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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.
I'm reserving judgement of Mayan mathematical prowess until late December.
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.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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
Textbooks in which field?
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.
They counted with their hands and feet (base 20 system) if that ain't kewl what is? Of course the thing is, people (particularly journalists) never quite understand the Mayans properly. The thing is just like we have leap years to correct the fact that the year isn't exactly 365 days they had a similar corrective system once a couple of decades were past where they added extra days. These days were in tradition associated with harmful events or whatever so they were usually holydays were people did nothing at all! Then there is the fact that they essentially did not bother extending that basic calendar past a certain year because they saw no use for it (they went extinct like in the XVIth century?). They do have a calendar system which is basically infinite but is seldom used. So the "end of the Mayan calendar" is a bit like the "end of the 32-bit Unix time_t epoch". A big DUH!
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.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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.
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.
Mathematics was held back quite a bit for quite a long time by religion. When institutionalized superstition abhors the concept of void (zero), you have a serious drawback.
(This is why 1BC is followed by 1AD, by the way.)
Similar for negative numbers, and more recently, infinity and imaginary numbers. The latter two still aren't taught below adult education levels in some particularly superstitious countries.
This is a great concept, but who does this benefit in the end? I know quiet a few professors that I took classes from that the very books we used in 'their' classes were one's they 1) either knew a close colleague in their field that reviewed it or provided input into it (see liner notes for their names) or 2) endorsed or provided input on the writing or content of it themselves. Outside of that, there's always going to be that uber passionate professor that isn't going to like the quality, content or organization of the open textbooks they have to choose from and opt to still pick the book of their choice for the benefit of their students and curriculum.
So let's say this flies for gen-ed courses, which is totally could. I don't see it working at all for actual studies or specific majors with changing content or new adoptive technologies.
Hoping on the student loan bandwagon a second, let's say even half of a students book moved to an openly available one, it still wouldn't make a dent in reducing costs for the student in any manner of impact. I also thought my university's bookstore thoroughly enjoyed raping student's pocket books on the re-re-re-reselling of used books at a dirt cheap by-back tactic. Either way, if I see the fee or cost difference falling right back into the student's lap as some 'new' fee line-item.
This is also in Project Gutenberg. I know. I had it scanned and submitted (though, as usual, lots of other people did the work of getting it proofed and assembled).
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33283
The difference is that kids today are expected to know more in general than back then.
This is obviously not true. The books get less and less content (see GGP). Things that were taught before are now dropped, because (in part) of "no child left behind" and the focus on passing tests, not passing knowledge.
When did Charlemagne live? What's the capital of New Zealand? What's a cantilever bridge?
Tell me with a straight face that today's children know these things.
You're begging the question here. Kids today _do_ know more math than they did when you were a kid and when your parents were a kids. It's much more likely that they've taken calculus and even passed a third year of math in high school.
Calculus was mandatory and started in junior high back when I went to school. By ninth grade elective maths or first year high school, you were into derivates and integrals.
What's more just compare what they're using it on compared with what was used 50 years ago.
Yes, let's. They rely on expert systems to do the maths for them, served in task-specific packages.
They wouldn't even be able to do a simple trig calculation to figure out how long a ramp must be to not exceed a certain grade, or how much grain or how long a fence they need or for a non-rectangular lot. They rely on Home Depot to figure it out for them. And the clerks there depend on specialized calculating tools which were written by your mom and dad.
Hell, I can't even get the correct change back when a cash register is broken. And they run to Google when faced with horrible problems like "cook at 250 C" on a stove with F temperatures, because doing 1.8 x + 32 is beyond them.
Forget mathematical prowess, learn their marketing. Tip #1, if you're going to predict the apocalypse, predict it so far in the future that everyone you're talking to will be dead. Some will still be awed by your power to know such things, but never see you for the fraud you are. Today's crackpots always get that wrong, going around rounding up gullible souls for their commune or whatever because the world is going to end in May. Then June comes and they're revealed to be charlatans.
Fair enough, so we get a new edition of a textbook every 50 years. Let's be generous, and say every 10. Is that what happens now? No, it isn't. When I was in college not THAT long ago, using last year's edition was generally frowned upon but not quite forbidden. Not because the meat of the course was different, but because things like page numbers might be different, problems might be different, et cetera. Now, does that speak to a massive increase in didactic power, or precisely what you, the publisher, would do if you wanted to force students to buy new books instead of used ones?
A college education is getting very expensive. This is okay, because a college education is enormously valuable. Nevertheless, we are entirely right to want to crush waste out of a very expensive system. I learned from my expensive econ textbooks that this is going to happen whether you like it or not because rich profits attract competition, and competition drives prices down. Switching around the pages, updating the examples in ways that doesn't change the content meaningfully, and changing the practice problems around is simply an artificial price support. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Switching around the pages, updating the examples in ways that doesn't change the content meaningfully, and changing the practice problems around is simply an artificial price support. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Hence why some colleges are just building the cost of the eTextbooks into the tuition from the outset...you don't even get a choice anymore. Someone's palms are getting greased for that arrangement, I'm sure; like any other arm of the MAFIAA, they're not going to let an antiquated business model get in their way of increasing profits.
At least, that's how things are here in the U.S., based on the comments of extended family members currently in college. Textbooks were always a fucking racket, we all know that, but it's getting more and more ridiculous year after year. eTextbooks are great for the publisher...no more used market to compete with, no more kids scraping by using a library copy of their text, and since they're starting to add it in to tuition, they have a guaranteed sale with every admission.
Mathematics was held back quite a bit for quite a long time by religion.
That's not entirely true:
- Guys like Pythagoras (c 500 BCE) and Aristotle (c 400 BCE) were living in a polytheistic society where religion was not really the force that it became under Christianity. Everyone seems to have paid at least lip service to worshipping the official state gods, but it was nothing like an environment where if you didn't profess a particular faith you were killed. Roman documents were very clear that they were generally fine with people believing whatever they wanted unless that belief encouraged them to revolt against Rome (which Nero thought the Christians were doing). And the BC / AD split (now BCE / CE, of course) obviously wasn't something that happened until Christianity became fairly well established.
- The Abbasid Caliphate actively encouraged and funded the study of mathematics and science from about 750 CE to 1250 CE, in what has been termed the Islamic Golden Age. The difference between the math that was being used by the Romans and the math that was available for Isaac Newton to draw on are largely the result of Arabic mathematicians (who in turn drew from mathematicians in India) - they had codified writing of numbers including fractions and decimals, created algebra and trigonometry, and vastly improved understanding of irrational numbers.
- The aforementioned Isaac Newton was incredibly religious, writing a great deal about alchemy and metaphysics. Same with Renee Descartes: his magnum opus was a philosophical proof (in his mind at least) that God exists.
If you mean that mathematics was held back in Europe in the Middle Ages due to dogmatic Christianity, then you'd be somewhat right, but that's different from all religion holding back all mathematics.
I am officially gone from
Math textbooks are basically just a listing of basic proofs.
It sounds like you were educated in the 60s - 70s, because that is what textbooks were at the time. No decent math textbook today just lists basic proofs. That would be a reference book, intended for someone who already knew the math and needed to look-up the steps. A good textbook is more explanatory, breaks out the steps, includes historical anecdotes, footnotes, examples of applications, etc. Since the 60s we have learned that drilling proofs into people's mind is not the optimal way to teach math.
Not that education or textbooks today are perfect, but there have been advances.