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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
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.
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.
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.