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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.
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.
How do you "break the legs" of a registered charity like Wikimedia Foundation?
Press charges in your country against their leader, extradite him, and then try him for "terrorism"
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
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.
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
Of course they are, they're accurate. Reality has a well known liberal bias.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.