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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."
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
$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.
This one's sat at the back of my mind ever since I read Feynmans account of reviewing math books.
I mean for some things like history every country/area would want significantly different books to focus on local history etc but how is it that basic math books haven't been supplanted by a handful of public domain high quality books?
of course I know the answer is that companies making thin margins printing public domain books don't have so much money to spend on guys in suits to go around and convince the people in charge to use their textbooks.
I know how terrible some of the schoolbooks are yet they get chosen by schools year after year.
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).
Rather than re-invent the wheel, he could also have a look at South Africa's free science and math textbooks: http://www.fhsst.org
-Gareth