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University of Minnesota Launches Review Project For Open Textbooks
New submitter Durinia writes "Minnesota Public Radio is running a story about the University of Minnesota's Open Textbooks project. The goal of the project is to solicit reviews of college-level open source textbooks and collect those that pass muster onto their website.
The project will focus first on high-volume introductory classes such as those for Math and Biology, because as David Ernst, director of the project, states in the interview: 'You know the world doesn't need another $150 Algebra One book. Algebra One hasn't changed for centuries, probably.'"
Requirements for inclusion include: Open licensing (Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike), complete content (no glorified collections of lecture notes), applicability outside of the author's institution, and print availability.
I was talking with a history professor (rljensen) the other day, and he said that free textbook ebooks would never catch on because, quote, "They're all terrible. And if they weren't terrible, they'd be selling them."
Hopefully sites like this will not only prove him wrong, but bring education, world-wide, to the next level.
It's an absolutely silly statement. Teaching methodology has changed enormously just in the last fifty years. I've had the luxury of comparing 19th century textbooks to present ones—it's not something you'd want to be stuck with; they're more like reference texts with a few questions (or even a separate question book) if you're lucky. The didactic power has, quite simply, vastly improved.
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Even more interestingly the Greek were comparatively lousy at math. Good at geometry, tho. The Romans had a similar problem. Their number system did stink.
20 minutes into the future
Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus Phillips Thompson was probably the best of my early calculus books, it is off copyright due to its age, and is on amazon for less than $10 and can be found for free online. $150 a quarter just was not a reasonable expense for the other books.
Classics and Math. I've also looked at 60s-70s Biochemistry and compared it with current stuff, and while the content is different, the difference is also huge in teaching style.
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It's an absolutely silly statement. Teaching methodology has changed enormously just in the last fifty years. I've had the luxury of comparing 19th century textbooks to present onesâ"it's not something you'd want to be stuck with; they're more like reference texts with a few questions (or even a separate question book) if you're lucky. The didactic power has, quite simply, vastly improved.
That is indeed the kind of book I'd like to be stuck with. The signal to noise ratio is way higher, and it's the job of the teacher to teach. Today's teachers are much like typical mid-level management armed with Powerpoint in that they read a pre-digested presentation for a captive audience, without doing much teaching.
If "didactic power [...] has vastly improved", you'd think that kids today would know maths "vastly" better than old people. Really, now.
That's not what I see - I see tests that have been dumbed down to fit a smaller curriculum, and kids have been dumbed down with them.
It's time for the pendulum to swing back; that we start to demand something from our teachers and children. Like being able to absorb book knowledge even when not presented according to the latest pedagogic fad or directly targeting upcoming tests. Enabling the kids to do so is the teachers' job.