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Textbook manifesto (2016)

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Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#61

Post by AllenDowney »

dullroar wrote: post #38
teekee wrote: post #27

"If you can’t find one, write one." What would be the best way to write a free book please? Any pointers? Experience?

I wrote one last year. It started out as notes for a series of "lunch and learns" I was going to give at work. The notes just kept growing and growing, until over the course of a weekend I ended up sitting down and pounding out 200 pages of content. That was the easy part! The hard part was then learning how to build an effective index (harder than it sounds), coming up with examples and figures, tuning and tweaking,…

This is very similar to my method. The first time I teach a class, I draft some notes. After the class, I fix the problems, or at least flag them for next time. The second time through, I add, remove, edit, refine, etc., based on feedback from students and my own observation (and, often, what I have learned since last time :)

Many of my examples start with code, so the first draft of the chapter is mostly explaining the worked example.

It's not very different from the work most profs do when they are developing a class, but at the end you have a book that has co-evolved to fit your students and the learning goals.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#62

Post by mattbettinson »

lvh wrote: post #32

In many European countries, this problem was resolved by what I feel is mostly student pressure. Our student union (for lack of better word) owned printing equipment and worked with most professors to do exactly what's suggested in this article: most professors wrote their own books (not 140 pages, though). Most of my textbooks were between 2 and 7 EUR, which I'm led to believe is approximately at cost. Occasionally,…

This has happened to me in a few courses at Queen's University in Canada

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#63

Post by AllenDowney »

pcmonk wrote: post #3

A lot of people tend to harp on the "textbooks are too expensive" issue, and I think this correctly identifies one of the problems: textbook price is not an issue to many professors. Unfortunately, there's no actual solution to that presented. > If you can’t find one, write one. It’s not that hard. I've used three or four textbooks written by my professor, and I can't say the quality was all that great. Considering t…

I understand that "just write a book" might come off as glib, especially for profs who teach 3+ classes per semester. So I don't mean that everyone has to, or should, but

1. Writing 150 pages that are targeted for your class and your students is easier than writing "the bible" for your field.

2. The quality of the first draft might not be great, but if you are getting feedback and constantly improving, it's not long before you are better off than using one of the expensive tomes.

3. If you start with other free material, you can get off to a fast start (several people have now written books that started with my material, and then evolved beyond recognition).

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#64

Post by esfandia »

I just implemented the reading quiz idea this term, and I thought that it went really well. Give the students a manageable chunk of reading material (in my case, the material came from various sources, not a single textbook), and give them an offline quiz to test their reading comprehension. The quizzes were graded by a TA, but the weight was quite small; small enough not to matter if they cheated (and cheating won't help them in the final exam. Aside: is it cheating if they didn't read the material but just hunted for the answers by skimming?) but enough to provide extra incentive to read.

In class we go over the answers to the quiz. I don't post the answers (the TA will have provided them the feedback they need when grading); rather we make it an interactive session. I answer questions the students have, we go over examples, I supplement the reading with slides if need be. Effectively, a flipped classroom.

This was done more out of necessity: first time teaching the course, no proper textbook (and in a quickly changing tech landscape for the topic at hand), lack of confidence in my own understanding of the material (I also tried gathering student questions beforehand so I could investigate them offline and come to class prepared to answer them), but now I think I'm going to stick to this way of teaching this course in the next installment next year.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#65

Post by wolfgke »

beerbajay wrote: post #47
jabl wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fellow European, my experience is similar (though our prices were higher but still substantially lower than the big-name commercial publishers.), but I suspect it would never fly in the US (communism, boo!).

Textbooks which are essentially the same are available in europe for like 1/3 of the price of the american versions. I bought $70 books for my master's courses in Sweden that would have been $300 in the US (where I did my undergrad). The "invisible hand" of capitalism at work!

> I bought $70 books for my master's courses in Sweden that would have been $300 in the US (where I did my undergrad). The "invisible hand" of capitalism at work!

I personally believe free markets ("invisible hand" of capitalism) work well in nearly all cases (yes, there exist cases of market failure, but these are IMHO rare). The problem rather is that copyright laws prevent a free market, since the copyright holder has a monopoly (i.e. opposite of free market) on the work.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#66

Post by SolarNet »

wolfgke wrote: post #65
beerbajay wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Textbooks which are essentially the same are available in europe for like 1/3 of the price of the american versions. I bought $70 books for my master's courses in Sweden that would have been $300 in the US (where I did my undergrad). The "invisible hand" of capitalism at work!

> I bought $70 books for my master's courses in Sweden that would have been $300 in the US (where I did my undergrad). The "invisible hand" of capitalism at work! I personally believe free markets ("invisible hand" of capitalism) work well in nearly all cases (yes, there exist cases of market failure, but these are IMHO rare). The problem rather is that copyright laws prevent a free market, since the copyright holder…

By that logic we should get rid of property, since the property holder has a monopoly on the property. I would put "(i.e. opposite of a free market)" sarcastically, but I'm being serious. Go read an economics text book on the definition of a free market, and while you are at it, what properties they have (muh freedom is not even a primary one) that make us want them so much, and what the requirements are (natural monopolies are a problem, but copyright and property are not monopolies; run-away patents are though) to have them.

The person you are replying to is wrong, the free market is what allows for corrections that are starting to happen (e.g. cheaper better books, student groups publishing their own books, etc.) it's just that Sweden has a free market with better conditions than many free markets in the U.S. so they get faster reactions in their prices.

But you are wrong in a worse way, you don't even understand what you are advocating for.

Edit: To expand on the copyright is property argument. Copyright allows you to own the result of your work. If someone happens to make something very very similar without ever seeing your copyrighted work, they have the copyright to their work, and you to yours. Like property you only have that which is yours (e.g. if I built a house on my land that looks exactly like my neighbors, I still own my property and the house; but if I took their house and put it on my property I wouldn't); this is why certain techniques like Clean Room development allow companies to build very similar products that are all protected by copyrights assigned to each company. The problem you have is with patents which allow the patent holder to claim all work done that matches the patent (even if the patent holder never actually made something that matched the patent; which is especially absurd).

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#67

Post by igk »

lvh wrote: post #32

In many European countries, this problem was resolved by what I feel is mostly student pressure. Our student union (for lack of better word) owned printing equipment and worked with most professors to do exactly what's suggested in this article: most professors wrote their own books (not 140 pages, though). Most of my textbooks were between 2 and 7 EUR, which I'm led to believe is approximately at cost. Occasionally,…

Was in the students union for my faculty. We pulled out all stops to make things as efficient and cheap as possible(we actually sold them below cost because we found other ways to subsidise them). 10ish euro maximum performance semester for all the textbooks that were used in the classes, and printing thesis was 50 % of the next cheapest option... if we had doubled our prices.

We also did "university politics", basically creating pressure for professors to make good textbooks. I typeset one myself for a professor who wanted to "beat" another one.

Join your students union, union or local cooperatives and cooperative oriented parties people. Infrastructure and necessities should be run like that or by government institutions.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#68

Post by Rotten194 »

syndev wrote: post #28
Rotten194 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a similar experience with linguistics. The main textbook I've used was $40, is a bit under 500 pages (but is smaller than a typical textbook, and paperback), and I've used it for 3 classes. That's the kind of book I'm happy to buy. Meanwhile my experience with CS classes has been a > $150 textbook that is never referenced in class, is outdated, and is seemingly on the syllabus just to have something there. I…

What was the book?

Syntax: A Generative Introduction, 3rd edition by Andrew Carnie. I got it used, so it's probably a bit more expensive if you want a new copy, but it's a great book.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#69

Post by [deleted] »

jabl wrote: post #41
lvh wrote: post #32

In many European countries, this problem was resolved by what I feel is mostly student pressure. Our student union (for lack of better word) owned printing equipment and worked with most professors to do exactly what's suggested in this article: most professors wrote their own books (not 140 pages, though). Most of my textbooks were between 2 and 7 EUR, which I'm led to believe is approximately at cost. Occasionally,…

As a fellow European, my experience is similar (though our prices were higher but still substantially lower than the big-name commercial publishers.), but I suspect it would never fly in the US (communism, boo!).

[deleted]

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#70

Post by repsilat »

jimmaswell wrote: post #44

Textbooks are flat out unnecessary. The notes on the board should be enough to understand the material, and the teacher can either write their own problem sets or copy them from somewhere and put them online. There's just no excuse to require a textbook for a class - it means the teacher is unable to communicate the material effectively and needs the students to read it on their own, can't be bothered to write or cop…

I disagree fairly strongly. Maybe this is reasonable for lower level courses, but in students' third or fourth year of study it seems short-sighted to expect the bulk of their learning to happen in live face-to-face lectures. Requiring them to learn independently, be it from prerecorded lectures or textbooks, allows classes to cover a lot more ground and (importantly) save lecturer face-time for the task it's actually best suited for: reacting to students' individual needs.

On covering more ground: this isn't just about expecting students to spend "their own time" learning things not covered in class, it's also about more efficiently using their time. With textbooks (and, to a lesser extent, prerecorded lectures) students can learn at their own pace. They can spend more time on the parts that they find difficult without holding up the rest of the class, and they can move more quickly through the material that they understand easily.

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