Virginia Begins Open-Source Physics Textbook 226
eldavojohn writes "The Commonwealth of Virginia has issued a request for contributions to an open source physics textbook (or 'flexbook' they termed it). They are partnering with CK-12 to make this educational textbook under the Creative Commons by Attribution Share-Alike license."
Hell Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
It's about time, can't wait to see the result and more of the same for other subjects. Education for everyone, free-ish. This is how it should be.
Great Idea! (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope it won't be Wikipedia style...
Kick out spdf (Score:2, Insightful)
Kick out spdf and welcome the era of open-source text books. Hooray!!
Is Project Gutenburg not going to lend a hand in this?
Web 2.0 as a force for good (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a good idea. Base it on a standard description of each concept like an old fashioned text book, but also allow:
- Discussion threads with students and teachers. (moderated, Slashdot style?)
- Contributed examples, again by students and teachers. You could do something like the PHP documentation, where the best contributed examples are prominently displayed at the bottom of the relevant page.
- Interactive tools to illustrate particular concepts.
- Copious linkage to similar resources.
A successful project like this could easily spawn similar projects for the other sciences.
Re:OSS Textbooks kick serious... (Score:4, Insightful)
accreditation? (Score:1, Insightful)
How will it be accredited? My understanding is that only textbooks that are accredited by some particular organization are allowed to be used in accredited schools, in order to retain their accreditation.
Re:Calculus, or no-calculus? (Score:2, Insightful)
Most physics without solving PDEs is pointless. But I don't think that is the point of this class. High school physics focuses more on physical intuition and the understanding of the scientific method than on actual calculations. The only areas of high school physics that could apply to the real world are the simplest constant value problems. I would consider a high school physics class a success if the students could describe Newton's Laws of Mechanics, the Work-Energy Theorem, Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation, Snell's Law, the First Law of Thermodynamics, the general gist of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Pascal's Law, the Ideal Gas Equation, the general gist of the wave equation, simple vector operations, and some electronics. I wouldn't expect students to do any real calculations until they had mastered calculus. And I wouldn't expect them to be useful for anything unless they had mastered ODEs and PDEs (and other mathmatics of physics topics like complex analysis, linear algebra, calculus of variations, and vector calculus).
Re:Wha? (Score:3, Insightful)
Open source? What could that possibly have to do with a textbook? Is it compiled?
If it's written in LaTex and you can get the source with the book, then it would be a wholly accurate description.
Re:Hell Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
How the hell are we suppose to sit in Ivory Towers and look down upon the commoners if education is free from us political and educational elites?
I mean, we need to make sure that people are certified by a piece of paper to prove that they've bowed before the altar of Education properly.
This includes requiring each new student to buy overpriced textbooks, brand new each year. Please, won't anyone think of the poor professors and teachers???
Re:Hell Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason I have concern is that in our state, the selection committee for books didn't have a single person with any type of degree in physics. So where are they going to find editors.
I would prefer they used Sears and Zemansky College version, but am afraid that schools couldn't afford it.
I have never looked at Halliday and Resnick Fundamental version, but that may also be good.
Finally (Score:4, Insightful)
Ahh, a definitive open source physics textbook so comic book writers can stop having Superman lift a mountain which under the small surface area he can cover, regardless of how strong, would simply crumble around him or the pressure at his hands would be so great the rock would go molten and he would effectively melt through the mountain he was trying to hold up.
Perhaps ships blowing up in space will finally be silent the WAY GOD INTENTED THEM TO BLOW UP!
Perhaps Cyclop's eye beams will finally push him back with equal force that they shoot with and maybe the death star's super cannon will no longer be a laser but some particle stream of sub-atomic explosives that penetrate the planet and rapidly conver the conventional matter it comes in contact with into some exotic and unstable form of matter that goes boom. BIG BADDA BOOM!
Perhaps with a good solid physics text book people will learn to wear their seat belts, realize that driving a motor cycle isn't as safe as driving a car, and learn that the LHC cannot destroy the universe...
This all, of course, is completely dependant that:
A: People are literate (yes there is a difference between knowing how to read and being literate)
B: People writing the book can write
C: People start actually taking physic courses
D: Pay attention in said courses
E: Have a teacher that actually teaches rather then babysit like 99% of teachers in North America (YEAH THAT MEANS YOU TOO CANADA AND MEXICO. GUATEMALA -> PANAMA IS OFF THE HOOK... FOR NOW...)
a few things (Score:4, Insightful)
1. TFA states that this is for K-12, NOT college...so all the 'screw the Univ. for making me pay $200 for a textbook comments' are misguided
2. I like this idea as well, but let's not forget that an open textbook than anyone can edit about SCIENCE is bound to attract hordes of Intelligent Design trolls...imagine it...every church in Virginian tells its members to go home Sunday afternoon and edit the wiki-text book about evolution...this is big, big trouble
3. I'd rather see this opened to a pool of teachers, professors, scientists, etc that have been vetted for their qualifications.
Re:Calculus, or no-calculus? (Score:5, Insightful)
Physics without calculus is a bit pointless.
Woh! Step down from your high horse. There is plenty to learn about basic physics that doesn't involve calculus. You must simply make the correct assumptions. All the calculus is doing is explaining why the algebra works under some assumptions and not others. Even in four years of engineering school, I rarely used calculus.
Keep in mind that a derivative can be expressed as a simple difference (subtraction) and an integral can be expressed as a simple summation.
For example, Newton's second law only requires calculus if the acceleration of the system is changing. For practical classroom purposes, acceleration due to gravity is constant. No calculus required. (sort of)
High school physics is teaching that the world can be described by math. The math that they will learn in physics without calculus will greatly help them understand calculus in the future. High school students don't need proofs, they need application. Application keeps kids interested.
Re:Hell Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a common axiom that should be in play here IMO, if a quorum of recognized physicists agree that a topic should be covered for a specific level of understanding, then it should be covered.
A wiki would work if it could be voted on, and topic frozen for a year once voted and approved, or that subject page moved to a reference site which could be used as the text for one or more years.
Physics 101 typically covers certain topics, more advanced classes cover more and more in depth. The trick is making that material available and flexible as they say. There are no great arguments about creationism in physics classes that I know of, but creationism is a religious principle and should be covered in theology class. NOTE to self: that page should be a redirect to bible.com.
If actual physicists and hobbyists can agree on material, then you have more intelligence working on the problem than currently being used to select texts... more or less.
Re:Calculus, or no-calculus? (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe yours was more focused on physical intuition, but mine was very much conceptual understanding and problem solving. We were expected to understand how closed form solutions were derived - sparing us the necessity of having to memorize them in some cases.
Yes, you can do some stuff without calculus, but calculus is easy, excepting some of the trig crossover and the umpteen billion integration tricks. It really ought to be part of everyone's high school education, if only for its tremendous ability to empower those who wield its principles in the age of the computer.
Re:Calculus, or no-calculus? (Score:4, Insightful)
I also went to an engineering school. I don't ever use calculus and other fancy math in the workplace, but calculus and other fancy math are tremendously useful in understanding many of the modern marvels about us.
As far as summations and differences, this is intuitively true. Vector calculus teaches the intuition for that sort of thing. But without the ability to integrate, you're going to miss out on certain things.
Calculus gives you the power to forget special case solutions and derive as needed in a lot of cases, which is pretty damned awesome.
You are paying for it (Score:3, Insightful)
1. TFA states that this is for K-12, NOT college...so all the 'screw the Univ. for making me pay $200 for a textbook comments' are misguided
The K-12 books are bought with tax money. They're not free.
Re:OSS Textbooks kick serious... (Score:5, Insightful)
But you know what makes a ton of money? Putting out a new revision of a standard textbook with only a few sections moved around, and all the questions renumbered, so you sell the same content for hundreds of dollars all over again to a new bunch of suckers! This works because you give the professors that assign it a little bit of a kickback, as well as a free copy to get it as the new standard textbook for the course. I can't understand why anyone would be upset by that, or feel as if they're being ripped off.
Re:others already exist (Score:2, Insightful)
More than likely, it will be CK-12 who will edit the books to maintain the "cohesive structure, consistency, and progression of complexity" so as to provide a better experience for the students. Places outside of VA should be able to modify the released book as they see fit, thanks to the Creative Commons license, but within VA, if teachers want to use this flexbook, they have to follow the approved version.
Besides, it'll be a while before Virginia will actually replace their textbook in favor of this flexbook, if it even gets that far.
Re:And this is why... (Score:4, Insightful)
Physicists just can't agree on even the most basic aspects of their science.
And who are you to make such a (ridiculous) claim?
Pay better salaries (Score:4, Insightful)
Pay more taxes so teachers can have better salaries, small classes and less time spend on paperwork and more on teaching.
Oops, you voted for the guy promising you a tax cut before any money has actually been cut and instead of saving what little money there is for a rainy day spend it all and more on tax cut only to then find himself involved in a war with no end.
Good teachers get burned out by the system created by voters who can't see anything but that 300 dollar tax refund.
Not really (Score:2, Insightful)
This won't change any of that. The "commoners" have had access to cheap/free information for decades, but they choose to reject it. It's not as though the theory of evolution is some big secret that no one knows about, for crying out loud. Don't expect people to turn off the television and start thinking just because textbooks are being published under better licenses.
Re:Hell Yes (Score:2, Insightful)
Whoa. That must be a seriously tall tower if you can't see the general population from your lofty heights.
Perhaps you missed TFS, which mentioned this is going to be a physics textbook...not an open source celebrity-nipple-slip rating system.
I'm not so jadded as to think this isn't a fantastic idea, but trust me, free access to this info probably won't cause one person in a thousand to look up from whatever the hell they're watching on TV.
Point in fact? My local library...
Nice troll (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm especially fond of your ironic sig line:
"I really want it" does not mean the same as "I need it" or "I deserve it"
You do actually need it to pass.
And since you are essentially paying into an extortion racket, there is no moral dilema in avoiding doing so. All these assholes do is change the sample problems with each book revision. There is no content change worth shelling out another couple hundred dollars each semester.
For example, let's look at an Algebra book. How much new algebra has been written in the last 1000 years? Now how much of that would you expect to see in an introductory text? The answer is zero. None. All introductory Algebra texts cover the exact same thing.
So, the dilema - how do you make a new Algebra book every semester? A publisher makes money by selling books. How to do that? Simple. Change the homework problems. There is no new Algebra information, no new content, so they change the homework.
This is unethical. It's extortion. "Pay us or you don't graduate." So yeah, it's nice to see people solving the problem. Remember, what is legal and what is moral are often times two different things.
Re:And this is why... (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, that's actually a very cool vid. Thanks for sharing.
But it doesn't apply at all to my comment. Biologists study fantastically complex systems, while neuroscientists and the like study something even more complex: emergent properties of a sophisticated network of neurons that are by themselves complex.
Physicists, on the other hand, are reductionists and try to study Nature at the most fundamental level possible, attempting to control for as many externalities as physically possible. There is not one real physicist in the world who would claim they don't believe Maxwell's equations describe electromagnetic radiation or that fermions don't have to form antisymmetric wavefunctions. There are certainly open questions (otherwise, why the LHC?), but to say we "can't agree on the most basic aspects of our science "is preposterous.
Some science is known with great accuracy (i.e. the mass or charge of the electron, Planck's constant, how fat your Mom is....oh snap! ;) and these facts are not disputed. You can't compare the certainty and universal acceptance of such fundamental knowledge to the hard-to-define and fantastic complexity of human reasoning and the brain.
Nice try, though.
Re:Not really (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes it will.
It will allow people who want to learn physics, but don't have access to $$$ for a text book. I'm thinking inner city geeks.