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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."
$8-15 billion wants to be free?
WALSTIB!
Some of Benjamin Crowell's work, of which I am a fan.
Nullius in verba
Does anyone know of any pre-1923 (i.e. out of copyright) series of educational books for early education that could serve as the foundation for some "open source" textbooks?
Perhaps Google's book scanning project will be digitizing some relevant books, or is there some other on-line resource? Ideally it would be the original books that would be scanned, to preclude any argument of copyright being held by re-publishers via minor changes.
Surely for basic education technology won't have made much of a significant difference in content (I'm a big fan of old-school education at basic levels - calculators are to be used AFTER you learn the basics, not instead of)
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
The reception to this effort will be especially positive after the Higher Education Opportunity Act goes into effect (requiring a list of changes for a new edition of a textbook showing how it differs from the older edition). As it currently stands, the author could change a few equations, and add a couple graphs, and call it a new edition.
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That would make it much harder for me, as an educator, to require my students to use a textbook written by one of my colleagues, who just happens to require his students to use the textbook I wrote (because, of course, it would be unethical to require your students to purchase your own textbook.
Once we have that tidy arrangement going, we merely have to make minor changes to the texts (new pictures - you know, the important stuff), and then obsolete the previous editions.
Mr. McNealy, you already got your payday - why are you trying to prevent me from getting mine?
I need trepanation like I need a hole in the head.
The whole textbook business is one of the biggest scams in education, and it only gets worse in college. New editions are churned out for the college market simply to ensure a fresh revenue stream for all involved. I think in 95% of math, science, lit, and history courses, you could go to Dover Publishers (the people that basically make their living reprinting stuff in the public domain), get the books in paperback, and actually get better textbooks in the end. I have a weird hobby of collecting pre-1950 textbooks, and frankly I think kids learned "more" back then from their textbooks than they do today. Obviously, some knowledge has been added here and there, but I've got an 8th grade science textbook that does a much better job imparting the principles of physics and chemistry to kids because of the practical examples used.
I have to disagree with McNealy's push to go all-online though. There's no substitute for having a physical book at times. We just need to get off of the "new textbook" gravy-train.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
(All the examples are real life examples, often quite important ones as well.)
Actually, it is VERY important that there be more than one textbook for each topic-grade level combination.
Competition will be important for:
* Quality
* Differing viewpoints
* Different teaching styles
* etc.
To me, it seems Sun's problem was that they didn't really 'get' how to foster a FOSS project and build a community (it takes more than just hiring Ian Murdock). Sun had other problems, but being smarter and more proactive about FOSS could have helped, although I'm not sure how much of an impact it would have had.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Indeed. Half of the reason book prices are so outrageous is because students for all practical purposes have to get the same book the professor demands. If I could shop around, I could get much better prices.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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).
If a school district decides to commission a textbook as a work made for hire, and pays the authors handsomely, and then makes the work free, it can be a win-win. The authors get a guaranteed amount, but they won't collect royalties going forward. The schools don't go broke buying expensive textbooks, and poorer districts can benefit. Textbook writers can be booked again when revisions are made. Of course, it will be possible to identify people that make less money. That's life.
When it comes to college level stuff, mathematics has more free books available online than any other discipline.
Yet, most universities use either James Stewart or one other book for calculus.
Why? I really don't know. I asked a math grad student friend of mine, and he said it ultimately boiled down to politics: Calculus level textbooks are decided by a committee, and the professor teaching it only has some say - and it's hard to convince a committee. As hundreds of students will take calculus every semester, they need the warm and fuzzy feeling an established textbook gives them.
To be fair, the mathematics departments are also perhaps the most likely to use free/cheap textbooks (compared to sciences and engineering). This usually happens for upper division courses, though.
Beetle B.
at least in school (can't speak for higher education). The have softcover booklets, with about 8-10 weeks worth of material. That means they are about 100 pages long, maybe shorter. Plus, they contain the practice problems and you can write in them. I never understood the practice of carry these heavy tomes called textbooks around, especially even after a year, that half of it is never relevant to the course in many instances. You also get to keep the booklets and don't have to go through the nonsense of putting covers on them or otherwise.
As for online books, I always thought wikibooks was a worthy effort:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
But people aren't as eager to write textbooks/practice problems as they are to make articles about their obsession. I wish Wikimedia Foundation made use of their mature efforts like Wikipedia and allowed a single banner ad per page (clearly labeled as sponsor, offer a no-ad subscriber version) and then funnel the money toward immature efforts such as these.
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).
Indeed, one of my pals used to say that the best book on any subject is two books.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Which high-quality public domain books are those?
All of the math books for which copyright has expired.
The book makers don't just make books. They screen them, and educate the school boards, so the schools don't waste students' time with crappy, outmoded texts.
New math books simply have "updated", or as I see it "dumbed down", terminology.
If I'm not mistaken the English course (esp. vocabulary) is required as well as math, so why dumb down the math books?
I tried helping out my little brother, a high-school sophomore, with his math homework,
but I couldn't stand wading through the stupefied terminology soup.
Solving an equation has been the same process since Algebra was invented,
yet the textbook referred to combining like terms via adding the coefficients (or multipliers) of like variables as:
Move same lettered variables next to each other then add or subtract the counter numbers of each type of variable.
I also found several typos and mathematical errors in the brand spanking "new and improved" math schoolbook.
There's no reason not to standardize on (reprint) a time tested (proofread) 70 year old Algebra book rather than release
new books with different terminology and poor quality control except to make more money for publishers.
A change in curriculum isn't an excuse since you could just provide the appropriate book containing the desired
info instead of reprint a new collection of the same old info with new terminology.
Oh, wait, you can't get a copyright on a book made by reprinting the same old info unless you change the info somehow...