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."

Comments

I hope they manage to

[Anonymous Coward]

Finnish it... Get it? Finnish... it?

Re:I hope they manage to

[tomhath]

I doubt it, they're not Russian.

Re:I hope they manage to

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I fail to see how their nationality could be German to this discussion.

Re:I hope they manage to

[neapolitan]

There were insufficient bathroom breaks; European in the seat.

Re:I hope they manage to

[Seumas]

They didn't have much time for meal breaks. They were so Hungary.

Re:I hope they manage to

[SpzToid]

The Turkey had no gravy, because there was far far too much Greece to deal with, so everyone went Hungary. They had no choice, unless they could afford to go Dutch.

because teaching is *that* easy

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:because teaching is *that* easy

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Perhaps they've been teaching stuff for quite some time and now they're simply putting their notes together.

why use hipsterisms?

[Gothmolly]

Hackathon? Booksprint?

When did mundane events and tasks become faddish?

Is it any good?

[phantomfive]

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?

Re:Is it any good?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the basis for his complaints were that the people writing the books didn't know the field they were writing about. In this case the people behind the project are graduate students in math, one professor, a few Ph.D's and some teachers. I would guess that the problems with quality will not be of the type Feynman was complaining about, rather problems might occur with explanations that aren't detailed enough or lack the polish that inevitably follows from a project like this. However, if they put up a mailing list for the project and start incrementally improving it, I'm sure it will surpass in quality the commercially available texts in Finland. Especially, if someone actually teaches a class based on the book, asks feeback from students (e.g. what should be explained better), and uses the experience to improve the presentation.

Since they want something open, the ideal thing would most probably be to have a discussion forum for the book, where students could ask questions. This would give tons of data that can be used for improvement. It would also make the data public, further encouraging contributions from the public. It would also benefit the students that have to live with the beta versions.

Re:Is it any good?

[fermion]

One thing that is good about it is that it is in LaTeX. That means that it could, for instance, be put on Github, and changes made and committed. This is different from so many other books that are written in,. say MS Word, that are less easily revisioned.

So quality is going to depend on basic initial construction and how much buy there is to improve the book. From my experience, there is often s good amount of personality conflicts in these things. The reason we have commercial books is because powerful individuals focus on what they want instead of simply whether the content is accurate.

Re:Is it any good?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can appreciate this. Having just completed a physics masters, I am well acquainted with trying to find textbooks on various things, often referring to the Big Names In Physics Textbooks - that is Landau/Lifshitz, Griffiths, Hecht, Goldstein, Sakurai and the list goes on. The problem is that very few books are written to the levels that students need them.

Introductory undergraduate texts are often superficial enough for a first pass, but quickly become doorstops (e.g. Young and Freedman). Personally I still found them useful for occasional things, but by and large we forgot about them. When you graduate things become more tricky and you resort to reading peer publications and textbooks that fit your niche. This is tricky, but hey, it's research and you live with it. The problem is in between, those three or four years of undergrad where you need excellent concise explanations of, in reality, very complicated phenomena. Most of the time that simply doesn't exist.

After four years of my degree I hit problems. I understood what was taught in the lectures, but I had problems applying the information to other things. Why? Because I found myself asking whether something was possible or not. This was especially apparent in General Relativity with tensor calculus, I was hesitant to work through equations because I wasn't sure whether I could do operation X or if such and such was valid. It's that horrible feeling of knowing enough about a topic to understand that what you're about to do is wrong, but not enough to know the solution.

Let's take quantum mechanics as an example. The textbooks almost uniformly start in the same way, a quick overview of the observed phenomena, some stuff on wave-particle duality and a headfirst dive into the Schrödinger Equation followed by uses thereof. By the time you get to higher level QM and things like bra-ket notation is introduced, people get confused. They get even more confused when analogies to vectors start being bandied around and when operators come into the fray it gets worse. Why? Because they started the wrong way. Going in the other direction, the big well known books in QM are strictly graduate and often the people recommending them really have no idea what they're talking about. There simply aren't that many geniuses in most colleges/universities. Realistically 95% of students need simple, hand-holdy books with a lot of solid grounding.

There is only one textbook I've found at an undergraduate level that remedies this for QM, and that's Shankar. Whereas most books begin with historical waffle, Shankar immediately dives in with mathematics. Quantum mechanics barely gets mentioned until the third chapter. Why is this? Because it lets you get your head around the idea of a vector "not being a stick with an arrow" as he puts it. Once you understand that a vector is simply a mathematical object that obeys a set of rules and that position vectors happen to obey them also, things get easier. The second chapter is still no quantum and in fact deals with Hamiltonian mechanics, I know of no other book that does this in quite this way. As a result, by the time you get to introducing quantum effects, it is easy to explain the Schrödinger equation in terms of abstract maths and solving problems becomes more straight forward. In fact, you realise that you learned about operator notation, eigenvector/value/functions before you even learned about the wavefunction and it's simply a matter of applying your knowledge.

The rest of the book is fairly self explanatory, all the usual topics are covered in a decent amount of detail although there is no field theory. But that's not the point. The point is that the reader is given a rigorous mathematical explanation of the physics before the physics is taught. As a result, the physics becomes almost trivial and you can understand why things connect the way they do.

Extend this to the rest of textbooks and you have your problem. Authors need to step into the students' shoes a

Re:Is it any good?

[Unnngh!]

I hate reviewing LaTeX documents, as the software doesn't come with any revisioning/collaboration tools to speak of. Word, on the other hand, PITA though it may be, comes with very good tools via track changes and comments. Not revisioning in the sense of version control, but in the sense of what most people actually need for document editing. For an open textbook a VCS would work great, but it's overkill for smaller, article-length papers.

Re:Is it any good?

[TheRaven64]

The problem with writing a textbook like this is that you need to know two fields: the topic of the textbook and education. It's very easy to find people who know one, finding people who know both is hard. It's also really hard to correctly pitch textbooks aimed at children so that they're approachable without being patronising. There's a reason I stick to writing books for adults: it's orders of magnitude easier.

Re:Is it any good?

[TheRaven64]

You are doing it wrong. LaTeX is source code and so it can be put in any revision control system. We store a load of LaTeX documents in svn and it's very easy to review minor changes just by reading the commit emails. You can't do that with something like Word - everyone needs to check out the document and open it in Word. For reviewing larger sets of changes, I use the latexdiff tool. This annotates changed sections between two arbitrary versions. For stuff I'm sending off to my publisher, I just add change bars so that the copyeditor or proofreader can recheck those sections. For things I'm editing collaboratively, I'll make it highlight the old and new text.

I've also done collaborative work with Word and it was painful in comparison. The rest of the company agreed, and later paid me to produce a custom LaTeX document class for them that matched their publication style so that they could ditch Word. If you have more than two people collaborating, then the Word model is very cumbersome.

Re:Is it any good?

[gl4ss]

it's for (what's essentially) the first course in high school "long" mathematics. I don't think they can fuck it up too much(there's really not that much to fuck up in it).
as such though it's not very useful until they make the books for the rest of the courses(this is like 1/8th of the 3 year high school long mathematics).

And "long" mathematics because we have this choice of doing "long" or "short" in some subjects, like chemistry, physics, and mathematics. And free textbooks that don't change every other year would be nice because this is not elementary school, the pupils have to buy the books(however if you really couldn't afford them, I think you could get social services to pony up for them).

(it's not high school but "lukio", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(school) ).

Re:Finland...

[Troyusrex]

I'm not much of a grammar Nazi but I can't help myself here. It's FEWER test, If it can be counted it's "fewer" if not, it's "less".

Re:Hackathon?

[martin-boundary]

He means, it contains the authors' favourite topics related to the basic material, and doesn't contain the authors' least favourite topics. For example, in calculus, optimizing functions (finding the max or min) is an important application of calculus. So if a textbook doesn't mention this application because the author finds it uninteresting, that's an example of a biased textbook.

Re:Hackathon?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have agreed with you a year ago, but read up on conservapedia's crazy leader.

Bad Public Relations

[Bruce Perens]

If you want Open Textbooks, and there are many reasons to want them, you should not start by announcing to the world that you wrote the complete thing in a three day sprint. That's just handing a line to the commercial publishers to use in opposing such works.

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.

Re:Bad Public Relations

[puhuri]

Many of those who are participating have experience on writing commercial i.e. closed text books and the work estimate is reasonable. With that group the amount of work done in a weekend is the same or larger that is done by the author on text book. Probably part of illustrations and editing work made by publisher will be missing by end of weekend. The text and content looks reasonable as I just pulled it from github and compiled.

There has already been lots of discussion in local media "those are stealing money from publishers", "how they are going to get living" and usual stuff related to open source software. And that is a good thing - specailly becase crowdsourced and crowdfunded language teaching book was killed by authorities.

The fact is, that only very few text book writers earn living just by making text books in Finland. If you have only a about 5 million speaking Finnish, you do not sell many books even if you get manage write a bestseller for elementary school. This book is for the first course in high school "long" mathematics, that is taken only by about 10000 students annually. In addition, aftermarkets are quite active, so at best one is able to sell 5000 books - and of course that is divided further between different publishers. Taken that writer gets some 2 € for a book, it is easy to make then math - annual salary for qualified high school math teacher (15y experience, additional education; i.e. one that would be able to write a book) is 50000 €. And typically there are at least 3 persons sharing the profits, so after marginal taxes one may afford to pay holiday flight tickets.

I, as a father of 3rd year high school student, would have welcomed this three years earlier.

Rushed design by committee

[happyhamster]

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.