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California State Senator Proposes Funding Open-Source Textbooks
bcrowell writes "Although former Governor Schwarzenegger's free digital textbook initiative for K-12 education was a failure,
state senator Darrell Steinberg has a
new idea for the state-subsidized
publication of college textbooks (details in the PDF links at the bottom). Newspaper editorials seem positive. It will be interesting to see if this works any better at the college level than it did for K-12, where textbook selection has traditionally been very bureaucratic. This is also different from Schwarzenegger's FDTI because Steinberg proposes spending state money to help create the books. The K-12 version suffered from legal uncertainty about the Williams case,
which requires equal access to books for all students — many of whom might not have computers at home.
At the symposium where the results of
the FDTI's first round were announced, it became apparent that the only businesses interested in
participating actively were not the publishers but computer manufacturers like Dell and Apple, who wanted to sell
lots of hardware to schools."
I hear Houghton Mifflin has goons who break legs. When you make $150 profit on a simple 600-page textbook, you can afford the muscle.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
How do you "break the legs" of a registered charity like Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the Wikibooks project to create collaborative textbooks licensed as free cultural works?
Trying to lower the cost of books is a great idea but what stops schools from not raising tuition on the back end when they see those funds become available. Get school tuition under control first and then worry about the books.
Foot placed squarely in mouth since 1983.
A while back slashdot had a story about Open Source text books. I scanned through the books they had available and they were absolute junk. It appeared to be written in word with formulas printed out then scanned in as images and inserted inline. Needless to say they looked horrible.
Has the opensource Calculus book moved on to LaTeX since then or does it still look the same?
Can you imagine the politics over what the textbooks should say about evolution, climate change, economics, history,etc. First edition says Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia but by the second edition, Eurasia has become Oceania's ally.
That is the key. Will it also be 'government supported'? Will it be the first guy they can get that will 'work for free'?
While i'm all in support of more openness, i want to be sure what data we are the feeding children is quality, and accurate.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm sure if Richard Feynman were alive today he would be a very vocal proponent of OS text books. In fact, I'm sure he'd probably spend an inordinate amount of time editing them himself!
As a college math teacher, my gut instinct is that this is the only damn thing that really makes any sense. Math books are probably ground-zero in that they have no need or right to change very much from year-to-year. They ought to be written once, and released for free for anyone to download and use (and modify and improve if you need to). If there's any more compelling use of computing technology to distribute knowledge, I frankly don't know what it is.
What I see happening currently is one of two options: (a) Use a mass-market book that the publisher churns with a not-quite-compatible edition every year or two. The statistics text used in my classes (picked by department, not me) is excellent, but a new copy costs $180 to students, which kind of breaks my heart (multiply that by all their classes each year, holy damn!). (b) Use an in-house written textbook custom to the department (done in a lot of lower-level classes) which will be cheaper, lets the department recoup some of the money, but is of much lower quality (fewer exercises by an order-of-magnitude, no proofreading for errors, no graphic design, no color, hand-drawn sketches, etc.) And this work is probably repeated thousands of times at schools across the country.
Just write the damn thing once, somehow, and give it away free to everyone. Seems inevitable, and I'm eager to see it.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
So basically they want Wikipedia in a book form?
Good luck doing that against all the trustees of the WMF at once.
And just where do these people think the funds are going to come from to pay for these books in this all but bankrupt state? Oh I know, let's raise the sales tax and vehicle registration fees again. What a joke.
Not even close, my friend. Not even remotely close.
Care to cite some examples or left-wingery in textbooks used by CA schools?
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Access to knowledge should be universal... of course it does not replace schools but at least one has the possibility to learn on their own if they want to. This is particularely true when as tablet usage becomes universal... allowing to carry a whole bookshelf in one tiny object.
Also, it would enable knowledge access to poorer neighborhoods/countries, allowing the usage of other books when they neither can afford to create material or buy books.
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
Of course they are, they're accurate. Reality has a well known liberal bias.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
No, I'm not suggesting that the current system is ideal. I'm suggesting using print-on-demand services like CreateSpace to produce cheaper textbooks. The author can sell a book for about $30 and make more money per copy. Also the author can sell a digital copy on Amazon and B&N for $9.99 and make 70% on Amazon and 65% on B&N. There are other similar digital alternatives. This allows competition for book production. Authors across the nation can compete for part of the California market, based on price and quality. I see no need for California to subsidize the effort.
I have self-published an assembly language textbook, so I am somewhat familiar with the choices. There is no real need for textbooks to be mass-produced and sold by the big publishers. The Internet and modern technology offer better alternatives.
There are 2 big questions: How to get instructors to try an author-published book and how to get instructors to care about the students' money. An individual author trying to sell an inexpensive book can't afford to send out thousands of free copies. Competing with the big publishers is hard, but I see this as part of the solution.
Ray Seyfarth, ray.seyfarth@gmail.com, http://rayseyfarth.blogspot.com
There is no reason for college text books to be as expensive as they are now. Any educational institution that takes money from any level of government should be using text books that are open sourced. Anything that can drive down the costs of getting an education without decreasing the quality of that education should be encouraged.
END COMMUNICATION
Trust *nothing* from the festering maw of Darrell Steinberg.
What exactly is an "open source" textbook? Stop using this term to apply to anything but software development because it is almost always used incorrectly.
The "source" of any text book is inherently open. If you can think you can write a book and thus no-one controls the content of the book you write.
There is a differences between opening up the standards used to select textbooks in schools systems, but the source content of a book is always open, there is no proprietary source for learning.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
It's not just a good idea, it's inevitable. The immediate drive, always a convincing one in politics, is money. the interesting Q is HOW to do it, but whether to start, and to do it with public money is a no-brainer. You might otherwise as well question whether public-financed education is relevant. That ship has sailed, and this is just one part of that critical project. Feynman's essay on textbook adoption is timeless: http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm
Current textbooks are overweight, expensive, and boring. Many schools including ours have been reduced into getting students two copies because they were to heavy to take to school and back (really). Now the kids rarely even open the things.
Would you rather that the state continue to pay for new textbooks, over and over and over?
Do you believe it would be business as usual for the remaining trustees if one or two of them were to end up in Gitmo?
That depends on this: Would it be business as usual for the home countries of the remaining trustees? I'm guessing that some of the countries where WMF trustees live are richer than those where Guantanamo Bay detainees lived and can thus make a credible threat to vote with their wallets against the United States if it p(er|ro)secutes any more WMF personnel.
California might have controversial subjects like science.
That's why they ask the publisher for an advance fee. And publisher are willing to pay it for a book with a guaranteed market. Also, only some schools enforce that rule.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Raising taxes and other means of revenues is what you should have done instead of getting to much debt.
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
Wikipedia provides a lot of information if you know what to do with it, but frankly it doesn't often have good example problems, walkthroughs, or other insight that is useful to applying mathematics to solving problems. Wikipedia just gives statements of definitions, maybe with some proofs mixed in. Good as reference, not helpful to a newbie. However, with those additions, Wikipedia is a good first step to a "write once, distribute to all" math text for a large spectrum of mathematics courses.
What really is required IMO is not so much a textbook (since as you pointed out, the information already exists out there), but rather an open free set of very good sample exercises, prompts, and projects that teachers may use in their courses. It's very difficult to find good homework problems that engage a student to think about what they are doing (and not simply apply formulas by rote), and even more so to find a more long-term project to test their understanding of the material in a way that holds their interest. Sample topics for in-class discussions are another good one; finding interesting problems to get the students talking with each other and the instructor is also hard to do, but every once in a while you find a gem that gets students arguing with each other over the best way to proceed before we work out a solution together. A catalog of things like that would be fantastic.
Just write the damn thing once, somehow, and give it away free to everyone. Seems inevitable, and I'm eager to see it.
Hey man if you're up for writing it, I'd definitely chuck $25 at a thing like this. I donated $25 to Daniel Shiffman's Nature of Code book and plan on reviewing it on Slashdot once he's done. Here's some examples of his latest products for it: PDF of Chapter 10 and Code.
...
Figure out how much money you would need to have your department make some creative common texts and see how Kickstarter responds
My work here is dung.
No, that's spending state money to burn books.
I'd rather have the federal government reform copyright, then we could give the students access to better materials than textbooks, and the schools could get a dozen different printers to print them at the lowest cost (or encourage parents to buy their student's ereaders for a discount on book fees).
Who said that anyone will be working for free?
To use an analogy, there's nothing stopping me from paying millions of dollars to someone to develop software for me, then turn around and release it under an open source license.
All they need to do is pay normal market prices for competent people who can write textbooks to write textbooks, make sure that the contract specifies that the government--not the author--retains copyright, and then release the textbooks under some sort of freedoc license.
'Sciences' like * studies?
Learning more about Ceasar Chavez then George Washington?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
First off, do you have any credible evidence that CA pushes a left wing agenda in the classrooms via text book selection? Or are you bitching because they don't teach creationism, that climate change is a lie or the frequently popular rethinking of US history to make white people not look like the monsters that would enslave people?
Secondly, my mother taught out of an open source text book for a while and it was significantly cheaper than the ones she had been using. The students were on the hook for about $24 a book. And yes, she receives her salary from the state.
While we're at it, nice straw man argument with Sallie Mae, Sallie Mae wasn't the problem, the tax cuts for the rich were. Education was a lot less expensive for students back before funding was cut by the government.
was uses as a red herring by the textbook industry.
You can have digital books AND PRINT THEM OUT for those who need them.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"The enormous cost savings for students also translates into greater efficiencies in the use of California student aid. Cal Grant B recipients are currently allotted a $1551 annual stipend for books and living expenses. By significantly reducing textbook costs, the students will have more resources to cover the array of others costs necessary for pursuing higher education. "
"government does something it's always cheaper" depends, but infrastructure items? yes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Having put two kids through the San Diego system, I have plenty. I particularly liked the week my daughter was ordered to wear a burqa and threatened with failure for not doing so at my direction. Funny how American History class turned into teaching the foundations of Islam for about a month. I can do more... At Otay high school the school board tried to replace the entire music program with hip-hop dancing; an obvious job enhancer.
You are spouting nonsense.
1) reforming copyright has no bearing on student material
2) Copyright isn't likely to expire while a student is using the book
3) textbooks get updated. Which would also update the copyright for the NEW version.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Just let anybody who feels like it pitch in.
WC:PGW?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"The enormous cost savings for students also translates into greater efficiencies in the use of California student aid. Cal Grant B recipients are currently allotted a $1551 annual stipend for books and living expenses. By significantly reducing textbook costs, the students will have more resources to cover the array of others costs necessary for pursuing higher education. "
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It is comprised primarily of Germans.
And this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsCaQBl_yBs
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Maybe in your own fantasy world. Take off your tinfoil.
How is California going to afford this venture? The last time that I checked, the entire state is in dire straits financially. A holiday road trip from San Diego to Santa Barbara revealed some roads and infrastructure in terrible condition.
Many of their packages require local installation of software to each workstation. No web-based options.
Language learning software can't be purely web-based because the module to evaluate students' pronunciation requires access to the microphone, and JavaScript under HTML5 still has no way to (ask the user to) access the microphone. Nor can certain geometry software be purely web-based because a WebGL view of a geometric object won't work in any web browser that doesn't support WebGL.
'Sciences' like * studies?
Learning more about Ceasar Chavez then George Washington?
These ideas come from people like yourself saying, "Those kooks in California would probably ______________," but don't match reality. There are a few absurd exceptions that you can find in any state, but no statistically significant trend of crazy liberalism in Californian textbooks. Also, there's no way to be as far from the truth as evolution denial in textbooks but in the opposite direction. That scale runs from reality to Texas.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
We subsidize college students at all levels. Surely many of those can also teach and write. So reformat the grant programs so that those that write good textbooks and apps that are actually used can get compensated through tuition.
What percentage does the average PHD student actually pay for their tuition?
Are these ebooks not sold publicly?
No. They are rented publicly, at a price no cheaper than a printed textbook and DRM'd to become unreadable at the end of the academic year.
to stand out in a crowd (at least on first new hire jobs without experience) to stand out, you'll need at least a masters.
Is a degree necessarily better than volunteer experience? Or is volunteer experience unavailable anywhere that matters due to employment law?
Cesar Chavez lived in Arizona, which borders California. I've always wondered why K-12 students living in Minnesota and Michigan learn more about the history of Texas, which is literally a thousand miles away, than about the history of the province of Ontario, which borders Minnesota and Michigan.
LaTeX supports color and diagrams; why would you not include them?
Color costs more to replicate in print than gray, and color ebook readers cost more and don't last as long on a charge (e.g. Kindle Fire vs. Kindle models using E Ink).
But when was the last time soneone showed up to revise a textbook while a student was using it?
Which is why the school board would collect a particular revision of each chapter and use those revisions as the textbook. Wikibooks already implements a "pending changes" system, where anonymous users can't see edits except from users who have made at least 100 edits to 10 different pages, been around a couple months, and flooded Recent Changes at least once. There have been times when it has taken weeks for one of these editors to "sign off" on a revision.
at a local community college. The text book was crap, so the instructor told the students not to bother with it, and taught from notes. Trouble was, the book was written by the head of the department. Their grades were held hostage until all the copies of the book at the book store were sold.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It wasn't liberalism that did Greece in, it was fraud. Transparency is a liberal principle, so if you want less fraud, you want more liberalism.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
'Sciences' like * studies?
Learning more about Ceasar Chavez then George Washington?
Assuming that this is true (and not just some random crap you picked up from Rush Limbaugh), I don't see the problem. George Washington lived a long time ago, and is less relevant to dealing with the modern world than Cesar Chavez is. Much, much less relevant. It's like complaining that people in a military college learn more about Schwarzkopf than Hannibal - Hannibal was clearly a towering figure in military history, but much less (though still a significant amount) can be learned from him than from Schwarzkopf about fighting modern war.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
If they are trying to reduce costs, do what all colleges in my community did: school-sponsored textbook resale, and define curriculum such that teachers need not change textbooks too often. If the curriculum doesn't change much from year to year, then 4-year-old text books are as good as new ones, especially if they are well cared for. Reducing resale value of beat-up textbooks gives financial incentive for the students to keep their textbooks pristine. The end result is fewer textbooks are bought from publishers, and everyone saves money.
The publishers may hate it, but if the community decides democratically that this is best for their students, what will be will be.
I find it a crying shame that cultural works like the original Hunt the Wumpus, Colossal Cave "ADVENT"ure, ELIZA, or Space War wouldn't be considered as seminal and historical in nature as [traditional literary works]
Most computer programs are useful tools, such as a kernel, a document editor, a web browser, etc. The four programs you mentioned are essentially video games. You are correct that these straddle the boundary between tool and art. Free Software Foundation, the organization that popularized copyleft licensing, has never to my knowledge come up with a licensing framework or revenue model that covers the issues specific to video games.
The only difference is that the grammar is considerably more constrained for computer software
That and the fact that the public generally doesn't view the program itself, only its output. And the fact that programs in a lot of languages are generally distributed in such a way that makes it next to impossible for a human to read ("object code"), not the preferred form for making modifications ("source code").
I would utterly dare a company, with or without SOPA, to "block" Wikimedia projects and sue the WMF for copyright violations from previous fair-use content plus original content donated to the foundation through open source licenses like the GFDL and CC-by-SA.
It's called a SLAPP, and one of the tactics used in a SLAPP is for the plaintiff to drag out the proceedings in order to deplete the alleged infringer's legal fund.
aggressive steps to remove copyright violations.when found.
This gives WMF a defense under OCILLA. However, it still costs money to assert such a defense in court. This hurts especially if the incumbent copyright owners and the U.S. government manage to get the major payment processors (PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard) on the incumbent copyright owners' side, as tlhIngan suggested.
I am pretty certain that a legal defense fund could be raised for the WMF if there ever was a need... or even for one of the volunteers in the performance of their assigned duties (assuming that it was pretty straight forward). Once things get settled down, you can also "SLAPP" back and counter-sue for legal costs... refunding anything actually spent plus per diem costs for defendants and other legitimate expenses, not to mention barratry fines The penalty for losing could be pretty bad for somebody trying this to somebody at the WMF.
More to the point, any such lawsuit would get the Barbara Streisand effect for the company making the lawsuit, where the public relations damage alone should be awful enough that anybody stupid enough to try this sort of silly stunt through legal channels might as well be pointing a gun to their own head.
Seriously, a legal approach that would attempt to shut down a Wikimedia project is doomed to failure. Even trying to write a law, at least in America, that would shut it down would be completely ineffective. Simply put, I think you are out to lunch to even suggest it would be possible except for a very narrow issue that wouldn't ever shut the site down.
Way for both of you to completely miss the point of my question. Right now the German economy is extremely healthy considering the scope of the world wide recession and they have one of the most robust welfare states in the world.
And before anyone even tries, American workers work longer and are more productive than German (or any other nation's) workers, so don't try and pin it on them having a superior "work ethic".
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I am pretty certain that a legal defense fund could be raised for the WMF if there ever was a need
How would that happen if PayPal, MC, and Visa freeze WMF's merchant account for alleged copyright terrorism?
This is getting pointless. Besides the fact that you have openly admitted there are gatekeepers in the financial services industry that are even beyond government control in some cases, there are a whole bunch of presumptions being made with your suggestion that simply wouldn't apply to the WMF, or would take long enough to work their way through the judicial system that more than a few phones in congressional offices would be ringing off the hook to change laws involved.
Besides, you can always go back to cold, hard, cash that can be donated through fundraising efforts of local meet-up groups or other volunteer groups that already do exist, including local WMF chapters that are already officially recognized by the WMF, and then physically move that cash to the WMF offices. This isn't anything like Wikileaks that is explicitly trying to keep from having formal offices in a fixed location.
The legal, political, and public relations consequences to engaging in such an action would set a legal fire up that would burn most career politicans opposing the WMF, and might even take a few judges out with it. Even bringing this issue up shows that you really don't understand political realities here. A legal approach to shutting down the WMF simply won't work. It may have worked in the past, but the WMF and Wikipedia in particular are so ingrained into American society and indeed much of the rest of the world that it can't be taken down through such amateur tactics. The rot must happen from within, not from an external threat to the project.
The whole point of this discussion is how a textbook publisher might get around to shutting down Wikibooks as a project, seeing that it is somehow a threat to their business model. I am declaring that simply can't happen through legal channels as nothing Wikibooks or any other Wikimedia project is doing right now is illegal, and that such laws to make it illegal simply will never be passed or long kept on the books if subversively submitted. You are off on a hypothetical tangent that would have so much else happening that your supposed "shutting down fundraising of the WMF" would not be instantaneous and would completely backfire on anybody even attempting such a stupid thing.