Slashdot Mirror
Teachers Write an Open Textbook In a Weekend Hackathon
linjaaho writes "A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students write an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a three-day booksprint. The event started on Friday 28th September at 9:00 (GMT+3) and the book will be (hopefully) ready on Sunday evening. The book is written in Finnish. The result — LaTeX source code and the PDF — is published with open CC-BY-license. As far as the authors know, this is the first time a course textbook is written in three-day hackathon. The hackathon approach has been used earlier mainly for coding open source software and writing manuals for open source software. The progress can be followed by visiting the repository at GitHub or the project Facebook page."
Finnish it... Get it? Finnish... it?
The US could learn a lot from the Finnish approach to education...
Palm trees and 8
The main thing which distinguishes a paedagogical material from bad paedagogical material is care.
There are lots of people who know lots of stuff. Almost all these people are able to quickly write down some information relating to this stuff quickly if you give them vague outlines.
But teaching is an interactive process, and finding out what teaching material works means spending time with students and developing your material based on that experience.
And then updating it regularly to reflect feedback.
I am a mathematics graduate and I could knock together an introduction to lots of things in a weekend. Hell, when chatting with intelligent researchers in other disciplines, I have done "introduction to blah" on-the-spot lectures *literally* on the back of a napkin in canteens or whatever. I really don't think I managed to convey enough to give the audience a solid foundation, and it certainly wouldn't have worked at a secondary school level where I don't know that I'm talking to exceptionally bright people.
Hackathon? Booksprint?
When did mundane events and tasks become faddish?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
> The book is written in Finnish.
When did they finnish it?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Richard Feynman is probably the most famous person to complain about textbooks, but he wasn't complaining about closed source, he was complaining because they weren't any good.
So the question remains, is this textbook any good?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Why is this considered a hackathon? Seems like the term "hack" is a little too cliche...kind of like "epic", "epic fail", etc. They wrote a textbook, wow. I wonder how many errors are in it and how biased it is. Prolly could use a little peer review but 3 days to fill a couple hundred pages...I mean "three days to hack some paper and not epic fail is swell."
If you are not going to do everything that a commercial publisher and their authors would do to ensure the quality of the work, please don't tell the world about it. Just put the work up for people to fix, and let them announce it when they're satisfied with it.
Bruce Perens.
It's going to end up being a steaming pile of crap, designed by a committee, rushed to finish. Why such a hurry? In my experience, great textbooks are labor of love of experts in the field with talent in writing.
Textbooks are dense compilations of abstract content. They struggle poorly to contextualize their subject matter of the reader. The best a student can hope for is some example with a good diagram. They don't interact with the student, the student can't reprogram a mathematics example in a textbook by itself, they have to go and learn to use entirely separate tools and skills to do that. If you want to learn something, then you immerse yourself in it, you push yourself toward comprehension and you play with the components. A good teacher with LOGO and enough computers could teach a bunch of 11 year old kids deeper and more complex mathematical ideas than a good teacher with a textbook on Algebra with more mature students.
And if you want someone to learn something, the hardest way you can make them do it is by reading about it in a book. In order to understand an abstract concept in writing, you have to read and comprehend the material deeply. To do that, you have to burn through hours of mental effort or develop your own ways of interacting with the ideas you want to learn, like writing programs to graph them or making physical models involving their principles.
The only reason this project is good is because it makes no sense for schools to pay for a product as bad as a textbook.
An upper secondary mathematics textbook written in Finnish? Sounds to me like your average Linux man page.
Here's a English-language video from Vesa Linja-aho, the submitter and the main boss guy in this project: http://youtu.be/ThbUiky4AKA
Seriously, do you REALLY want your child taking data from something thrown together in a weekend?
I'm positive it was not fact checked. I'm positive it has not had any sort of consistency, its going to have several different writing styles which is bad. Its not going to focus on the proper things where students have difficulty, its going to focus on the things the writers know the most about, or THINK they know the most about.
'Open' doesn't make it better or more useful. In general if you compare ALL 'Open' things to closed, 'Open' pretty much universally sucks. Yes, there are exceptions like Linux, but the key word is EXCEPTION.
This is a stupid idea.
Maybe not. But...:
A teacher friend recently pointed out this quality of the work in textbooks to me. It seems like quality isn't what makes it hard to compete--rather, it's the same sort of things that made it hard for opensource software to compete with Microsoft et al.
-rozzin.