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Sun Founders' Push For Open Source Education
theodp writes "Unfortunately for textbook publishers, Scott McNealy has some extra time on his hands since Oracle acquired Sun and put him out of a job. The Sun co-founder has turned his attention to the problem of math textbooks, the price of which keeps rising while the core information inside of them stays the same. 'Ten plus 10 has been 20 for a long time,' McNealy quips. 'We are spending $8 billion to $15 billion per year on textbooks' in the US, he adds. 'It seems to me we could put that all online for free.' McNealy's Curriki is an online hub for free textbooks and other course material. Others hoping to bring elements of the Open Source model to the school textbook world include Vinod Khosla (who co-founded Sun with McNealy), whose wife Neeru heads up the CK-12 Foundation, which has already developed nine of the core textbooks for high school."
Some of Benjamin Crowell's work, of which I am a fan.
Nullius in verba
$8-15 billion wants to be free?
Yes, but...
Important distinction: You don't put stuff online for free, you make it free when you put it online. I work for a 'free' legal information service that spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year being Free. People give us money because they understand that if ignorance of the law is no excuse, then free access to legal materials is kind of an important corollary.
McNealy's right - there are tons of good reasons to make educational materials available online, free of charge. It will take a considerable investment to do so.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
USSR science textbooks. Seriously, they are great (with some obvious exceptions :) ) and they are out of copyright.
For example, Fichtenholz's "Differential and Integral Calculus" is THE best textbook on calculus ever created. It's so clear and written in so beautiful language that I had actually re-read it just for fun. I don't know if there are translations into English, alas.
Landau and Lifshitz's "Course of Theoretical Physics" is the one of the best reference books for the modern physics, and it's available in English. It's out of copyright but its translations might be copyrighted.
I'm certain it's possible to create a decent course on math/physics without much problem. Also, other countries should also have a lot of good material.
It'd be different for the modern fast-moving fields of biology, chemistry, etc. But there's no reason for math/physics books to change every year (or even every decade).
Foner claims they can profitably sell a 168-page print-on-demand book for $14.95.
http://www.legco.gov.hk/yr97-98/english/panels/ed/papers/ed1601-3.htm
The Education Department (ED) issues a Recommended Textbook List. If the publishers want to be on that list, they have to reduce the unnecessary revisions. That seems to work extremely well:
>According to the Consumer Council's surveys, unnecessary textbook revisions have been greatly reduced in recent years, dropping from 21% in 1992 (six out of 28 textbooks) to 2% in 1996 (one out of 44 textbooks). From a random selection of revised textbooks in 1997, no unnecessary revision was detected (out of the eight sets of books examined, revisions to two were found necessary and those to the remaining six quite necessary).
This one's sat at the back of my mind ever since I read Feynmans account of reviewing math books.
I was curious about this so i googled around and came across a copy here. It seems that not a day goes by in which I fail to see more evidence reinforcing my decision to home-school.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
The Brontosaurus was a separate genus, i.e., a sibling class. Both the 'Brontosaurus' and the Apatosaurus were children of the Diplodocidae family. The 'Brontosaurus' was then discovered to be so close to the Apatosaurus that it was then placed in the same genus. The problem with the name 'Brontosaurus' is that it refers to a genus that has not existed for over 100 years. If they want to be specific, then they can call it an apatosaurus excelsus.
To directly answer your question, no, I wouldn't correct them if they said it was about an even-toed ungulate, but I would be troubled by their vague description. If, however, someone said that Babe was a movie about a warthog(a sibling of the sus genus), I would most definitely correct them. It was obviously about a domesticated pig.
FYI, in some social circles, I am known as a douchebage.