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Textbook manifesto (2016)

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Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#121

Post by gwillen »

riffraff wrote: post #71
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,…

Italian, and fellow european here. When I started university (1999, I think) there were still plenty of Big Expensive Books (I recall my Chemistry one was like that). The "student pressure" materialized in the form of doing illegal copies of the books. This used to be totally illegal, but incredibly easy. At some point the legislative environment changed so that photocopying up to a decent percentage of the books was…

In the US it feels to me like it's gone the opposite way. The textbook publishers are increasingly able to block people from using pirated books, or even buying used books, by including one-use online codes in the books. Then they can raise the prices because there's no other market.

Don't ask me what I think the punishment should be, for devising this system, or for a professor requiring the use of such a thing in a course.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#122

Post by sbuttgereit »

At the school I went to, many of the classes had no formal textbooks.

You bought a 50-100 page of not terribly dense text/examples; these were photocopies on plain old letter paper that were stapled together and pre-punched for three-ring-binders. Each class you'd buy one of those per semester and they were developed in-house. That was it. Naturally, it wasn't always this way, but certainly for the basic classes it was exactly this way.

Note this wasn't any sort of engineering field and what they were teaching didn't have a lot of authors writing standard issue coursework to begin with, but it was great material that was very focused to the classes they were teaching. I still hold on to them, too: very concise and a nice reference if I ever need to brush up.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#123

Post by pirocks »

tnecniv wrote: post #49
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!).

In the math and engineering classes I took, the prof normally just distributed his notes via PDF.

I read this as the "prof had normally distributed notes".

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#124

Post by jimmaswell »

thanatropism wrote: post #119
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've had lots of classes that worked like this, particularly my Calculus I/II classes where there was a textbook but homework from it was just suggested, not collected, and the lectures were entirely sufficient to understand the material and do well on the exams. I'm guessing the exams were easy but you didn't learn much calculus.

I definitely learned calculus from the Calculus classes. I took calculus 3 recently for credits with no difficulty remembering anything relevant from 1/2. Some things I could give right now off the top of my head are the definition of an integral/derivative, squeeze theorem, mean value theorem, integration by parts, epsilon delta definition of a limit, second/third derivative tests, and a lot more. Test me with something if you want.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#125

Post by TeMPOraL »

Here's a trick we used when I was a student: we had an FTP server shared by students of all years of our program, and we put there a copy of every required and recommended textbook, as well as slides from the lectures and every other piece of material that was relevant to our classes.

Honestly, I think this kind of setup is something universities should provide for their students. We live in 21th century, it's not that much work to provide PDFs (with restricted access, if needed, because copyright blah blah).

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#126

Post by 3131s »

tedmiston wrote: post #83

> Students: You should go on strike. If your textbook costs more than $50, don’t buy it. If it has more than 500 pages, don’t read it. There’s just no excuse for bad books. This is bad advice. You need the book for reference or at least will do better with the book most of the time. If you want to stick one to the publisher, buy used. Textbooks need a "microservices revolution". And not with these crappy interactive…

Governments should definitely pay content creators to make open-source curricula for schools and universities.

I agree with Stallman that proprietary learning materials are antithetical to the spirit of learning itself. Part of the process of learning is rearranging information, changing it, collectively annotating it, and consuming it through convenient new media (a digitized, hyperlinked document on a open comment platform, for example). There are only limited possibilities with proprietary information in this regard, and even fewer possibilities with proprietary software. Schools should not use either one.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#127

Post by fasquoika »

no_wizard wrote: post #102
AllenDowney wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. I have the good fortune to work at a college (Olin College) that recognizes that my work developing textbooks is aligned with the mission of the institution, and can have as much external impact as research. But you are right -- most places give professors zero credit for writing textbooks.

Hey man, Just wanted to thank you for all the stuff you have given us. I have found your books to be both delightful and enlightening, and the fact you give them away is pretty astounding. I myself buy the printed copies just to support this work, however I know many many people not of means that I point your resources to with great success. I don't know if you hear it a lot or not enough, but thank you, sincerely. S…

Seconded, I have Green Tea Press bookmarked and I've been meaning to read through The Little Book of Semaphores for a couple months now

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#128

Post by syrrim »

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…

It's funny, because many of my professors already do write what amounts to a small textbook, in the form of notes/slides. These are then freely available online. By saving, editing, and expanding on these notes over the course of a few years, I'm sure most could have a fairly authoritative textbook for their course.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#129

Post by mncharity »

> Choose books your students can read and understand.

A noble and audacious goal.

> If you can’t find one,

Realistically accessed.

> write one. It’s not that hard.

WTF?

Ok, I can see how this could be either plausible, or utterly absurd, depending on the domain.

> check whether they understand.

Err, does this mean "I think they didn't do too badly on the midterm"? Or daily quizes and clicker questions? Or a grad student, with a focus on the field's education research, dedicated to running concept inventories and stats?

At least in college introductory science education, "check whether they understand" is hard, an area of active research, and historically, a cesspit of professorial self-deception.

> It’s not that hard.

Let's draw a proton. With marker on whiteboard, as a circle (not hard). With an illustration app, as an arbitrarily-sized hard sphere with physically-bogus lighting (not hard). With code, as a gradient, based on the proton mass density curve (not hard, but did eat some hours).

Let's draw atomic nuclei. As balls of red and blue marbles (not hard). As gradients, post-processing from recently published ab initio density functional plots, when available (hard). Background: light nuclei are lumpy.

Ok, so let's aim lower.

Let's draw the Sun. As an arbitrarily colored circle (not hard). What about as a circle, with a color at least vaguely realistic? Demonstrably hard, as it's so rare. You likely can't ask your first-tier astronomy graduate student to do it.[1] Or almost any of the professorial authors of the many introductory astronomy textbooks.

Ok, so let's aim lower.

Last week I was reading an AP Chemistry curriculum standard. Towards the top, "atoms are conserved". Great. Later on, "atoms are neutral"[when charged, they're instead "ions"]. Okaaaaay. So are there any atoms on the right side of H + light -> H+ + e- ? The old "molecules aren't made of atoms, they're made from atoms" school. Two historical threads of definition. Left for students to reconcile, because that's obviously where the burden should lie. And this wasn't Pearson trash content, this was a curriculum spec (albeit a poor one). So what do you tell your kids to make it safe for them to take standardized exams?

"[N]ot that hard." I know wizzy education-focused MIT and Harvard professors who work really hard to raise some small bit of intro physics and biology content from wretched, to very-slightly-less-wretched.

Perhaps for some domains "not that hard" is true. And it helps if the objective is "no worse then the rest of the crap out there". And if "check whether they understand" means "ask a few clicker questions, and give a random quiz" instead of "systematically run formative misconception checks". But, wow. It so doesn't match the areas I'm most familiar with.

Perhaps the manifesto is missing some scope-of-applicability predicate?

[1] http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/MHjx6 "Scientific expertise is not broadly distributed - an underappreciated obstacle to creating better content"

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#130

Post by michaelmrose »

tbrownaw wrote: post #92
supremesaboteur wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor people are lifted out of poverty when they get jobs. Jobs are created by incentivizing job creators.

Poor people are lifted out of poverty when they get jobs. 1) A bit over a third of poor people (in the US) do work: https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2014/home.htm 2) Reducing poverty can work by either raising the baseline (stronger social safety net, maybe higher minimum wage, better overall vocational education, etc) or by moving individuals into other economic classes (getting people (better) jobs). I…

"A bit over a third of poor people (in the US) do work"

This sentence is not wrong but a casual reading of it would nearly always give the wrong impression. Herein "poor people" is defined as the people below the federal poverty limit. For one person this is around 12000 dollars.

A more common sense colloquial definition of poor is those barely scraping by based on the cost of living in their area of residence. In most of those considered poor by that broader definition someone in the household is working. Remember that not all families have both partners working.

Your perhaps too brief post would inspire people to think that most people by the common sense definition of poor are in fact unemployed which is not correct.

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