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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.
I bought my netbook this year for less than the cost of two textbooks. I would go so far as to say the college book store could still make a decent living by offering rental and sale netbooks pre-loaded with proper course materials for much, much cheaper than what students pay on books right now.
"Open Source" needn't mean(though it certainly can) "read on a computer". Obviously, digital distribution is convenient because copying is essentially free; but for locations where digital use is inconvenient or impossible, it isn't rocket surgery to send a digital document to the printer's and have copies made.
Since, with an OSS document(or one that you own the rights to) you can have anybody you want print it, you can put out the printing for competitive bid, and should be able to get it done for not too much above cost(and printing is actually pretty cheap, compared to textbook costs).
The issue of open vs. proprietary, for textbooks, is pretty much orthogonal to the issue of digital vs. printed.
But I hope we don't resort to wiki textbooks which anyone can edit.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
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
I actually posted before you from my kindle, but amazon deleted it.
"Open source" takes on a figurative meaning when it comes to things that aren't software(though given the difference between print-ready formats and the input files that created them a source vs. binary style distinction can be said to exist with texts as well); but it is still a well formed concept in that context.
"Public domain" means not under copyright. "Open source" typically implies "Under copyright; but available subject either to essentially no terms, or subject to the requirement that you extend the rights given to you to any people you give the work to". Those are sometimes equivalent in effect (public domain vs. new BSD doesn't make a big difference in many contexts); but that doesn't make them equivalent in general.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?