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."
Easier to wreck a netbook, yes. But, with the cost of books alone for this year, I could buy two per semester and still have change left over.
I got my EEE PC for under $200 and am enrolled full time working toward a BSBA. That's what my observations are based off of, as a reference.
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
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.
The books are not in the public domain--they are available under permissive copyright licenses. For example, CK-12 Calculus (PDF) is licensed under CC BY-SA (page 2 of the PDF). This is the only book I checked, but I expect most (if not all) are licensed similarly.
If the books were public domain, they could be redistributed as proprietary works under another's name. Instead, these books are essentially GPL'd (again, assuming they're all licensed similarly).
Have you driven a fnord... lately?
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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.
(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.
Your statement is literally true, but very misleading. The state didn't ask anyone to submit ancillary materials, so even if the ancillary materials exist, you're not going to see them listed on the clrn.org site. As a specific example, I submitted my physics textbook, and my ancillary materials are available here. They include a test bank, solutions to homework problems, and an instructor's manual.
My book includes a web site, assessment software, lots of homework problems and solutions, and automatic grading software.
In my own field, physics, your description is completely inaccurate in critical ways. Big commercial books like Halliday and Resnick come out in new editions every few years. The new editions typically have zero changes to the presentation of the material, and very few new homework problems. What they actually tend to do is renumber the homework problems so that it becomes a huge hassle to use the old edition side by side with the new one. This is simply to kill off the market for used books.
I'd also be interested in seeing your evidence for your statement that 'open textbooks run into the "staleness" issue.' Open textbooks are actually easier to change, because they're typically not produced and distributed via conventional printing. They're either distributed purely via the web or, in some cases, via print on demand services like lulu. In fact, one of the governor's big talking points in favor of free and open-source textbooks has been that they can be updated more rapidly, unlike antiquated paper books from traditional publishers. In fact, one of the issues discussed extensively at the symposium this week was the fear that open-source textbooks would change too quickly. The K-12 bureacracy is heavily oriented toward top-down control over textbook selection, and they actually want to impose a two-year freeze on digital texts once they're approved, so that the books won't change after having been blessed as conforming to state standards.
Huh? This "can't" be delivered by open textbooks? This is particularly off base. In fact, automatic electronic grading was pioneered by open-source folks at universities. One of the first systems used for math and physics was LON-CAPA, which is open-source software that was first developed about 20 years ago at MSU, and is still being actively developed and supported. Here is a list of some open-source software for this type of thing. What's changed within the last few years is that the publishers have started offering these things as services that students have to pay for, and promoting them heavily in publications like The Physics Teacher. So if all you've been exposed to is sales reps' pitches, I can see how you'd be under the impression that it only exists in proprietary form, but that's completely inaccurate.
Find free books.
This was a huge topic of discussion at the symposium where the results were announced. I've blogged about it here, but I'll quote the relevant part of what I wrote: "Nobody seemed sure about the implications of the settlement in the Williams case, which requires equal access to books for all students. Will poor students be locked out because they don't have computers? Schwarzenegger's proposed solution is to print out books as needed, but Murugan Pal from CK-12 pointed out that current state law allows a school to use textbook funds to pay $80 for a book from a commercial publisher, but forbids it to pay $10 to print out a copy of a free book at Kinko's."
There was a heavy presence from the computer hardware industry, too. They love the idea of walking into a California public school and selling one netbook per student.
Find free books.
Zero. You didn't show your work. Sure, you could probably take that series expansion and work backward into something I might believe you did yourself, but by the time you do all that you might as well just have answered the question yourself. And you're going to fail miserably on the next question, which is short answer.
Yes, I mark university assignments. No, I really don't care what answer they get.
Why are these not written in LaTeX? This looks like they were written in Word with the equations generated by another program and copied in.
It was specifically designed to do stuff like this. I'm trying to learn it right now, it's definitely not the easiest, but it's 100x more powerful than Word and it's just PlainText.
Imagine doing an "svn checkout http://textbooks.org/grade/12/calculus" and or seeing the entire revision history.
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.
The downside to this, however, is I'd come in with some pretty janky-ass looking books that weren't even allowed to be sold to people in my region, complete with 'NOT FOR SALE IN NORTH AMERICA' disclaimers printed all over the covers.
Just did that for my son. 1st edition physics textbook, $160 at the bookstore; used copies around $130. Identical copy, new, purchased online from a bookseller in India: $14. In English, identical in every way (same page numbers, same sample problems), but with the "not for sale in North America" banner on the back. Just makes me MORE determined to work hard to make sure the textbook publishers get as little of my money as possible.
About LaTeX:
``It was specifically designed to do stuff like this. I'm trying to learn it right now, it's definitely not the easiest, but it's 100x more powerful than Word and it's just PlainText.''
And the best advantage of all: it works. When the choice is between LaTeX and MS Word, people often choose MS Word because it's easier to get started with. This is actually a good idea when you're writing simple documents of a few pages each. But if your document will be more than a few pages, have lots of figures, is intended to be released in book form, contains formulae, or any other sort of more advanced thing, LaTeX starts to actually win out. It pretty much automatically does the right thing, and your investment is just having to learn the handful of features you will be using.
If you want to adapt things to your liking (and it isn't a matter of using a .sty file someone else has already put together), LaTeX can get pretty involved ... but, in my experience, it's still nothing compared to MS Word's known issues: references that break all the time, things that have to be updated by clicking a lot each time you change your document, formatting that seems to lead a life of its own, and the major drawback that your document will only work more or less right in the same version of Word that it was written in.
Simple rule of thumb: if your document is large enough to contain a table of contents, LaTeX is going to give you better results for your time than Microsoft Word.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Why don't you?
Send them an email with you thoughts and some examples.
Seriously. Open and online text books can vastly improve education and the education system, but it needs peple like you to do a bit.
And if it's online, eventually ALL education systems can get value for it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on