Bill and Melinda Gates: Textbooks Are Becoming Obsolete

No Bill... by blahplusplus · 2019-02-17 03:08 · Score: 5, Insightful

... textbooks are not obsolete. Not everyone on the planet can afford internet especially schools in places where internet is costly/sketchy and teachers need classrooms where kids can focus.

Re:No Bill... by Type44Q · 2019-02-17 03:46 · Score: 2

...textbooks are not obsolete
They certainly fucking aren't; Dear Beloved Bill, on the other hand, is either suffering from accelerated senility or is merely continueing the subtle eugenicist fuckery of his ilk.
Re:No Bill... by apoc.famine · 2019-02-17 04:31 · Score: 3, Interesting

I find myself in surprising agreement with the Gates. As someone who was actually a teacher, I learned a lot about the deep negatives behind textbooks.

Not everyone on the planet can afford internet...
But they can afford it more than they can afford to keep current with textbooks. FFS, rural India and Africa have a surprisingly large amount of internet access. And not 100% of a community even needs it - just one person to pull down information.
By the time a textbook hits the market it's already a year or three out-of-date. It would be one thing if textbooks were cheap and we could just update them as needed, but they are a fucking racket. The people paid to write them are not necessarily experts in the subject, and they don't necessarily even have an education background. (I actually know some of them.) The cost that goes into making textbooks is really not that high, and the markup is utterly insane.
What we need are online texts that are free or very low cost, maintained and vetted by experts, and designed for educational use. We don't have that. We have parts of that, but not the whole package, which would be necessary to replace textbooks. If the Gates wanted to help, they'd set up such a system for all subjects. But to do that they'd have to understand something about the education system and hire some experts to work with teachers to figure out how to craft an internet replacement for textbooks. It would need to be low-bandwith, downloadable and printable, organized to match standardized curriculum, and be easy for teachers to craft lesson plans around.
But given this is the guy who made Microsoft, it's clear that such a concept would be utterly foreign to him.

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Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Re:No Bill... by JaredOfEuropa · 2019-02-17 04:39 · Score: 2

Well, the mantra amongst educators the past few decades has been "the classroom sucks". And same as with textbooks, they've failed to come up with a better alternative. Even in places where internet is great and schools can afford the equipment to offer e-learning and/or computer assisted teaching, educators are still finding that a lot of the electronic learning aids are ineffective and rather expensive to produce.

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If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Re:No Bill... by KiloByte · 2019-02-17 04:43 · Score: 2, Interesting

Dear Beloved Bill, on the other hand, is either suffering from accelerated senility or is merely continueing the subtle eugenicist fuckery of his ilk.
This. This is the guy who sends poor countries some medicine (valuating them at five orders of magnitude above reasonable price) for the tiny string attached of agreeing to forbid local manufacture of said medicines. Or, promoting male genital mutilation instead of fighting it. And so on, so on. His "philantrophy" sets back what he touches about as badly as his "contributions" in the software world.

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The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Re:No Bill... by JaredOfEuropa · 2019-02-17 04:45 · Score: 5, Insightful

Most textbooks really don't go out of date that quickly. But those who write and publish them obviously have an interest in issuing a new edition every year or two, so parents are forced to buy the new edition at a premium instead of buying one second hand or using a hand-me-down from an older sibling. And of course if textbooks go online, publishers can charge the full price every time even without issuing new editions; they just need to be sure that access to a textbook cannot be transferred between accounts.

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If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Re:No Bill... by serviscope_minor · 2019-02-17 05:12 · Score: 5, Interesting

Excuse the selective quoting, but:
By the time a textbook hits the market it's already a year or three out-of-date. [...] It would need to be[...] organized to match standardized curriculum,
I think those things are somewhat in opposition. If you're at the level of standardised cirricula, then you're teaching intro level or a bit above. Anything much higher doesn't have standardised cirricula. On that note, most things that are intro level don't change fast enough to be out of date in three years (not everything, but most).
On another note, textbooks don't need to be matched to a cirriculum. At uni the lecturers often gave a list of books they thought were useful if you wanted to learn outside of lectures. The cirriculum wasn't organised around those books (or vice versa). And sometimes books are just plain useful for learning stuff, for example, I love my copy of Horowitz & Hill and NR.
On the other hand, a dig in the eye wit ha sharp stick would be a better bet than some of the things that pass for textbooks, especially at the mass eucation level.

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SJW n. One who posts facts.
Re:No Bill... by Megol · 2019-02-17 05:18 · Score: 1

Provide references for those claims.
Re: No Bill... by Anonymous Coward · 2019-02-17 05:23 · Score: 2, Insightful

I can drop a textbook down the stairs and end up with a few creased pages.
An iPad Pro, however...
Re:No Bill... by jwhyche · 2019-02-17 05:35 · Score: 4, Interesting

Actually, I think it depends on the market. The basic knowledge that a child needs in a developing country can usually fit in one text book. That is math, read/writing, basic science, and history. This text book can be printed on waterproof paper and can last for decades.
In modern schools the text book has gone obsolete. I remember roaming the halls in high school and college with pounds of fat ass books on my back. Right now on my desk I have whole classes of books on my android tablet. It weights 1/2 pound, maybe.

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Re:No Bill... by Dutch+Gun · 2019-02-17 05:40 · Score: 3

There are other practical factors as well. Books are bulky, expensive, and just damned heavy to carry. I still don't think the technology for ubiquitous e-readers is cheap enough yet, but when you can buy a new tablet-like reader for the price of a book or two, many of the arguments for paper textbooks will seem a bit less compelling.
Still, I think "textbooks" as a concept, whether in printed form or electronic, will be with us for a very long time. I don't see why they'd ever become obsolete, as they're purpose-built for a student to read along with and learn in a structured way. What may change is the way we interact with them. Those little quizzes at the back of chapters? How about if a student can interactively take those quizzes right in the textbook (via the reader), and then software suggests a specialized review chapter and tailors future quizzes to help ensure they learn the proper material? That is, you keep drilling the student on the area they're weakest to ensure they learn the material, all with little to no additional work by the teacher.
This doesn't mean the end of the "textbook", but perhaps just an expansion of how it's organized and a change in how students interact with it. The simple act of a student being able to use a humble hyperlink to look up terms or concepts on the fly could be invaluable. I've already experienced this myself when looking up unfamiliar words with my Kindle.

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Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Re:No Bill... by bill_mcgonigle · 2019-02-17 05:49 · Score: 1

Gates can pay for a Starlink to each school in a few years. Maybe also for some solar panels and a battery to keep it running. (They're already working on clean water and mosquito nets.)
This won't be a bottleneck very soon so it makes sense to overlook connectivity problems now when planning for the future.

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My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Re:No Bill... by Anonymous Coward · 2019-02-17 05:52 · Score: 4, Insightful

One year old textbooks...out of date? Please. Fundamental, primary level textbook content hasn't changed significantly in 50 years, current events, and modern (terrible) teaching trends notwithstanding. Tell me, with a straight face, that primary level basic math, life sciences, chemistry, algebra, calculus, geometry, ancient civilizations, literature, etc. etc. etc. have reason to be revamped because of new discovery, in the last ten years, and I'll know you're a sociopath.
The only reason they update every year is so that problem / answer sheets update, requiring students / districts buy new books, keeping the authors and publishers in perpetual perpetuity. That last bit goes double for college level textbooks, where our understanding of things is more prone to rapid change.
Re:No Bill... by bill_mcgonigle · 2019-02-17 05:55 · Score: 2

My son's online curriculum automatically adapts to wrong answers, gives him extra questions where he needs practice, and gives me detailed reports of problem areas. But it's good enough that I rarely need to intercede and he's performing at about 97th percentile (the public school wanted to "code" him).
The problem teachers have is they're not exploring solutions that allow for the possibility that the teaching role is obsolete.
Frankly this is merely a return to the "one-room-schoolhouse" primer model but they're too wed to the Prussian System to allow for it.
I pay about 1/1000th of what a public school classroom costs.

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My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Re:No Bill... by Darinbob · 2019-02-17 06:13 · Score: 2

Textbooks are a great reference. As long as kids remember how to read and turn pages, so another half decade at least. The internet may be good for supplementary information, the textbook is generally laid out in a straightforward manner, it's compact, and it's all there.
People have been claiming that computers will replace traditional education methods since the late 1970s. And yet it hasn't come to pass. Every "breakthrough" here has been a flop. Online videos really are nothing more than the old films they used to show in class, except that they beg you to subscribe and like.
Re:No Bill... by Darinbob · 2019-02-17 06:13 · Score: 1

Get a used textbook. The textbook will also last you for decades.
Re: No Bill... by Dog-Cow · 2019-02-17 06:45 · Score: 1

I wish I could drop a textbook down the stairs and end up with an iPad Pro!
Re: No Bill... by Anonymous Coward · 2019-02-17 07:18 · Score: 1

No, Bill Gates is totally right. We need to burn all the books. No one should have to carry around big heavy books that have no Internet backdoors for our spy systems to collect metadata from. Not to mention all the trees that will be saved!
Mandate Microsoft Surface Pro Windows 10 tablets in all schools today! For the sake of our childrens' future!
Re:No Bill... by ChrisMaple · 2019-02-17 07:19 · Score: 1

You've touched on the way things should go: not textbooks, but interactive educational software. Learning should be like an early Tomb Raider game: some exposition, mostly adventure and puzzles.
Not only books, but classrooms and teachers should be phased out. Computers and software should be able to handle everything but physical activity skills, at much lower cost.

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Re:No Bill... by Dutch+Gun · 2019-02-17 07:49 · Score: 2

but classrooms and teachers should be phased out.
I wouldn't go in that direction, at least not for everyone. There are certainly some children who are self-starters and could make that work. I suspect I would have done far better with self-study than I did in a traditional classroom, which bored me to tears, and annoyed me with pointless make-work. Had I been able to test out, I would have done so in a heartbeat. But I'm not sure all children would flourish in such an environment.
When it comes to education, I feel it's best to be somewhat conservative, taking small, incremental steps and verifying results, so as not to accidentally destroy a generations' education with radical experiments (see: bizarre methods of learning to read/spell English).
Ultimately, I don't think the profession of "teacher" will ever go away completely. Young children need direct supervision, and older children still need guidance and advice. What may happen is that classrooms become much more virtualized as children get older, allowing fewer teachers to do supervise more students as they demonstrate more self-reliance.

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Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Re:No Bill... by Anonymous Coward · 2019-02-17 08:36 · Score: 1

So, how often does a text book on say, arithmetic, need to be updated in order to stay current?
I think 2 + 2 = 4 has been the case since a very fucking long time.
Re:No Bill... by Jetstream · 2019-02-17 09:31 · Score: 2

Textbooks are a great reference. As long as kids remember how to read and turn pages, so another half decade at least. The internet may be good for supplementary information, the textbook is generally laid out in a straightforward manner, it's compact, and it's all there.
I read a book a few years ago, titled "High Tech Heretic", which talked about how computer based education (at that time anyway) was less effective than traditional teaching methods. I can't really comment on that, as I'm not an educator, but in my opinion a physical textbook is a lot easier to page through and jump around in than is an eBook. (On the downside, you don't have an easy search function to locate specific information.)
Re:No Bill... by Livius · 2019-02-17 09:31 · Score: 3, Insightful

textbooks are not obsolete.
But also not all textbooks are equal. There are excellent textbooks, but I can't say I've come across them frequently. Many textbooks exist merely to slightly re-phrase something from an earlier textbook. Some might not work well with a particular student's learning style. And some textbooks are simply poor quality and do more to obstruct learning than facilitate it.
There's no reason to limit the understanding of what constitutes a textbook. E-books, YouTube videos, and commercial instructional videos are all valid learning resources. A wealthy philanthropist could easily hire experts to write stable Wikibooks-style textbooks in the public domain to cover, perhaps not all, but quite a lot, of high school and university level curricula. Even considering traditional paper books, a textbook should be considered one tool among many for a student to learn material. Except for the newest, latest developments in a field, a university library will have multiple versions of roughly equivalent textbooks, and seeing explanations from slightly different perspectives can be enormously valuable.
A phenomenon that I have noticed, both in software and textbooks, is that once a product is more or less optimal, the desire to create new versions requires creating something necessarily sub-optimal. I once went through my university library for a book on a certain topic and I had to find a book with the original discoverer's insight from 1920s, because every book since then had to phrase the subject matter differently and, therefore, poorly. Although non-obvious, it was so simple that there really was only one way to explain it.
Consider calculus. First-year university calculus hasn't changed in 250 years. Second-year university calculus hasn't changed in 100 years. New textbooks aren't being manufactured because all those previous authors failed in their goal.
Oracle has a whole business model of making good software, charging for an upgrade that is deliberately broken, then charging to fix the broken version, instead of simply continuing to support software that already works.
Re:No Bill... by argStyopa · 2019-02-17 10:18 · Score: 1

"By the time a textbook hits the market it's already a year or three out-of-date."
Do you work for a textbook publisher?
I'm going to guess that a decent teacher - particularly in a school where they have little wealth - could make perfectly good lessons with the megatons of "out of date" school books pitched by US schools every year.
Has math or history gotten a major paradigm shift in the last 10 years? Something that invalidates everything ever taught?

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-Styopa
Re:No Bill... by dpilot · 2019-02-17 13:54 · Score: 2

I'm finding myself hoping that this is true, not truly knowing whether it is or not. Textbooks have become a political battleground. I guess I'll show my leanings, by saying that it looks to me as if "Creation Science" is trying to work its way in, while other forces are trying to get sex education pushed out, or at least heavily watered down.
Moving to online texts may do nothing to resolve this part of the issue, in that no doubt there will be a similar structure to publishing them, as today Texas has inordinate power. It might even make things worse, if standardization were to go away. I don't know if its worse to have everyone using texts where religion encroaches on science, or having some people taught science and some taught religion as science.

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The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Re: No Bill... by backslashdot · 2019-02-17 19:51 · Score: 1

Got proof or concrete examples?
Re:No Bill... by omfglearntoplay · 2019-02-19 05:24 · Score: 1

This makes it sound like text book authors are rich bastards that are ripping us off... while what, Microsoft/Gates is a poor selfless company that is only out to educate people for education sake? I don't buy it.
Anyway, with kids in schools, I can say some computer work is helpful. I like the reading assignments that are short and sweet and test you on comprehension in a piecemeal way. That way you can hone in on problems and overcome things by focusing on them. It makes reading much more like something logical... math for instance.
On the flip side, I don't get why math has become so ultra language verbose. They require so many complete sentences for answers it kind of seems ridiculous.
Now for cons... teachers are not organized people. So my kids are sometimes confused as to what is due because teacher A only gives due dates online under some extremely not obvious section of the class website (which is shared by the whole school system). Teacher B puts stuff online, but she says the paper handout overrides the stuff online. And Teacher C literally does three things, and says the only one that really matters is the chalkboard assignments they HAVE TO WRITE DOWN.
So what of the 3 ways is the least stupid in reality? The paper handouts. They are consistently located in my kid's binder, and I don't have to have an argument with a teacher about "It was on the WEBSITE that day, honest, your kid and the other 3 kids he knows who didn't see it are mistaken." WTF teacher?
And turning stuff in via computer is sketchy, too. We hit the submit button, then my kid gets a zero. WTF happened?
Re:No Bill... by Areyoukiddingme · 2019-02-20 12:46 · Score: 1

Moving to online texts may do nothing to resolve this part of the issue, in that no doubt there will be a similar structure to publishing them, as today Texas has inordinate power. It might even make things worse, if standardization were to go away. I don't know if its worse to have everyone using texts where religion encroaches on science, or having some people taught science and some taught religion as science.
Standardization would indeed vanish. Texas would lose its inordinate power. They have that power now because printing literally millions of physical copies of text books is too expensive to set up more than once. Digital texts, on the other hand, are infinitely malleable. It would be trivially easy to create the Intelligent Design Bullshit biology book for Texas and a normal "edition" for everyone else. The concept of editions would become little more than a version number.
`apt-get install elementary-biology-1.0.1-doc`

Good textbook bad software by rknop · 2019-02-17 03:13 · Score: 1

Whether it's textbooks, or other reliable resources, we need SOMETHING to offset the conceptual damage that stackexchange does to all kinds of technical learning.

Some textbooks are much better than others. The same is going to be true of software and digital resources. The vast majority of software that's out there for learning is not nearly as good as what you might want it to be. Does the format have some potential advantages? Absolutely. But it's easier to implement and distribute really bad digital resources than it is to distribute (at least printed) textbooks of any sort. And, it's easier to put together websites and videos of small bits of concept one at a time than it is to put together a whole coherent textbook -- whether good or bad, in either case.

A good teacher/instructor is superior to any SW. by Anonymous Coward · 2019-02-17 03:20 · Score: 1

Call it wetware. This is why people learn better from other people.

Guess what? by Dunbal · 2019-02-17 03:25 · Score: 1

Bill and Melinda Gates are becoming obsolete.

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Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.

Textbooks are an expensive racket. by couchslug · 2019-02-17 03:36 · Score: 3, Insightful

Textbooks cost far too much for something the student will use briefly. Their prices are a burden to many students. Their weight and bulk are a burden to carry between classes.

I'm old and should be nostalgic for dead tree media. To hell with that. I can can download, convert and share ebooks for much less money. I can back them up effortlessly.

Tell me why I should prefer to make publishers rich for an inferior experience. Gates is right on this one.

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"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."

Re:Textbooks are an expensive racket. by LinuxIsGarbage · 2019-02-17 03:48 · Score: 5, Insightful

Textbooks to me seem like a perfect opportunity for "Creative Commons".
The concepts have hardly changed in decades, why pay the publisher exorbitant rates for a rehash of last year's material?
With a CC textbook, it could be printed and bound, it could be printed a chapter or excerpt at a time, or it can looked at entirely digitally.
Re: Textbooks are an expensive racket. by K.+S.+Kyosuke · 2019-02-17 03:57 · Score: 1

Textbooks cost far too much for something the student will use briefly.

But that's a US problem; most of the world does not have a problem with publisherS being in bed with educators. So it's basically a non-issue due to its artificial nature.

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Ezekiel 23:20
Re:Textbooks are an expensive racket. by Anonymous Coward · 2019-02-17 04:09 · Score: 1

That's already happening, the problem is that none of the books have the reach that the major publishers have. This is a bit of a problem as it can lead to additional work being done when it comes time to have accreditation renewed or when ensuring that students can transfer their credits.
There's a reason why, despite how horrible the text is, Stewart Calculus is used at so many colleges. It's a terrible book, the examples are simple examples, and then he went overly complicated in the questions being asked. The result being a book that's basically unreadable and questions where you have to go elsewhere to find methods for.
But, since there's only a few publishers left, that's what people get stuck with.
Re: Textbooks are an expensive racket. by Darinbob · 2019-02-17 06:19 · Score: 1

so the problem is the price? That's not the same thing as "obsolete". The reason people push the "internet" for this is because they mistakenly assume it's free.
Re:Textbooks are an expensive racket. by fermion · 2019-02-17 10:32 · Score: 1

Textbook are a guide to learning that are only expensive only if you think knowing how to do stuff is worthless. Textbooks as physical objects are not worth so much because so many resources are now available and the value of a curated fixed piece of knowledge is now much more limited. Painstakingly created guides to history, literature, problem sets, etc are not the basis of education they once were.
That said, the idea that code.org is not a textbook is false. It is. These guys are making loads of money, and the people training the teachers are making lot of money just like the people who train for textbooks. Code.org is a curated path of curriculum that is as fixed as any textbook. The problem sets are as open to cheating and as ineffective as any traditional problem set. It is expensive. The only difference is that the expense is paid of by industry partners, who then get to advertise to the student and teachers in the curriculum.
That said, code.org is an invaluable resource to delivering instruction to the high school student. The reason is that, for the most part, we don't have that many computer science teachers who can put together an effective curriculum from resources off the Internet. Also, we don't really have a lot of free tools to teach students computer science like we do the other core subjects of math, science, and reading. Code.org fills that holes very effectively and allows many students to receive a basic introduction to computer science that otherwise would not. It is like the early days of AP Calculus and Physics, where it was hard just to find a teacher with deep knowledge, so a textbook to help them was critical.
And that said, one has to remember that the course being discussed here is conceptual computer science. The ability to actually solve a problem using computer science is non existent. The written part is portfolio based and created outside of a secure environment. The content taught is pretty much what anyone around here who has done this for more than 5 years would consider common. It is critical that every person has this as part of the their very early high school experience, but is no match to the rigor of computer courses I was offered in high school when all we had were Apples and mainframes.

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"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black

Gates is, as ever, a moron by Anonymous Coward · 2019-02-17 03:37 · Score: 1

No, they aren't. In fact the use of all sorts of books is on the *rise*. He is just as big an aspie as any other valley retard. The biggest thing people fail to notice at present is that young people are generally even *less* technologically saavy than their forebears. I'm sure his bloated ego wishes he was correct - he simply isn't, and his logic is the kind that isn't. People really need to inderstand: Gates was never particularly bright or visionary; he was just in the right place at the right time (not unlike Zuckerberg) and willing to be more unethical than everyone else.

Re:Gates is, as ever, a moron by Miamicanes · 2019-02-17 10:19 · Score: 1

Young people today are no less technically-savvy than we were at their age... it's just that NOW, we have non-technically-savvy people using technology they don't understand & subconsciously regard as 'magic', whereas when WE were their age, the dumb kids didn't use technology at all. Or if they were rich, their parents bought them a Macintosh.
Ignore the kids who spend their afternoons posting selfies with ice cream cones, and pay attention to the kids building robots and winning FIRST competitions. THEY'RE the smart kids who matter... and if anything, their numbers (as a percentage of their generation) are probably a bit HIGHER than the percentage of smart kids were in OUR generations, simply because when WE were their age, a kid who was poor had approximately zero chance of getting anywhere NEAR the resources he or she needed to thrive. We've gotten slightly better and finding those kids and giving them the resources they need to thrive... or at least, survive long enough to get to college.

Shut the fuck up ... by CaptainDork · 2019-02-17 03:38 · Score: 1

... you didn't spend any of your billions of bucks investing your goddam time getting a motherfucking PHD in the methodology of teaching.

You're telling us what we need to hear to do things your way.

What a dirt bag.

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It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.

Re:Shut the fuck up ... by Anonymous Coward · 2019-02-17 04:14 · Score: 1

Definitely. The thing that matters most in presentation is clarity and comprehensibility. Videos and lectures are pretty much the worst way of conveying information whereas text tends to be one of the best. Especially if it's supplemented with animations as appropriate.
I've been working with math students for years and it's usually the language aspect of math that causes most of the problems. Occasionally, it'll be the reasoning and analysis, but the overwhelming problem is the notation and language aspects.
We have terrible textbooks in math, and most of the sciences; I wouldn't even consider chucking the textbooks without trying to have students use ones that are actually readable. Compare a decent engineering textbook with a decent physics textbook and the engineering book is virtually always more easily read. Similarly, the math text books are always a nightmare to read. They'd do far better by the students to just remove all the English and just leave the equations as that's the only part of a typical math book that can be read.
And I've been reading them for years. They're crammed full of so many technical terms, references to previous examples, switching back and forth between mathematical notations and English, with a few pathetic diagrams to sort things out that most people just can't understand what's being presented.
Re:Shut the fuck up ... by tehcyder · 2019-02-18 04:17 · Score: 1

In university I found untranslated German wikipedia pages on math the best way to understand the concepts and how to utilize what I am being taught and I can't read German!
Well, I suppose "2+2=4" is the same in any language.

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To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it

Re:What a waste by mark-t · 2019-02-17 03:39 · Score: 1

What's wrong with trying to improve the quality of life in the meantime?

We are still many centuries away from being a species that can live on multiple planets... the sheer magnitude of difficulty in life support off of earth being one of the biggest hurdles, so being a true interplanetary species will require finding another planet that can actually support life such as ours (and further assuming that such a planet isn't already claimed by another species that could interpret our attempts to colonize as an unwanted invasion). For practical purposes, that puts us at being not merely interplanetary, but interstellar, and that is roughly 1000 years away.

Fear of an extinction event before that time isn't going to make progress happen significantly faster, at least not on a scale that would have any significance to a human lifespan. 700 years, 800 years, a thousand years.... what's the difference to anyone alive today?

Nobody is saying that we shouldn't be trying to figure out ways to eventually expand the human race to the stars, but we shouldn't be wanting to not try and make the lives of those who are alive today any better because of it.

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File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'

Paper books don't track you by bagofbeans · 2019-02-17 03:46 · Score: 4, Insightful

Thanks, I'll stay away from ebooks that phone home where I stopped, started, how long I stayed on a page, whether I re-read it, what time I read... and then sell to advertisers continuous analyses of me based on that.

Re:Paper books don't track you by Anonymous Coward · 2019-02-17 09:34 · Score: 1

This. Textbooks and tuition are ridiculously expensive. If they get to spy on students' lives that way, shouldn't the price drop A LOT?
Silly person. Prices never go down. Profits for the publishers and universities just go up. You will pay more... forever.
Of course you could just not go to college... but then everyone would look down on you. You wouldn't want that, would you?

Yea maybe by oldgraybeard · 2019-02-17 03:53 · Score: 1

textbooks are not the best way to learn. Especially, when you consider that most today are out of date and/or written by companies/professors/individuals with a monetary over accuracy outlook.
I buy few books these days and do internet searches for most things. It has gotten to the point where I recall the query, not the actual information the next time I need the info. So I ask myself what happens when the internet is down ;) On a side note, I have always wondered in the past how advanced cultures can loose knowledge, maybe I have the answer
In addition I find that I can pickup things I need to know using the internet. So maybe the concept of sitting in a classroom with a teacher in the room dispensing knowledge is also an obsolete way to learn.
If someone has the desire and an internet connection is our current public educational system obsolete. I don't think the government, academic establishment or the educational unions will respond well ;)

Just my 2 cents ;)

Re:Good textbook bad software by Anonymous Coward · 2019-02-17 04:05 · Score: 1

Properly written textbooks are the greatest method yet devised for providing access to information. I've read textbooks from a hundred years ago and they're often just as good, or better, than something from a few years ago.

Obviously, that depends on what the topic is, biology textbooks that old are worthless.

The source of information should not be the sole source of assessing whether or not the reader has learned the material. A decent text book should have a set of questions and a set of answers. Obviously, for some subjects that's not easy to do because the answers are fuzzy, but in a great number of cases it's true.

Even in those cases, you should be applying the knowledge in some way and as a result you should know whether or not you could apply the knowledge.

Bill Gates still operates Microsoft, apparently. by Futurepower(R) · 2019-02-17 04:07 · Score: 4, Interesting

Two years ago, during a Jan. 17, 2017 discussion with Charlie Rose, Bill Gates said he spends "15 percent" of his time managing Microsoft. I interpreted that to mean that Gates is still extremely involved and very influential. Did Gates want the mess that is Windows 10?

From the transcript at that Charlie Rose web page:

08:42
"Bill Gates: I'm there about 15 percent of the time. And I get to work just on the R and D part, brainstorming with people, thinking, OK, how are we going to take this artificial intelligence and make it understand, help you use your time better. It's a very exciting time in software. There's five companies that are, you know, in a really strong position. Microsoft is leading in some really cool stuff so --"

It seems obvious that Bill Gates still has a huge amount of overall influence on the management of Microsoft, even if he mostly focuses on other subjects.

Some of the many stories about Windows 10:

Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC." (Aug. 4, 2015)

Microsoft's Intolerable Windows 10 Aggression (May 27, 2016)

Microsoft is infesting Windows 10 with annoying ads (March 17, 2017)

Microsoft, stop sabotaging Windows 10. (March 21, 2017)

Interactive computer learning by Archtech · 2019-02-17 04:12 · Score: 1

Interactive computer instruction was implemented 60 years ago by the PLATO system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

See also "The Friendly Orange Glow"
https://www.amazon.com/Friendl...

For suitable topics and students, it works better than textbooks. Maths, for instance, or electronics. Subjects that lend themselves to many detailed, specific tests with mainly right/wrong answers.

One of the most strangely neglected areas of education and computing.

--
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.

Texbooks will never be obsolete by SirAstral · 2019-02-17 04:20 · Score: 1

This only reveals how ignorant someone that thinks they are in the know can be.

Do we think stone tablets written in cuneiform are obsolete? No, they are priceless artifacts from history and highly valuable. Books are much the same thing just with a lower shelf life.

While there are some things that could become obsolete, often times folks like Bill are only calling them obsolete because they do not fit into their control of the market schemes. They would rather you put your copy of 1984 on your kindle than carry it around on paperback so they can take from you when someone decides you should not have it. https://www.theguardian.com/te...

Ironic!

Re:Texbooks will never be obsolete by couchslug · 2019-02-17 08:47 · Score: 1

"They would rather you put your copy of 1984 on your kindle than carry it around on paperback"
I have plenty of (converted) ebooks and no Kindle. They can't phone home. Technology routes around damage.

--
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."

So what's the replacement? by reanjr · 2019-02-17 04:22 · Score: 1

Tablets and E-readers suck for this. Flipping physically in a book back and forth from index to glossary to content is way easier and provides tactile reinforcement. Nothing in the digital realm compares.

Re:So what's the replacement? by ledow · 2019-02-17 05:02 · Score: 1

Chapter hyperlinks and search.
Hell, hyperlinks in the index.
Re: So what's the replacement? by reanjr · 2019-02-17 05:07 · Score: 2

That's not even close to a replacement. When you need to skip back and forth between page 3 of the index, the diagram on page 7 of Chapter 3, and page 24 of the answer summary, tablets and ereaders are pieces of crap. It's not like it's not theoretically possible to solve the issues, but no one (Apple, Google, Amazon, Adobe) seems interested in doing so.
Re: So what's the replacement? by ChrisMaple · 2019-02-17 08:01 · Score: 1

Big screen. Multiple instances of the text reader open simultaneously. Problem solved.

--
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Re: So what's the replacement? by Jetstream · 2019-02-17 10:02 · Score: 1

Pretty much what I was going to suggest: A tabbed format for the e-reader software, so you can have multiple windows open.
Re:So what's the replacement? by Miamicanes · 2019-02-17 10:31 · Score: 1

Hyperlinks are DEATH to understanding many topics. I've seen WAY too many "web-based" instructional sites that put the equivalent of 4 or 5 sentences' worth of information on a page, then spray diarrhea-like hyperlinks at you with nearly every word. The reader gets sucked into a rabbit hole that ultimately leads to nowhere, and ends up learning almost nothing.
Single-column web design, compounded by the 16:9 monitors we've been stuck with for 15 years, just makes things worse.
There's a REASON why textbooks have generally followed a design pattern that could be called, "diagram on right page, descriptions of diagram on facing left page", and why technical books are so much harder to read on a slow e-reader that can only show one page at a time & takes a second or more to flip pages. The pattern exists because it works, and ebook readers break it.
Re: So what's the replacement? by Gilgaron · 2019-02-18 01:25 · Score: 1

You could get that functionality pretty easily with a OneNote type program. That they can doodle notes on the pages would make it all the better.
Re: So what's the replacement? by Miamicanes · 2019-02-18 08:10 · Score: 1

I've actually been working on an Android app like that on & off for the past couple of years. Some of the frustrations I've encountered:
1. Extraordinarily slow rendering performance compared to even a fairly OLD formerly high-end laptop or desktop PC (say, a 2009 Thinkpad T61p with 2.2GHz core2duo and 8 gigs, or ASUS P5A with 2.6GHz quadcore i7 and 8 gigs, both with 2010'ish SATA2 SSDs). I suspect much of the blame lies with poor eMMC flash performance, combined with open-source pdf-rendering libraries that are single-threaded and are compiled without optimizations for common-denominator ARM. This is one of the big reasons I keep throwing the project back on my "re-evaluate the situation next year" pile.
2. General unavailability of Android tablets with large (13.3"+) high-resolution (240+ PPI) displays. If there's an Android tablet out there somewhere with a 3:2 3840x2560 display larger than 13" diagonally, I haven't found it yet. I personally own a Chuwi Hi12, which has a 12.1" 2160x1440 display that's largely been a disappointment due to extraordinarily poor wi-fi compared to pretty much every other device in the house, slow charging, laggy touch performance, and a screen that's about 15-20% smaller than I really wanted it to be.
At one point, I experimented with pre-rendering pdf ebooks to various formats (JPG, PNG, WEBM), but I just couldn't get the "fetch from flash, instantiate into Bitmap, and display into View" fast enough to be imperceptible. It WAS fast enough if I kept multiple Views (containing the page's Bitmap) expanded, stored in an array, and ready to swap in on the spot... but you can only get away with doing THAT for a couple of pages... and meanwhile, attempting to pre-fetch predicted future pages from the filesystem in the background badly affected the touch-animation performance. Maybe I'm just too much of a perfectionist, but I want to create an experience where the performance is SO instantaneous, it stops feeling like the user is sloshing around underwater trying to scoop around laggy virtual pages, and instead feels like the user is flipping a real page that's quite firmly gripped by his fingers with no slippage or lag.
For shits & giggles, I even did an experiment & wrote two programs... one for Windows, one for Android. Using a different program, I pre-rendered a pdf O'Reilly ebook to bitmaps that were approximately 400% larger than the desired target size, then used ImageMagick to downsample them with Lanczos sharpening to fit within the desired target sizes for Android and Windows (incidentally, AFAIK, there is no known FOSS image library for Android that can do Lanczos... Android's API omits Lanczos, and nobody has ever bothered to implement it as a generic Java library because Java itself has Lanczos built-in. If you hand Android a large bitmap and tell it to downscale it, it just uses nearest-neighbor and looks like shit). I then wrote an Android app to display two Bitmaps side by side & flip through them using the volume buttons, and did the same thing in Windows with two monitors in portrait orientation and the left & right arrow keys. Windows could load the files from the SSD and flip through them at 60fps without breaking a sweat. Android wheezed and stumbled through approximately 15-20 pages/second, and hung for a few seconds to do garbage collection every 30-50 seconds. The only way I could sustain 60fps with Android was if I bypassed loading the image from flash & inflating the Bitmaps, and instead just kept four Bitmap objects in an array & cycled through them. That was basically the point when I said, "fuck it, Android's too slow to do it with current hardware" and threw in the towel until my next tablet... and so far, I haven't found a new tablet that looks like it would genuinely be a real improvement over what I already have.
The point to take home: contrary to what "the industry" seems to believe, ebook-rendering is absolutely NOT some "lightweight" task that can be adequately performed by cheap hardware. If you wa

Not if you need a searchable reference by Solandri · 2019-02-17 04:26 · Score: 1

If you need a refresher on, say, Mohr's circle, you grab a textbook and look it up in the index. If you've got an e-textbook, you just do a search on Mohr's circle. But good luck quickly finding the 10 minute segment of video describing Mohr's circle from a library of hundreds of lecture videos on structural engineering.

The difference is that you can easily create an index of photos or text because they're not time-dependent. You can reduce them in size (photos) or context (keywords) by just reducing their spatial dimensions. An index generated this way lets you rapidly search a huge library. Time is irrelevant to the process.

On the other hand, audio (and consequently video) is time-dependent. If you try to reduce it, it becomes frequency-shifted until it's unrecognizable, or too rapid for you to understand. If you try to use reduce it to short clips (preserving the playback speed for the clips), then someone has to go through and manually pick out the segments of audio/video to turn into clips. It cannot be done automatically.

This is why you take notes in class. It converts the time-dependent lecture, into a time-independent text record which you can rapidly scan and search to remind yourself of material presented in the lecture.

issues with electronic versions by e**(i+pi)-1 · 2019-02-17 04:33 · Score: 4, Insightful

Yes, one can question physical textbooks. I avoid them also as much as possible but there are still various issues with electronic texts: 1. Loss of control: Even with free versions of books or videos or resources, they can disappear at any moment. How many electronic resources which were available 20 years ago are available still now? I myself have the habit of keeping copies of everything I see electronically which I like because it can be pulled at any moment. Books don't just disappear. You can still read them in 50 years if they are converted first into a industry independent format. 2. Long term backup: Having a private library however requires to have a good backup system, decentralized because one can not trust any service in the long run. I'm old enough to have seen many things come and go, terms of services change and it is only 25 years now, that we teach and distribute online (i had my first course websites for classes in 1994 and still have all these resources online, but how many things from 25 years ago are still there? The biggest shock for me was the pull of google video to youtube. It can well be that in 10 years, youtube is sold to an other company, or only available behind a paywall. Services like Kahn academy etc, we will have to see how long they are still free. 3. Privacy: Even in the ``free textbook movement", one has started to look for ways to mine the information like tracking students readings. Like in e-books, the information what a reader reads, how fast and possibly annotates is used or sold. I personally do try to avoid such resources, because it is as if somebody constantly looks you over the shoulder. How long did I read what? What do I read? When do I read? Where do I read? This information is all given away for free to the reader. I know that even well intended projects for free textbooks start having students to register (yes it is free), but all this information is kept somewhere and evaluated. Who is naive enough to believe that this information stays confined. We have seen massive data breaches recently. This by the way is the same also for online newspapers. I have concerns with being tracked all the time telling an anonymous entity what articles I read when and how and from where. 4. Screen and write technology: Electronic reading has become better with the emergence of tablets and good computer screens. It is still not there. Annotation with pen still beats annotation by electronic pens which can be sluggish and depends on industry controlled technology which changes still frequently. We will eventually get there, once the screen technology has the resolution, speed and comfort of paper. It is a matter of time only but it is not there. The tablets of today also run on operating systems where one has lost control. Even well intended systems start to bug you to log in. Sorry. I keep all my library in a gold old fashioned directory tree which I'm sure I can read also in 10 years, which I can print out if needed and annotate with an old fashioned pen if needed. 5. Proprietary formats: One of the biggest problems with electronic reading is proprietary formats. I don't know how many different reading systems (apps) i have tried and which were abandoned or then bought by a big company which then only allows to use the service while registered. The best systems for writing on a tablet or screen are all proprietary and could disappear any moment. It is essential for example to have wrist protection technology when writing and drawing on a tablet. The pens have become great already, but the apps continue to disappear and appear. There were apps I liked which do not exist any more. Come on. If I write something, I need it to be available not only the 3 years of the life span of the app, I need to be able to read and modify it in 20 years. I have still documents written in software written by companies which disappeared or were bought by others. If the document was exported as a PDF and put on my own machine, yes, I can still read it. Other things have disappeared once one does not pay any more for the service.

Re:issues with electronic versions by serviscope_minor · 2019-02-17 09:42 · Score: 1

Yes, one can question physical textbooks. I avoid them also as much as possible
I don't, though mostly beacuse textbooks have paragraph breaks.

--
SJW n. One who posts facts.

Re:Good textbook bad software by rickb928 · 2019-02-17 04:37 · Score: 2

Here here...

The single greatest advance for humanity was the printing press. The ability to accumulate and deliver knowledge beyond a generation or two, and to many, changed everything. Skills could be taught. Knowledge developed, information shared, at a scale never before practical. And accurately.

Now while the media change, publishing is still publishing. eBooks are books, though we are well on the way to losing the greatest value of a printed book in the current paradigm - to be able to share it, physically and freely, with others. At the moment it isn't illegal to give a book I've purchased to someone else.

Textbooks, be they printed on paper or delivered as data, are textbooks. Perhaps the greatest danger of eBooks is that they are indeed editable in a moment, even while you were reading it, if the author or publisher cared to. And of course, bad actors could also do so, surreptitiously, but that's pretty criminal.

And we should have figured out by now that education is not benign. Some have purposes other than enlightenment. This is the price of freedom - sometimes you have to deal with what you disagree with or fear. There are much worse things.

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deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.

Online Classes provided by Book Publishers by coryhamma · 2019-02-17 04:39 · Score: 1

The latest craze in community college education appears to be online classes whose "content" is provided by the book publishers. From several of these courses, it appears that the publishers are sending their books to the lowest bidder and having them come up with slides and test questions. Then, the community college just has to hire someone to oversee the class and ask questions from students. Of course, the book is required reading, and without the book, you are likely to fail the class.

Why?

The tests are primarily about regurgitating exact quotes from the book. The exam authors don't actually understand the material and only take random snippets from each chapter and ask about them. Therefore, an understanding of the concepts is not enough to pass the test - you must have basically memorized entire passages from the book. The exams and "lecture slides" are also riddled with errors, as is to be expected when you ask an unqualified person to write them.

Re:Online Classes provided by Book Publishers by couchslug · 2019-02-17 08:50 · Score: 1

It's been a thing for many years. Community college courses are mostly space filler outside core material so they love this model.
They also love selling the expensive books at the school book store.

--
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Re:Online Classes provided by Book Publishers by Jetstream · 2019-02-17 10:52 · Score: 1

They also love selling the expensive books at the school book store.
It would be interesting to know what kind of profit margin college bookstores run, with the crazy price of textbooks (even 20yrs ago when I was in college). I'm sure the publishers get most of it, but I bet there's still some kind of mark-up.

Re: Good textbook bad software by phantomfive · 2019-02-17 04:58 · Score: 1

Would argue that writing was more important than the printing press by an order of magnitude. The world went from a technological advancement every few thousand years to several a century.

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"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."

Re: Bill Gates still operates Microsoft, apparentl by phantomfive · 2019-02-17 05:03 · Score: 1

If he spends a lot of time in R&D, that explains why nothing impressive has come out of Microsoft research, despite spending tons of money and hiring good people. He spends time working on Microsoft AI? The most notable thing to come out of Microsoft AI was Tay.

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"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."

Re: Good textbook bad software by rickb928 · 2019-02-17 05:25 · Score: 1

Right there, buddy.

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deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.

Re: Good textbook bad software by rickb928 · 2019-02-17 05:26 · Score: 1

Writing, yes. But publishing, distribution.

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deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.

Re:A good teacher/instructor is superior to any SW by Bite+The+Pillow · 2019-02-17 05:31 · Score: 1

A good teacher is still going to have to figure out the order to introduce concepts, when to introduce. They will have to generate problems to solve. This is currently handled by textbook writers. So the same process has to be done, regardless of how or where it's taught.

If I never handed students a book and gave them printouts with homework on them, I've essentially written a textbook. If everything is online, same.

The physical textbook needs to go. But the work to produce textbooks will still remain.

Once we realize that we can store and provide the textbook in any fashion, printed and bound or online or lectures.

still better then DRM loaded E-books with time out by Joe_Dragon · 2019-02-17 05:42 · Score: 3, Insightful

still better then DRM loaded E-books with time outs in them. Unless they make the E-books about 60-70% less then real ones.

Rambling of a book user. by Anonymous Coward · 2019-02-17 05:46 · Score: 2

Even though we are supposed to love the newest and latest kindle because of it's anti-reflective display and fantastic battery life, books are much more "Keep on task" friendly. I think this is much more useful in our attention deficit world.

Publishers have always been trying to squeeze money out of schools and students by issuing the latest and greatest textbooks, but do we really need to re-invent the math textbook? It seems like algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculous have not changed much and old textbooks reach their way to 3rd world countries and the friendly lookup portion of folks library. Also, who really needs the newest preface to the classic novels?

Re:Rambling of a book user. by Jetstream · 2019-02-17 09:27 · Score: 1

Even though we are supposed to love the newest and latest kindle because of it's anti-reflective display and fantastic battery life, books are much more "Keep on task" friendly. I think this is much more useful in our attention deficit world.
I agree here, it's too easy to get sidetracked & tempted, not to mention smart kids would try to hack electronic devices to be able to surf & do social media. I think you also need to keep in mind that kids of different ages & abilities will learn best with different teaching methods; electronic may work best for some, direct verbal instruction from teachers for others, etc. Perhaps stick with traditional teaching for the first few years, then introduce newer formats?

Depends what a textbook is and for what usage by godrik · 2019-02-17 05:51 · Score: 1

There was a good discussion on the vlogbrothers youtube channel (video and comments): https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It really depends who are the target users of textbook. As a first time introduction to a topic, textbooks tend to be a little rough. But as collections of carefully curated piece of knowledge, they are valuable.

There is a need for a carefully written description of a concept and the various versions of it, with 200 exercises some of them with solutions. That is what a textbook is. Whether it is print or not is an orthogonal issue. OpenDSA ( https://opendsa-server.cs.vt.e... ) is a pretty good online textbook for data structures and algorithms for example.

Now, there is value to a printed copies of some books and there is value to electronic ones depending on you usage of them.

We can't replace all our textbook with 3 minute video discussion of the topic. Such videos do not get in enough details and can not be precise enough and can not provide with dozens of alternate versions. But they can be a pretty good introduction to a topic.

Publishers won't allow this by Anonymous Coward · 2019-02-17 06:04 · Score: 1

The racket is very clever here, especially at the college level.

Most of the first two years of college courses (e.g. English, calculus, physics, chemistry) is the same rehashed basic knowledge year after year. The publishers know this, and the only thing they do with new editions of their books is change the problems (and solutions) enough to prevent students from using old textbooks. Remember, however, that they also publish many textbooks for senior undergraduate courses that can be fairly dynamic.

If a college attempts to use CC/copyleft/whatever material for the same basic courses or create their own material, all the publishers will do is back-load the costs onto those more advanced textbooks, making them prohibitively expensive. In conjunction with state funding of a large number of colleges and the structure of the student loan system, students and institutions have little recourse.

This is also why companies like Pearson and McGraw-Hill want to go to online textbooks, temporary licensing for access, and similar schemes. It's all about extracting economic rents. This is happening increasingly in K-12 under the guise of improving the student learning experience, but it's really about artificially moving the target without adding value.

I'm generally a free-market person, but it's clear that this is an area the FTC should have investigated and clamped down on decades ago. Meanwhile, our taxes and loan amounts continue to skyrocket to the detriment of all of society.

Nails by fluffernutter · 2019-02-17 06:18 · Score: 1

When all you have is a hammer....

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Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.

Re:No thanks by fluffernutter · 2019-02-17 06:19 · Score: 1

Google ended the honest internet I think. It seems every advancement in technology comes with an agreement attached that you give up your privacy. If you want your privacy, you can feel free to live in the stone ages.

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Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.

UTTER BALDERDASH FROM A COMPUTER DESIGNER! by CAOgdin · 2019-02-17 06:23 · Score: 3, Insightful

Let me share a story: As a child, in Columbus Ohio, I had to walk one-mile each way between home and school, from 1946. I'd been admitted to First Grade at the age of 5, because my mother taught me to read, write and do simple math. That meant that I was always ahead of the class, so sat in back, so I wouldn't look so bored.

But, there was an upside: Every day, I could take a two-block detour and visit the local Public Library. So, every day, I'd leave two books I'd taken out the day before, and pick up two more to occupy myself in the back of the room the next school day. I read a lot of books, and learned a lot (and a lot more I've forgotten), as I worked my way through the Dewey Decimal system. And, one day, I carried Frederick Terman's "On Radio Engineering" to class...and was transfixed. There I was, at age 6, learning how my mom's radio worked! I went back home and tweaked the dials on the huge (vacuum tube) radio, finding out how the controls actually changed stations, and how tone controls could help me listen to far-away stations! It set me on a path of fascination with what became to be known as the field of "electronics." I worked in a TV Repair Shop at the age of 12, played with ZJ17 (GE) transistors at 15, went into the Air Force at age 19, and wrote a published article predicting the likelihood of the emergence of the "computer on a chip" some three months before Intel announced it.

Today, as I sit (age 78) in front of my computer, I never had the benefit of all those "electronic" substitutes for reading...to this very day, I look forward to reading my weekly edition of "New Scientist" (published in London), to stay abreast of information.

I don' need no STEENKIN' "video" from which to learn. What I did learn was how to DO IT MYSELF by soldering wires together, debugging the arrangement of electron flows until it worked, and then having the satisfaction of educating myself in the bargain.

There is joy in finding out, not having it explicitly explained. During my career, people have asked me, what 'College did you go to?' I have factually responded, "I've taught at several universities, I've been on faculty of a few...but I've never ATTENDED a College or University (save a few abortive attempts, lasting no more than a month before I became bored, relearning what I already knew.)

Having to read, at one's own pace; being able to go back a few pages to find that earlier illustration for guidance; having the freedom to pace myself to MY learning rate, are all benefits of books. I fear Television (which I still enjoy as entertainment) and Video in general is just a way to sell a product, not ENGAGE the participant in the learning experience.

Just one old woman's view...

Re:UTTER BALDERDASH FROM A COMPUTER DESIGNER! by HatofPig · 2019-02-17 08:01 · Score: 1

Having to read, at one's own pace; being able to go back a few pages to find that earlier illustration for guidance; having the freedom to pace myself to MY learning rate, are all benefits of books. I fear Television (which I still enjoy as entertainment) and Video in general is just a way to sell a product, not ENGAGE the participant in the learning experience.
Exactly! Thank you, this is precisely my experience with books. They are tangible, tactile, books that give you an intuitive feel for where you "are" in them that can't be digitized. You can flip back and forth and write in them and grab them instantly and place them spots. I've been reading lots of Marshall McLuhan in the past year and the more I do, the more I appreciate what we're missing out on by putting everything on the other-side of a pane of glass.

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Silicon & Charybdis McLuhan Kildall Papert Kay

Re:Windows by NikeHerc · 2019-02-17 06:26 · Score: 1

I wish he would spend his time and money fixing Windows. What we are stuck with now is abysmal. If he were to really put his brain and a billion dollars into making a really good OS, I bet he could do so. THAT would be a legacy to leave humanity.

If you want a really good O.S., forget windows. Switch to Linux. I'm ms-free since July 4th, 2018, and I'll *never* go back to windows.

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Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.

“Textbooks are becoming obsolete,” by Hallux-F-Sinister · 2019-02-17 07:54 · Score: 1, Interesting

“Textbooks are becoming obsolete,” says a dropout whose only claim to fame is being in the right place at the right time and having no scruples and not minding fucking everyone over to pocket more and more ill-gotten gains he never should have had his grimy paws on, from the pushing of a demonstrably inferior product using FUD and strong-arm tactics that should have triggered the use of the RICO ACT.

Fucker should be in jail, and Misrofuck should have been broken up, and required to open source all their code, so people could find all the probably deliberately planted bugs they've been using for decades, compromising their own customers’ safety and security, just for the sake of their own goddamned motherfucking bottom line. Never forget.

In sum, fuck Bill Gates, and fuck Microsoft.

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Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.

A strange comment from Gates by zkiwi34 · 2019-02-17 08:13 · Score: 1

Considering his own kids are/have been raised largely tech free.

My converted ebooks don't track me. by couchslug · 2019-02-17 08:41 · Score: 1

https://calibre-ebook.com/

How can you be on Slashdot (supposedly News For Nerds) and not instantly know the solution to that problem?

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"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."

Textbook ndustry growth is racket-based. by couchslug · 2019-02-17 08:44 · Score: 1

There's considerable profit in selling textbooks, including those integrated with computer learning. Follow the money and you'll have your answer.

The education business is not altruistic.

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"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."

Re:What a waste by Livius · 2019-02-17 09:34 · Score: 1

He should be building rockets to take us OFF Earth.

Educating young people who may some day build those rockets is a good approach too.

Gates again by Tom · 2019-02-17 19:10 · Score: 1

This culture of listening to people just because they're rich is deluded.

We have the scientific research that proves that rich people (in general) are rich not because they're super-humans, but because of a combination of talent, the right background and environment and sheer dumb luck. And that their talent in one region doesn't necessarily confer talent in other regions.

Bill Gates has been wrong about almost everything that's not related to making Microsoft an evil empire. He famously underestimated the Internet even in his book, which is choke full of more mistakes. His actions in Africa are lauded by some and called misguided by others, and pretty much everything else he's done outside MS has received mix results at best.

e-learning is something he's been trying to be a champion of for at least a decade, with no results to show for. Textbooks won't go away for one simple reason: They work.

When your nifty tech solution is as reliable as a paperback book, we can talk. When it can be lended, get any kind and colour of bookmarks, can get comments scribbled in the margins - in short, when you can duplicate the reliability and functionality with something digital instead of weak attempts at a somewhat imitation as we have now, then you can try to expand on it.

Or, invent something different and better. Cars don't duplicate horse-drawn carriage and yet they replaced them. Because they didn't try to be the same thing just better, they understood they are a different thing. Also, horse-drawn carriages still exist in some areas.

Textbooks aren't going away just because some tech-mogul wants to sell you something that will pump up his stocks.

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Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org

Textbooks are not obsolete, their prices are. by ebusinessmedia1 · 2019-02-17 20:39 · Score: 1

Textbooks are not obsolete, their prices are. I worked in the textbook publishing world for many years; it's a racket. Now, most of the big textbook publishing companies have gone print *and* digital and also entered the "services" arena with "Learning Management Software". The biggest textbook publishing houses (most of the big ones are now private-equity-owned) are huge monoliths that can't adapt very quickly.

The "Open Textbook" movement has some promise in bringing down the cost of textbooks, but has been hindered by overall incompetence (mostly, by meddling academics and foundations who don't understand the vagaries of the textbook marketplace. One place "Open Text" seems to be doing a fairly decent job.

Most aren't aware that universities take a % of profit from the bookstore, and as a result haven't really come on board to cut costs as aggressively as they could have.

Khan Academy? WAY overrated. What are the outcomes? People learns (this is cognitive science) by following threads of interest, not being "lectured to", whether in person or in a video - although "in person" at least allows for "branching" if the student can as questions of the presenter/teacher.

Code Academy? Can Code Academy create a mechanical engineer? A surgeon? Sure, coding can be taught online; it's a very linear activity (not always, but mostly). It's a language. Not everything can be taught effectively online. Lso learning styles come into play. Some people love textbooks, but textbooks CAN be made a LOT cheaper. (Examples: open textbook repositories; Flat World Knowledge, etc.)

Learning is a multi-faceted activity that doesn't require one magical approach.

Eventually we will probably see ultra-cheap tablets that have incredible markup capabilities,with software that is *designed* never to be obsolete, so the student can refer back to notes, etc.

Me? If I'm pursing a professional degree, I want a physical textbook as *one* of a number of learning tools, and it will remain in my library for as long as I wish without it's "software" (grammar, graphics, paper, print, and ink), going obsolete.

Sure they are by Chas · 2019-02-18 01:34 · Score: 1

Currently students spend THOUSANDS of dollars on textbooks.
Textbooks written YEARS or DECADES ago, and only mildly edited every year to justify "new" purchase pricing instead of feeding the used market.
Yet, more and more, we're seeing pushback from courses not using said golden geese.
What's NEXT to boost the profits.
Cut out the costs of the physically printing and/or shipping the book!
And will prices come DOWN on such electronic distribution? ... ...
What the fuck are YOU smoking? OF COURSE NOT!

On top of that, they can put them out in a proprietary format that "expires" the material after X-months/years. Meaning you'll essentially RENT your textbooks from now on...

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Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!

Don't care electronic or paper, but make it usable by DumbSwede · 2019-02-18 05:26 · Score: 1

I have a high school aged daughter and the school system has a schizophrenic approach to text books. In the science curriculum they mostly switched over to Power Point demonstrations of the knowledge they need to know. Where is the “knowledge” itself? Undefined. Just an outline of what you need to know. In a parent teacher conference I asked where they get the “knowledge,” what I got was a rambling explanation of a variety of source including the “OLD Science Curriculum book”, but the book is only available to use at the school because it isn’t distributed to the students anymore. The Power Point is derived from the old book, but can’t be bothered to give page numbers or chapters for what needs to be looked up. Basically they expect the kids to just Google everything and if all else fails use an old book in class and find the item by looking them up in the index.

Very little emphasis is placed on knowing basic science knowledge and facts, but rather HOW to do research. Keeping elaborate lab books and statistics, but again hardly any real emphasis on knowing the structure of science from the ground up. That’s just all stuff you Google when you need it. Oh and about the knowledge they did look up, it is all mostly ephemeral stuff like percentage of this and percentage of that or completely isolated factoids with out a reference to the whole framework they reside in.

Now the math curriculum where we are at is much better, stellar as a matter of fact. No complaints there (other than the very competitive nature). But SCIENCE is a mess from what I’ve seen.

Last note, I don’t care if a book is paper or electronic, but learning shouldn’t be constant steam of Google look-ups. Which isn’t to say Google doesn’t have a place if you are doing your own separate learning project, but give’m books for the core stuff!

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Letter To Iran

tech hype nonsense by globaljustin · 2019-02-18 07:37 · Score: 1

Even the best text can't figure out which concepts you understand and which ones you need more help with. It certainly can't tell your teacher how well you grasped last night's assigned reading. But now, thanks to software, the standalone textbook is becoming a thing of the past

Words and pictures. It's all words and pictures a book is just a delivery system. Computers are another.

It's beyond foolish to say "[insert kind of book] is dying"...it's still content.

Books are a persistent, non digital, non-powered storage medium for information.

Computers are another.

Yes, computers can show the user several pictures quickly such that it appears to be moving (video) but the existence of video doesn't negate the existence or render useless the data not contained in video format.

This is just micro$oft trying to enter a new market through charitable donations

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Thank you Dave Raggett

books forever by NikeHerc · 2019-02-18 07:38 · Score: 1

I'm writing a two-pass assembler. I went to my textbooks for reminders on parsing arithmetic and logic expressions and for new knowledge (to me) on generating binary object code. billg, don't tell me books are obsolete. As others have noted, maybe you are.

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Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.

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