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California State Senator Proposes Funding Open-Source Textbooks

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Re: California State Senator Proposes Funding Open-Source Textbooks

#21

Post by learc83 »

maratd wrote: post #17

New Jersey resident proposes California State Senator stay out of education and focus on reducing his state's budget deficit. Open-Source Textbooks ARE a good idea. However, just like Wikipedia didn't need the government to get started ... this gem doesn't require the government either. It'll happen once eBooks become more prevalent and there is nothing the government should do to help or stop it from happening.

Normally I'd agree with you, but since the government is by far the largest purchaser of text books...

The state of California spends millions on buying text books, think of all the money they'd save if they paid to develop open source text books instead.

Re: California State Senator Proposes Funding Open-Source Textbooks

#22

Post by freehunter »

lukejduncan wrote: post #2

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 FTA: "In some ways these guys are looking outdated.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 took it to mean that the industry is catching up with the technology, although this is just my interpretation. The author was not clear, I agree.

Instead of pirating games, you can use the OnLive Play Pack. Don't even need a powerful computer anymore. Instead of pirating music, get the Zune Pass or Spotify. TV shows are on Hulu, movies are on Netflix. The legitimate reasons to pirate are still there in some niche markets, but overall those reasons are disappearing.

Re: California State Senator Proposes Funding Open-Source Textbooks

#23

Post by jonnycowboy »

Splines wrote: post #9
breckinloggins wrote: post #6

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 Ab…

http://wiki.bssd.org/index.php/Main_Page looks like a good start. I hope that open source curriculum takes off - IMO there are fact-based topics that translate easily to software learning, where a child's mastery can be measured accurately to provide a useful custom teaching plan.

I like the home-grown approach (ie: bottom-up instead of top-down) they've developed. The section "Five Easy Steps to a Balanced Math Program" gives a good overview of what the general goals of their math program area. It would be interesting to compare this to the guidelines in different states and countries. For example in California, the STAR guidelines are termed "blueprints" and available here: http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/blueprints.asp Once we have a large table of the goals each district sets for their students it would be easy to tailor each math level.

Re: California State Senator Proposes Funding Open-Source Textbooks

#24

Post by tlow »

jonhohle wrote: post #8
ivansavz wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> repository for textbook content, > a platform for mixing and matching > content to meet the curriculum This would be awesome indeed, but there are some problems. From the things that i have seen so far, (ex: cnx.org), the content is predominantly of low quality. Simply put, ask the average person to explain something to you and he/she won't do a very good job. The other thing is that modularization completely brake…

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)…

Hi there. My name is Doug, I work at ck12.

If you're interested in learning more, contributing, or giving feedback please email me at doug@ck12.org I'd love to hear from you (or anyone else). Thanks.

Re: California State Senator Proposes Funding Open-Source Textbooks

#25

Post by cbs »

breckinloggins wrote: post #6

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 Ab…

1. It should be open-source or

Flexbook is a project working on this, the few books I've looked at are cc-by-nc-sa. www.ck12.org/flexbook/

Re: California State Senator Proposes Funding Open-Source Textbooks

#26

Post by equark »

breckinloggins wrote: post #6

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 Ab…

I think you're missing the fact that textbooks are written by people. They don't magically appear. Writing a good textbook requires the passion of a single expert author, who must dedicate years of his or her life to write it. There are very few shortcuts. And crowd-sourcing is definitely not one of them.

A more innovative approach, I think, would be for the government to buy out leading textbooks at a premium and after holding an auction to determine the fair price. This gives you the best of both worlds -- rewards for individuals' efforts but the ability to use the published material in an unrestricted way in the future. Plus you avoid the loss associated with monopoly rights granted via copyright and wasted duplicative textbook efforts.

This ideas has been proposed more broadly for patents by Prof. Michael Kremer of Harvard. Its logic is pretty compelling:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/2000/0...

Re: California State Senator Proposes Funding Open-Source Textbooks

#27

Post by rflrob »

heydenberk wrote: post #10

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…

This seems like a failure on the part of the publishers to collect all the money they could. There are large fixed costs to produce the first textbook, but relatively low marginal costs to produce the next million. If the publishers had some sort of "budget-impacted schools" program, under which schools that would otherwise share textbooks among students could buy textbooks at a relatively small markup over marginal cost (as opposed to the full amortized total cost), then they'd still be making more, and the schools would get the benefit of the use of the textbooks.

Re: California State Senator Proposes Funding Open-Source Textbooks

#28

Post by tlow »

equark wrote: post #26
breckinloggins wrote: post #6

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 Ab…

I think you're missing the fact that textbooks are written by people. They don't magically appear. Writing a good textbook requires the passion of a single expert author, who must dedicate years of his or her life to write it. There are very few shortcuts. And crowd-sourcing is definitely not one of them. A more innovative approach, I think, would be for the government to buy out leading textbooks at a premium and af…

"Instead of mass-produced textbooks, the more than 3,100 sophomores in the state's largest district are learning from an online curriculum developed by their teachers over the summer with free software distributed over the web.

Engelhaupt, 31, was one of three district math teachers who spent about 100 hours each developing the lessons, which cost the district about $175,000 less than buying new textbooks."

http://www.nola.com/newsflash/index.ssf/story/anoka-hennepin...

here's the link to the book: http://www.ck12.org/flexbook/book/8561

Re: California State Senator Proposes Funding Open-Source Textbooks

#29

Post by robrenaud »

rflrob wrote: post #27
heydenberk wrote: post #10

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…

This seems like a failure on the part of the publishers to collect all the money they could. There are large fixed costs to produce the first textbook, but relatively low marginal costs to produce the next million. If the publishers had some sort of "budget-impacted schools" program, under which schools that would otherwise share textbooks among students could buy textbooks at a relatively small markup over marginal…

Price discrimination is hard. I've heard of Americans picking up crappily bound but reasonable priced big name texts, like Norvig's AI book, or CLRS's algo book produced for India.

276 RS http://www.dealsandcoupons.in/resources/3986-discount-book-I...

The publishers don't want to risk shaking up big profits to sell near cost to the low end. If you sell cheaply to the poor schools, what prevents the poor schools from reselling the books to the rich schools 20 miles away?

Re: California State Senator Proposes Funding Open-Source Textbooks

#30

Post by wmf »

learc83 wrote: post #21
maratd wrote: post #17

New Jersey resident proposes California State Senator stay out of education and focus on reducing his state's budget deficit. Open-Source Textbooks ARE a good idea. However, just like Wikipedia didn't need the government to get started ... this gem doesn't require the government either. It'll happen once eBooks become more prevalent and there is nothing the government should do to help or stop it from happening.

Normally I'd agree with you, but since the government is by far the largest purchaser of text books... The state of California spends millions on buying text books, think of all the money they'd save if they paid to develop open source text books instead.

This can probably be fixed with a little spin, like "California schools band together to save taxpayers money by writing their own textbooks".
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