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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
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.)
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).
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).
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.