who disrupt class and suck up all the teacher's time. And that assumes that your teacher even CARES or KNOWS anything about the subject they're teaching. Keep in mind that most teachers' knowledge of the subject they're teaching is limited to maybe 16-32 hours of course work taken years or decades earlier when they were undergrads (and almost no course work in the field they're teaching if they're teaching below the secondary level). Most teachers who go on to advanced degrees or who make any effort to learn anything new after their undergrad degree pursue EDUCATION coursework, not coursework in the subject they're teaching.
So you've got a science class filled primarily with dullards and average kids (many of whom have discipline problems and learning disabilities), taught by a teacher who hasn't learned a thing about science since she was an undergrad in 1960 (and has forgotten much of what she DID learn), using a textbook written by a committee (which is bland and careful to avoid any subject which might offend ANYONE). How on EARTH would intelligent kids learn anything in that environment, unless they struck out and learned it on their own (in which case they don't even need the school anyway--except maybe for the library)?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I think it's great that this is happening and look forward to the adoption of open textbooks.
However, I looked at the PDFs that they post on their website, and they look awful. The formulas and plots were hard to read and pixelated. They should have used LaTeX for their typesetting and formulas and maybe sage or matplotlib to make the graphs.
BJ
Panasonic still makes the Toughbook line, but ToughOnline.com seems to price them at $2,000 or more. For that price, one could buy a standard Acer Aspire one and have room to replace several broken units.
"But, even in something like a math course, open textbooks run into the "staleness" issue. That is, students do the assignments or tests and then the solutions are passed on to the next year's students. Publishers do quite a bit of work to change problems. Do not underestimate the amount of work and editing/QA involved in such an effort."
If this is the reason, then why do they sell solution manuals?
In fact I think that book should be required reading for any self-respecting nerd.
Oh, whew. Good thing I'm off the hook, then. I didn't need to add anything to my reading list!
The enemies of Democracy are
They may have met 100% of the standards, but that doesn't mean that the history in them is correct.
Do they still teach the story of how Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope? How Betsy Ross sewed the first national flag? How the Boston Tea Party was motivated only by patriotism? Or that Plymouth Rock is an actual, original artifact of the landing? If so, then they are factually wrong.
Hopefully, free textbooks will contain factually correct information which, after all, is true freedom. Otherwise, "free" textbooks are not worth much.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Several of the PGDP projects of maths books are meant to be marked up with LaTeX, e.g. this one in round F1:
Journal de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées (1838) (ed. Joseph Liouville) (warning, PGDP membership required)
Now this is probably not a really suitable example for school use, but e.g. a book like Elementary Algebra for Schools, by H.S. Hall and S.R. Knight (1885) (warning, PGDP membership required) sounds about right.
That book has already been checked and formatted but needs to be checked again and post-processed, afterwards it's public domain for anyone (including California schools) to download. In a few years time at most.
This page (public) might be helpful if you want to help out making (old) public domain maths texts available as LaTeX e-books: PGDP LaTeX resources, especially Distributed Proofreaders LaTeX formatting manual
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Self-deprecating nerds should also enjoy it, assuming there's available stack space :)
open and free text books.
We can reduces texts costs by 90%.
I talk about it here:
http://harns.blogspot.com/2008/07/so-obvious-and-yet-so-not-done.html
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Get involved an use critical thinking and you will be as cool as Feynman.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Our volunteers just finished a download compilation here:
http://www.legaltorrents.com/torrents/680-california-learning-resource-network-textbooks
All of the textbook except one included a share-friendly license. One Biology book did not, and the content was not included. The Physics texts were published about a year ago.
I also wish I was as cool as Richard Feynman.
> Geekoid said:
> Get involved and use critical thinking and you will be as cool as Feynman.
I try, but most of my attempts are utterly sisyphean.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus
Chuck
I don't think ANY of the monopoly textbook publishers, Wiley, Pearson, McGraw-Hill, even pretend to follow open standards in a rush to lock-in student subscriptions to their web sites before either the US or the EU decide to kill their cash cow once and for all. Their sites are buggy, don't support Safari properly and are even worse with Firefox! Their a hodgepodge of old IE6-only technology or at the very least Windows-only technology and there is NO incentive to be current.
We all know where the big publishers want to take us. To subscriptions to access educational materials so that their revenue stream remains constant so they can "invest". This usually means publishing the same books every three years, tying pin codes into the books to ruin the used book market, and strong-arming professors into making the online courses MANDATORY so that we have to buy either a new book or a card with the code for the SAME DAMN PRICE as a new book.
I think this compares VERY favorably to Wolfram's project.
Why would "fundamental computer concepts" need to be updated frequently?
"A computer has one control unit and one arithmetic and logic unit." That died with superscalar execution but even more with the first symmetric multiprocessor, and now it seems every desktop and 13" or bigger laptop has a dual-core or bigger CPU. Texts that assume a single core don't mention synchronization.
Self-deprecating nerds should also enjoy it, assuming there's available stack space :)
Yeah, stack overflows are a much bigger concern when they mean being crushed by a toppling pile of pressed wood pulp.
The enemies of Democracy are
I'm assuming that it looked like the equations were done in something other than Word was becuae they could be read? :)
Anyway, the middle ground for equation intensive writing is to wo it in LyX, and let it write your LaTeX. With LyX' equation functions, you type quite similarly to TeX, but get the equations displayed--and editable--as you go. And it's not word's click-type-click-type-click-click-type of word; you can enter it entirely from the keyboard, and maneuver around the equation from the keyboard.
Also, the equation writer in StarOffice/OpenOffice beats the tar out of the one in word.
hawk, who gave up his macs for unix over LyX over a decade ago
Why not just use 'wikipedia'???? Some just are wasting public money in contests to gloat for!!!
http://www.clrn.org/fdti/
You can also download the complete report from there.
I've pulled down a couple, they were about 44 & 80 meg respectively. eg. CK12 Calculus is 43.8 meg and 457 pages.
It's nice to see they haven't made them hard to find for the rest of us who might want to review our rusty math (or whatever).
I'm a perfectionist but I'm trying to cut back.