California To Move To Online Textbooks 468
Hugh Pickens writes "Last year California spent $350m on textbooks so facing a state budget shortfall of $24.3 billion, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has unveiled a plan to save money by phasing out 'antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks' in favor of internet aids. Schwarzenegger believes internet activities such as Facebook, Twitter and downloading to iPods show that young people are the first to adopt new online technologies and that the internet is the best way to learn in classrooms so from the beginning of the school year in August, math and science students in California's high schools will have access to online texts that have passed an academic standards review. 'It's nonsensical — and expensive — to look to traditional hard-bound books when information today is so readily available in electronic form,' writes Schwarzenegger. 'As the music and newspaper industries will attest, those who adapt quickly to changing consumer and business demands will thrive in our increasingly digital society and worldwide economy. Digital textbooks can help us achieve those goals and ensure that California's students continue to thrive in the global marketplace.'"
Re:Publishers have had it too easy (Score:2, Informative)
The way textbooks are pushing above $100, I'm not surprised. Publishers have made a mint and have tried their best to hamper the second hard market. This is a positive change.
How is this positive? With DRM now they can charge what they want, and all you get is a PDF that expires in a year, that you can't read without lugging a laptop and charger wherever you go.
Also, has anyone actually tried to read books on a computer? It's pretty painful after a while.
Re:That's supposed to be a good idea? (Score:2, Informative)
Textbooks (Score:2, Informative)
Various pieces of research (such as http://www.sigchi.org/chi97/proceedings/paper/koh.htm [sigchi.org]) show that reading from a screen is not as effective for learning based activities as reading from paper. The major problems focus on reading from the screen being slower than reading from paper, the perception of text on-screen less accurately than paper and higher fatigue when reading from a screen than from paper due to the backlit screen. Furthermore, prolonged usage of screens can lead to eyestrain, a common argument for restricting children from watching T.V too much, and with most children already watching hours of TV/Games/YouTube etc, do parents really want them spending another 6+ hours per schoolday (plus homework) stuck in front of a screen?
Re:ha (Score:3, Informative)
A federal judge isn't subject to a state constitution.
I think that's what you meant, though Harry Blackmun etc may agree with your original statement.
Re:OLPC? (Score:3, Informative)
The "Not everybody has access to the internet" argument works in 3'rd world contries, but not in the USA, Everybody DOES have access to the internet, even those who don't have access to a fancy laptop.
Incorrect. My mother wrote and ran the Borderlink Project (http://www.borderlink.org/), which was a multi-million dollar technology grant for the rural and needy areas of southern California. Believe it or not, most of socal doesn't look like the OC - at some of the schools she worked with (near Warner Springs), the schools opened early so that kids could come to school early to take showers. 3rd world countries, indeed.
And if you're making the logical connection that kids that don't have showers, who live 30 miles away from the school up backcountry roads, don't have internet access, why, you'd be right. From what I remember working with a school district in Calexico (in the desert near the border), home computer access was around 30%, with around 60% having TV (and a slightly lower number having a Playstation or similar system), and 80% with phones.
I don't see how these kids would benefit at all from electronic textbooks. While I never really read my textbooks when I was in school, I think that students at least should be guaranteed access to the texts.
Re:ha (Score:2, Informative)
Don't forget that rather important part of the US constitution that says that
That pretty much means that unless otherwise specified CA constitution trumps the US Constitution.
Wifes school already did this (Score:4, Informative)
She works in the Palm Springs school district and so far the results are mixed and expensive.
Basically the school dumps down $35,000 of tax payer money into laptops that the students try to steal which break when you drop them. The software is all internet based so that means no filtering. For some reason the I.T. department can't figure out how to firewall all addresses besides the 2 or 3 needed for the programs. She was told it had to do with some activeX controls. This means the kids log into myspace, facebook, and other inappropriate web sites when no one is looking. This includes a few sites where a chick in her class thought it was funny to show a pic of herself topless. My wife didn't report it because she could be fired on spot. She tried banning htem after I told her how to filter them with a hosts file. The kids just google for proxies to get around that. This is a problem because the lawyers feel the teacher is 100% responsible 100% of all the viewing on all 30 laptops.
Anyway as a math teacher the students really need to practice on paper and its hard to graph functions and slopes on a computer as the students do not understand the concept. What is good about them is that students can finish their work early and then be done and browse the net. With books they have to wait because they can distract other students if they do any other activities.
My wife kind of likes it because its less work for her. Computer grades everything wtih a submit button. In practice she has had the lkaptop key stolen once or twice and had to put her classroom on lockdown to get them back and the issue of inappropriate websites keep becoming an issue. Schools do not have a budget for a real competent staff who could configure their routers tighter than a virgin's ass with blocking search engines and non educational websites.
One way to do it. (Score:3, Informative)
Fundementals of Financial management [textbookmedia.com]
Basically a free book with ads online, a printable PDF version for a small fee ($9.95), a slightly larger fee ($14.95) without the ads and a modest printing cost for the full book ($24.95).
I got the printed book version. Pretty nice book to. It has no bar code but it does have an ISBN and it is marked "Not for Resale" But at under $30 including shipping I don't really care if I can resell it or not.
This business model seems to be new in the area of text books but I like it and hope it takes off. - SR
Re:OLPC (Score:4, Informative)
As to the cost of school materials, that is the central theme on this thread - everyone is looking at the publisher model here and those models are NOT compelling... the monopolistic publishers (There are like 3 of them, maybe 2 depending on how you cut it) don't want districts to move to online, and so they price their online additions such that it would be cheaper to keep buying the dead tree versions. They don't want to eat their own lunch, and while I don't blame them, I for one have had enough of it.
I'm advocating an approach similar to what California is doing - they are creating their OWN textbooks, free of the publishers. They get real educators, PhD's and everything, to write their ebooks. That is the model I am advocating. Think of it like Open Source for textbooks.
The arguments AGAINST such a model are the same arguments that Open Source faced at its beginning, and still face, to one degree or another, today. But at this point, you CAN run your computer completely on open source software if you want to, and with time, you'll be able to run your school system completely on open source textbooks. And instead of having to choose from 2 versions of your AP US History textbook that come from HM or PH, you'll be able to choose from who knows how many open source versions, all with the ability to tweak the textbook for your curriculum. I realize there will be a transitionary period, and that during that period you may end up having to do a mix of dead tree books and ebooks. But given a few more years, you will be able to basically give up the dead tree versions and the pay for play ebook versions, thus getting to a more flexible and sustainable textbook model.
Re:Outdated? (Score:4, Informative)
History, physics, chemistry, social science. These are some examples of subjects that, if I didn't update myself about since school, would today be outdated data. Perhaps not completely useless, but I never claimed such either.
We are talking high school here though. There is a lot of history that has not changed that can be taught in high school with a 5 or 10 year old textbook. Physics, same thing. High school physics should be the basics (optics, classical mechanics, etc.) not something that was discovered last year. Same with chemistry. Let the colleges and universities teach the advanced stuff since that's what they're for.
Talk to professors that teach first year courses. You'll find many of them will complain that students are coming into first year without an understanding of the basics in science and math or an ability to read critically and properly write an essay.
For Sciences? No Thanks (Score:2, Informative)
Of all the courses to institute online texts, the sciences? I had nothing but issues with online material when I took Chem and Physics in college. The biggest issue wasn't the texts, though, it was the helper apps that came with it. In both courses, we submitted our homework online, which was automatically graded. This became a real issue when dealing with units, as the parser had the most obtuse formatting requirements. You'd end up with answers that looked like this when typed in:
(3)((NH[4])[2]SO[4]) ---> (2)(NH[4]OH) + (5)(SO[2])
I realize that's not a valid reaction, but it illustrates my point. I spent more time figuring out the damn formatting than I did solving the problems.
Problems came in sets of 5, so if you screwed up the formatting of one, you had to do them ALL over again (and they always changed the problems slightly). Same problem when dealing with complicated units in physics problems. The physics parser couldn't even handle spaces gracefully.
y[2] = 3.689 {(ft)*(lb)}/{(sec)^(2)} ---correct
y[2]=3.689 {(ft) * (lb)} / {(sec)^(2)} ---incorrect
I got so sick of the formatting issues that I wrote a little helper app to handle the formatting for me.
In some classes, though, having no textbook at all wasn't an issue. One professor taught all his courses via Powerpoint, so he just removed key words from the slides and printed out two hundred pages per student (400-student classes) at Kinkos (college bookstore charged a lot more to print copies). $20 a student and we were set.
Online texts may well be the future, but when it comes to math/science/engineering, the texts just aren't ready. Social sciences, sure (I took a few archaeology courses online with only a few issues stemming from Blackboard being the biggest POS in existence), but not hard sciences.
Re:I am skeptical (Score:4, Informative)
See my sig for hundreds of counterexamples.
But authors have already been doing this for years.
The project is only dealing with free textbooks, which means it is going to have zero participation from traditional textook publishers. (For confirmation that it's only about free books, see the project's web site, http://clrn.org/FDTI/index.cfm [clrn.org], and the Schwarzenegger opinion piece linked to from the slashdot summary.)
Re:Service-based education is stupid (Score:3, Informative)
High school students these days if I recall *have* to do community service to graduate.
Not all school curriculums require community service. Personally, I find service-based education to be hypocritical, because: a) education is mandatory (in the US), and b) requiring voluntarism really negates the entire notion of voluntarism. If you are volunteering to do something, but are only doing so because you are forced to, it really isn't volunteering anymore now is it?
Service-based education is a waste of my child's time. I don't need a community to teach my child what its standards are through forced labor, thanks.
I've never viewed the community service requirement as "volunteerism". I've always thought of it as a way to expand a student's view of the world with a method that cannot be done in a classroom. I'm sure it fails to teach some students, and I'm sure some kid's parents are better able to expand their kid's view, but for the majority I think it is a good thing. My sister's kids were actually very excited to spend some time with the local fire department and help educate others about fire safety.
I've always thought of it as an extended field trip. A chance to see that there is more to education than classroom lecture and testing.
Re:Mod parent up (Score:3, Informative)
They repay for most of the "static" learning material anyway. The books problem sets and examples are rewritten and rearranged nearly every year. If a school finds that they need 20 extra copies, the copies they need are likely the out-of-date old books. This forces a purchase of the current copies for the entire subject. To ease the pain, the book sellers offer a discount, which is to say they lower the impossibly inflated prices to only exorbitantly inflated prices. Even if the book hit a reasonable price, it's highway robbery compared to the cost burden if reprints of the old copies were available. I've even heard of "buy back" plans where the old books are recovered at a pittance of the price. All to ensure that too many old books never make it into the market.
A subscription model side-steps the need to repurchase an entire subject's books when you are ten books short. That's going to be the selling point. Unfortunately this is going to be tied at the hip to having to repurchase the access far more often than a well planned book purchase.
A well planned book purchase is rare, because you have to overbuy a subject, and when you're attempting to save money, overbuying is counter-intuitive.
Re:OLPC? (Score:3, Informative)
You act as though the students are teaching themselves out of the textbook. Textbooks are to supplement a teacher, not to replace one. They exist so that a teacher can say "go read this chapter" and expect the student to come to class with a good grasp of the basics.
Who 'discovered America has not changed, only our current spin on it. I'm sure any competent teacher is perfectly able to tell students about the different trips to America, or to skip the whole "discovered" bit entirely. The details like that are not the important part of the story - the following explorers and their impact on American culture (both native and current) are the important part of the story.
As for math, I know that I am perfectly capable of doing long division. My mother works as a teacher, and she has seen very little actual benefit to the newer methods of teaching maths. They have generally been adopted for political reasons rather than scientific ones.
I would say that nothing in literature should displace a classic work until at least 20-30 years after its publication - few works are probably judged without the perspective of history.
Whether or not pluto is a planet was a political decision and a random fact, not science - it's an arbitrary distinction. And when did you learn about computers in a science class? High school science is about basic biology, physics, chemistry, geology, and the scientific method. These fields have not changed at the introductory level. I'm not saying the schools shouldn't buy a new computer and lab instructions to use it, I'm saying they don't need a new textbook for everyone to run that lab.
I see it that any minor changes such as you mention are better addressed by the teacher than updated materials. Who cares if the kids read that Columbus discovered America if the teacher clarifies that this was a Euro-centric view held at one point.
As for books not lasting very long... you must have gone to very different schools. I remember less than one book a year being damaged in my classes, from elementary school on up. We were still using fifteen year old books in some cases that were still in good shape - I remember the teacher admonishing us to be careful with them, because they were out of print and she liked them better than the newer literature books she'd seen.