California State Senator Proposes Funding Open-Source Textbooks

Wait, What? Anyone know what this might mean?

FTA: "In some ways these guys are looking outdated. File-sharing as a means to pirate content is becoming yesterday's technology,"

I missed the "Funding" details.... How will the textbook writers get paid?

One-up contract? Write me a book for $100k (one year's worth of work) and keep it updated every year for $20k with typo fixes and new exercises?

This would create the right incentives, since 100k is probably more than any textbook publisher will give you -- even if you make it big, and your book is used in many universities.

I think the whole CONCEPT of a "textbook" needs to change:

1. It should be open-source or available on your nearest "App Store" for a REASONABLE price

2. It should be interactive. If I have a history textbook describing a battle, I want to be able to watch the battle unfold (even if it's just a diagram). If I am reading a chemistry textbook, let me play with the molecule. When I need to learn about the D3 group in Abstract Algebra, show me a triangle rotating and flipping as the group operations fade in and then drop to the bottom in a chain illustrating a composition. Let me swipe over to the Cayley table and touch a composition cell and watch the triangle dance. Whatever.

3. Textbooks should share a common ontology that can be extended for each book. But if I have two textbooks on my device and each has registered its ontology, I should then be able to cross reference concepts from one book to the other, or to appropriate entries in Wikipedia, for example.

4. All Chapters, headings, subheadings, and definitions should link to global, school, and class-level discussion forums about the topic where everyone can ask questions and have good answers upvoted in a stackexchange-like manner. These discussion nodes should be linked to the ontology, rather than the brand of book. That way ANY textbook with a section on "Limit Points in Rn" or "The Three Branches of US Government" would link to the same discussion node.

5. When appropriate, texts should be constantly updated, classes should always use the "latest stable version", and that update should be free after initial purchase (like an App).

Agreed. I think it would even make sense to hire accomplished authors, editors, and academics for the narrative portions of chapters/lessons. It would likely make sense to have fairly coarse units which would be the responsibility of a particular author.

I skimmed through some of the CK12 content. While some of it might be good (I am not qualified to determine whether or not the content is high quality or affective) - the presentation is really poor. In addition to authors, I think you need designers who will present the information in an attractive and engaging way.

In some Philadelphia schools, students share textbooks -- 2, 3, or even 4 kids to a book -- and homework can't be assigned out of the book because there aren't enough books for kids to take home -- god forbid they lose another! It creates a lot of extra work for teachers, who have to make extra photocopies of readings and assignments. And it kills me, because it's an artificial scarcity. Instead of $5 to $10 per book, the cost of its materials and manufacturing, schools pay upwards of $100 a book, because of the enormous premiums paid to the content creators and publishers. For the cash-strapped Philadelphia schools that is an excessive burden. You can replace "Philadelphia" here with another rust belt city or even, say, a city in California or Nevada, but the story remains the same. And it kills me even more, because there are academics, experts and writers the world over who'd love nothing more than to freely provide high-quality educational content to students. There is no better evidence of this than the hard work done by Wikipedians, but there is plenty evidence besides. Sorry for the rant, but I think it's important to recognize what an utterly simple and necessary step the open-sourcing of textbooks and curriculum is. Good for State Senator Steinberg, and although I'm sorry it's just for colleges and that the K-12 initiative failed, I hope that this program passes, it is successful, and its success forces districts all over the country -- cash-strapped or otherwise -- to consider open-source textbooks. They'll switch because they're cheaper and stay because they're better.