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.'"
OLPC? (Score:5, Insightful)
So are they gonna provide students a method of using these electronic resources, like a OLPC?
Go Arnold! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Is it just me or did anybody else parse this sentence as "Let's not fail in life like the music and newspaper industries and actually use internet for our gain instead of hopelessly fighting it"? Is he giving the music/news industry attitude!? :D
No its not... (Score:5, Insightful)
'It's nonsensical -- and expensive -- to look to traditional hard-bound books when information today is so readily available in electronic form,'
Yes, but online textbooks if they don't come with a hard-bound textbook are a bad idea. Already in schools whenever there is an internet outage, virus outbreak, etc. The school basically shuts down in the fact that teachers can't enter in grades, etc. But now the teachers couldn't teach. Then what happens if for some reason these textbooks are not cross platform? What if they restrict access to only Windows machines, or Windows and Mac? What happens whenever a student's computer breaks so they can't do the assignment or if they can only afford low-speed internet or that is all that is offered where they live? What happens if their computer is too old to properly render the site? What happens if the computer lab's hours are inconvenient for said students (for example an after school job where they usually work with their physical textbook during down time)? Take the old saying "my printer broke" and multiply it by a few thousand and thats going to be the result of this program if they do not mandate having a physical textbook.
Re:OLPC? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeap.. I was just going to post the same thing.. we as /. users are definitely on the tech side.. but lets remember not everyone has or can afford Internet access and the things to go with it (like a computer).
So really one must weight the cost of those dead-trees verses limited access mitigation like enhancing computer labs at schools, offering after-hours lab time, or even like you said, buying inexpensive netbooks for school (which you -know- will end up getting lost/damaged often so will need to be replaced.. plus who is gonna run the tech support for them when they get full of virii (or if they are linux, doing something like "rm -rf /")).
I'm very much for progress and technological evolution.... but we just got to realize there are still issues with doing it.
Bait and Switch (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No its not... (Score:5, Insightful)
On-line content needs to be leveraged accordingly (Score:2, Insightful)
Buy once - use many. (Score:5, Insightful)
They're not expensive if you use them and amortized over quite a few years. I went to a Catholic elementary school. ALL of our books were hand-me-downs of Public school books and at least 2-3 editions old.
Unless I haven't been paying attention, Geometry, Calculus, WWII, the Roman Empire, Mitosis, etc hasn't changed much in the last few years. We were also required to have all books covered. They last quite a bit longer if you do this. I know that when I switched to a public school I had the EXACT same history book, it just happened to be 2 editions newer. Other than a few minor editorial changes, I didn't see anything different to my 7th grade mind.
The problem isn't that books are expensive, it's that they keep buying new ones when the old ones aren't obsolete. Moving online isn't going to help unless they use OSS textbooks. Book publishers are going to love this. Instead of buying a book every year for 120$ they're going to give you a wonderful discount of an online book every year for only 50$.
Use the books until covers are falling off. Mandate that book publishers MUST keep publishing an edition X years after it is first published. This will eliminate 'prebuys' to try and cover all books that are expected to be lost or damaged. It'll also let a school use the same book for 10, 15 years. A $100 text book over 15 years isn't too expensive.
Unfortunately 10-15 years is at least one election cycle and everyone will forget what the person they replaced did and it'll be all shiny text books for all "please think of the Children".
Re:OLPC (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole reason the Gubinator is talking about online books is because CA has a budget deficit that is bigger than the GNP of a lot of countries. It's a pretty safe bet they aren't buying each kid a laptop. And before someone trots out "oh, it's only a one time expense of $250 or $300", remember, the books are neither going to be free to buy or freely redistributable, and you are dealing with children who are pretty good at losing stuff, forgetting stuff, and trashing stuff. This is one of those "look at me I'm tech savvy" feel good initiatives that is either going to go absolutely nowhere, or is going to further the gap between the haves and the have-nots
That's supposed to be a good idea? (Score:3, Insightful)
So how do you take the approved textbook into a restricted-text exam? How do you make notes in the margin? Are you supposed to print out relevant parts and bring them to use in class? When you're finished with it, can you re-sell it if you don't need it? What if you want to keep it? Have you bought it, or does the license stay with the school? I'd still rather stick with paper textbooks. It's great to have access to online reference material, but that's not what a textbook is for.
Re:No its not... (Score:1, Insightful)
But they're so much less easy to use (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No its not... (Score:5, Insightful)
Good Idea, Bad Timing (Score:3, Insightful)
I like the idea, but the thought that this will be a money saver in the short term is, well, short sighted.
Mod parent up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bait and Switch (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus, the publishers will sell, not the books, but the licenses, which means re-purchase every two or three years, on the publishers' schedule and not the district's. No money? No books and no just getting by one more year with last year's texts.
I'd also worry about the costs of the reading appliances. Some will wear out. Some will be sold black market. Some will have soft drinks spilled on them. I hope the solution isn't that all reading is done strictly in the classroom.
Re:No its not... (Score:5, Insightful)
A school has big consumer power.
Large schools sure, but these large schools also usually have the infrastructure not to have internet interruptions, etc.
I bet there are publishers that settle for such backup systems. After all it would strictly be for the sole purpose of maintaining studies for students. If you run into a publisher that has no interest in this then I see no reason why you'd have any interest in doing business with them, even if they wrote the best book about the subject there is. Fact is that book will, in five years time, be as shitty as the other outdated data in the world.
You assume that there is no textbook monopoly, and that publishers actually care about the students. Honestly the textbook publishers are nothing more than the academic equivalent to the RIAA and MPAA. They just want to make a quick buck and if that means screwing taxpayers, they will do that, if that means screwing students, they have no problem with that, if that means planned obsolescence, they will do that too.
Plus by expanding to internet you've already eliminated the dependency of books. Information can be fetched in numerous ways. If you're a publisher this is rather alarming and thus the power shifts to the favour of the consumer.
You have to remember these are organizations with as much sense as the RIAA/MPAA, their response to competition is to raise prices, sue competitors for little to no reason, and decrease quality.
Re:That's supposed to be a good idea? (Score:2, Insightful)
So how do you take the approved textbook into a restricted-text exam?
At levels lower than High School, there probably won't be a need for this. Heck, even at the High School level, there probably isn't a need for this.
How do you make notes in the margin?
Use Notepad (or better yet, Notepad++)
Are you supposed to print out relevant parts and bring them to use in class?
Yes, or have the teacher print out relevant part ...
When you're finished with it, can you re-sell it if you don't need it?
Only at the college level does the student own the book ... the license to the book should stay with the school.
One more thing, if the book is online, and several states go for the same idea, you could have a truely open textbook standard that could impact the entire nation, allowing every school district in the US the same materials.
The Cost is the Copyright, Not the Printing (Score:1, Insightful)
Producing soft-cover books (I've never made a hard cover) is trivial. The cost of these books isn't the printing cost, it's the copyright. Use Open Source textbooks.
Textbooks are a big business. And a dirty one: just see Richard Feynman's experience [textbookleague.org]
This should be on a course-by-course basis (Score:2, Insightful)
There are some courses, like literature, where the primary textbook is something best read curled up in a chair.
There are others, such as some sciences, economics, and anything involving current events or current technology, where textbooks are obsolete before they are printed.
There are still others, like PE, some fine arts, and most vocational training, where traditional textbooks were never an issue.
Re:Unfortunately (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:That's supposed to be a good idea? (Score:5, Insightful)
As a high school teacher, I can tell you the most common "notes" a student puts in the margins are "Roger kills Piggy," "Lennie kills George," and "Gatsby dies."
I am skeptical (Score:5, Insightful)
My first impression from this is: Arnold is passing off a pro-industry decision as a pro-California one. I am skeptical.
Online Textbooks Just Aren't ready (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm working on my PhD in History, and to help pay the bills I teach both classroom and online history courses. The institution I teach online courses for recently moved from requiring students to purchase the course text to providing them an online version with the class, while offering students the option to purchase custom hard copies. Students can purchase the full, hardback, color version, can select monochrome versions, or get paperback or plastic comb bindings. Sounds great, right?
Not so much.
The vendor provides students with a login ID and password for each student to use, which gets them access to the book for six months after the end of the course. The textbook website has integrated learning tools, skills assessments, maps, images, audio and video, etc... along with the text, which is properly paginated to go with my desk copy. Again, this stuff all sounds great. In practice, there are problems.
Students complain that it takes them double or triple the time to do their reading. Sending them login ID and password was a catastrophe, because they were provided by email, and not all students gave us the correct email address or knew that they had a school-supplied email address. This led the school to just embed a link to the text in our courses, which killed much of the interactivity built into the online text.
This ignores other problems. Student computer type and age, patch level, apps, skill level, whether they have their own machine, comfort with updating their computer, etc... have a huge effect on whether a student can successfully use an online text. I teach students that range from high school age into their sixties. Most of them are not comfortable troubleshooting problems, communicating problems, or even understanding that they have a problem. There are students whose parents won't let them install Flash or other media players on the family PC.
Unless Schwarzenegger is talking about providing all students with a Kindle DX (in color) or some similar device with free wireless broadband to access their texts, we're talking about huge administrative burdens, tech support burdens, and even financial burdens for families. The support ecosystem is just just not available for most folks to successfully use an online text for all of their courses.
Re:No its not... (Score:4, Insightful)
Its the same in CA. My point is that if they go to a digital curriculum that's one thing that might have to be centralized. The state might very well want to provide a library of online texts. They might offer some degree of choice to teachers and districts but setting up a full fledged digital document delivery and management system doesn't make sense to do at the district level.
Re:No its not... (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone with real experience of working in a school, please let me say this:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
No chance.
I'm not exactly clear what Schwarzenegger is trying to achieve here. Publishers will still charge per-copy, and probably not drastically less for the electronic copy versus the dead tree copy. Even if they do, you've got to budget to buy every child a kindle (or similar device) and budget to replace a certain number of these per year as they wear out or get damaged.
Unless the plan is to eliminate the concept of books altogether and use teaching material delivered over the school network - no, what about homework?
OK, deliver the teaching material online?
You think the publisher is going to charge significantly less for the material if it's delivered online? The cost of textbooks is high largely because they take a lot of time to write, you need a certain number of skills to get a complex subject across effectively and you don't have anything like the economies of scale seen in the latest John Grisham so if you need to pay the author $X, you have fewer customers to spread that $X between.
None of these things change with using a different distribution model.
OK, how about skip textbooks altogether and have the teachers put together their own material based on what they can find online? Good luck with that. You'd be doubling the average teachers' workload overnight. Not the way to win friends and influence people, particularly heavily unionised people.
Re:online lectures, not books (Score:5, Insightful)
This is actually starting to happen on my campus. Right now we have one set method of providing online courses through a learning management system (moodle) and a pilot of streaming the video and slides or providing downloadable audio podcasts of lectures. We are piloting another system this coming fall that should be more scalable.
The problem is a bit two-fold. My department has been tasked with managing and supporting all of these applications. We have a skeleton staff as it is, and with the budget cuts it's getting harder to justify the money to hire student assistants (even through financial aid). Right now I've been placed in charge of mapping out our help desk for these applications with three students and myself doing the support work for 1,700 faculty and way too many students (about 30,000? I don't remember the number). College departments are coming to us to put materials online because they cannot afford paper. They have no interest in actually progressing and moving into the 21st century, but are forced to digitize materials due to lack of funds. If it were up to some of these departments, we'd still be using chalk on slates.
The other part of the problem is actually maintaining the systems. We have three system administrators who have to balance time with supporting the servers running the applications and our internal office networks. These people, unfortunately, also get "borrowed" by whatever department on campus needs to supplement their IT staff (or lack thereof) when doing academically related projects. All of this with a shrinking budget and absurdly high expectations from the University.
All this talk and movement of materials online is great. It provides more access to students exactly in your situation that would prefer learning at his or her own pace and time. Our campus is a major commuter school and apparently 80% of our students work on top of full loads of classes, with something like 60% of those working full time. Being able to do course materials (for the most part) without coming on to campus is a big plus. However, people also need to realize that doing this also shifts the pain of funding books monetarily onto departments that are already stretched to capacity.
Re:Excellent (Score:3, Insightful)
From a licensing standpoint then, a digital publisher, with non-existent manufacturing costs, can license a professionally written textbook at a cost of $5 a student rather then $30.
They can, but will they? Hint: an e-book for the Kindle costs as much or more than the paperback edition. Why? Because they can. (Unless the California state actually employs some people to write public domain textbooks. That would be great. But don't hold your breath.)
Assuming the laptops are usable for 5 years the cost saving are INSAINE. We are talking slashing at least $200 dollars PER STUDENT PER 5 YEAR PERIOD.
So that would be $40/year/student out of budget of $10,000/year - savings of 0.4%, even in the wildly optimistic case that all of these e-book readers will need no paid personnel to maintain it and will last 5 years in the hands of 10-year-olds... Not that enticing, I'd think.
Re:OLPC? (Score:5, Insightful)
Technology isn't always the answer. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never seen a book crash.
I've never seen a book show a mysterious error message, or ask me to contact my administrator.
I've never seen a computer I could replace for under £20.
I've read - hell, I own - books older than the oldest personal computer in history. They still work.
I've seen plenty of books get wet, but once they're dry they're fine. Even if the pages are a little stiff.
I've never seen a book come delivered on the understanding I don't pass it on to anyone else once I'm done with it.
I've never seen a book which would stop working as soon as there was a power cut.
Nah, this is a silly idea. Technology for its' own sake is seldom the best answer.
Re:OLPC? (Score:2, Insightful)
What are you guys talking about? A text book costs more than a computer, how is this even an issue? Seems like a no-brainer to me. A freaking Kindle DX is cheaper than most text books... How about one Kindle per child?
Outdated? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fact is that book will, in five years time, be as shitty as the other outdated data in the world.
Outdated in five years? Really? What exactly is being taught in high school these days cutting edge genetics or something?
Because Shakespeare hasn't changed in nearly 400 years. Classical mechanics, optics, Newton's laws, etc. haven't changed in hundreds of years either. I have a calculus book from the 1920s and it is still as relevant if not better than many calculus textbooks today. Kids should be learning fundamentals in high school. How to do math, how to read critically, how compose essays, etc. Books teaching those will not be outdated in five years or even fifty-five years.
Worst idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:OLPC? (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed - Printing is much cheaper than buying a hard bound version.
And, for those of you complaining about computers/Internet access, compare the cost of 1 semester's worth of books to the price of a cheap PC and a semester's worth of Internet access. You might be surprised. Heck, PC + Internet + printing/binding may still be significantly than my book costs some semesters - And you only have to buy the PC once (hopefully).
Re:Bait and Switch (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OLPC? (Score:4, Insightful)
but lets remember not everyone has or can afford Internet access and the things to go with it (like a computer)
Not only that, but if you already have a computer at home you'll probably need a second one. After all, if your kid is tied to the computer for hours a day doing their homework, you no longer have a computer your kid does. So to save the government the cost of providing course materials to the kids, at least part of the cost is being passed off to the parents via the need for computer, internet connectivity etc. Also, teachers like to have kids read out of the book in class, does this mean that every class will need enough computers for everyone? Or are they going to supply the kids with Kindles or something?
Re:OLPC (Score:5, Insightful)
The economics of this proposal is compelling. If the books can be put on a netbook, I can save money day one by buying each student a cheap netbook (say $300)... My district already spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on textbooks each year. They go for something like $100 a pop. Granted, you can use them for more than one year - we generally get about 7 years of real useful life out of them. Then again, I can buy a netbook for a student, let them use it for the 4 years they are in high school, and GIVE it to them at the end and it still doesn't cost me a dime.
I'm a tech guy, so I understand there will be issues with support/breakage, but it isn't going to be very much more expensive than the "breakage" we already have in textbooks. And you can lock the desktops down to a great degree, such that the students don't have admin privileges. Install Defender and AVG and you have a pretty good package.
Also, if you are using local copies of books rather than relying on an Internet connection to get them, you can pretty much put that "digital divide" issue to bed. Students can sync up when in school and get assignments and other background materials from their WiFi connection, and while at school, or in the public libraries, use the Internet. For those that have it at home, it is a convenience, but not a necessity.
Finally, you now don't have to wonder if a student has access to a computer to write papers and do computer based assignments. They all have them. And thus, the "digital divide" problem, if not solved, has gone WAY down.
Overall, the proposal has a lot of merit and I'm hoping the rest of the nation can benefit from California's efforts here. It would be good to have a state like California to lead this effort, and then allow other districts in other states be able to leverage what they do.
I don't know about this (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:OLPC? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not really a question of whether a specific group of children will benefit.
It's a question of, can we prevent any group of children from being hurt by the move, and is there a net benefit? Here the driver is cost - and don't get me wrong, I'll be the first to say that a rush to technology to save a buck can be a disaster.
That said, none of the issues people are raising are show-stoppers. We're talking about books, not dynamic content, so internet access need not be a requirement. ("But if you had the ineternet, think of all the cool value adds..." Yes, but right now we're just trying to save resources without putting extra burden on any children. Doing too much too fast is one of the easiest ways for this to go wrong.) School-provided hardware, done the right way, could save money over school-provided books. The computer doesn't have to be a general-purpose PC, so the tech support environment can be kept dirt simple.
Yes, they need to think this through and proceed carefully. Let's save the pointing and laughing until we see whether they do or not.
Re:Dual-edged troll (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you a troll? Or just confused?
Who writes in the margins? Public schools at least try to minimize that, because the books get reused for several years. You don't want next year's kids reading this year's notes. Actually writing the notes is more of a benefit than reading something someone else wrote last year. How does PDF inhibit the ability to think?
What's the difference to the brain in reading computer text vs. book text? Are you thinking that students won't be tempted to visit iTunes or chat while reading a book? Think twice - that notebook next to them is always on, they'll do it regardless. Plus kids are getting used to doing things online - it makes sense to move away from textbooks as long as there is some sort of "appreciating of dead tree reading" being taught somewhere. Maybe moving away from that old part of the brain (if that's not something you just pulled out of your butt) is a good thing and will benefit us. Go make a study and let us know what you think with science behind you, not superstition.
What? This is public school, starting from a young age. You are probably thinking this is college. Not the case.
You are correct about one thing - some will benefit from this change, some won't. Public education is like that, since you can't serve everyone's needs completely within a reasonable budget.
Your entire rant seems like a knee-jerk reaction to new technology. Would you kindly read it again and tell me if I'm really all that wrong?
Re:OLPC? (Score:5, Insightful)
Printouts are good for worksheets (which you throw away anyway), and books that you won't actually use, [ ... ] but not Math and Science
1) Does anyone refer to their 8th grade math textbook all that often?
2) Did anyone ever read their entire 8th grade math book even in the 8th grade? I recall consistently covering less than half the material in any given text book, when I went to school.
Will work for grade schools (Score:3, Insightful)
In grade school you are not expected to carry books home. They give out Readers or Workbooks which are cheaply printed and have just the take home materials in them. The textbooks stay in the class and get pulled out for reference and in-class use.
There is no good case for Textbooks at the grade school level.
California needs to negotiate a periodic license fee for a variety of material with optional updates. Purchase interactive white-boards which are simply big LCD displays with fairly cheap touch screen capability (doesn't need to be very accurate). Display lessons and material on these... with handouts as needed for supplementation and home study.
Grade school kids don't need textbooks at all. They need good teachers who can engage them in the lessons.
Junior High/Middle schools also do not need Textbooks but do need some form of personal access. Here they should have built-in units in the desks. Scratch resistant good touchscreens and a durable keyboard pad with a very basic OS that can handle accessing media, local network resources and a word processor nothing more. There is no access to the OS itself except the login prompt.
They don't need full access to the internet (or filtered access). Set up a proxy server that pulls in copies of various websites (wikipedia, discovery channel, etc) on a weekly basis. The teacher gets the same whiteboard but with full access to the internet to pull up current events or additional materials.
Again, handouts go home. These can be bulk printed to reduce costs each semester with a local printer. Each child still has the same access to learning materials as they've always had based on their families priorities. They can still stay after school to use the media desks, the library (with additional media desks) or ask the teacher questions.
High School takes Junior High and simply swaps out the media and provides more applications. High School doesn't need anything additional - never has. There are still computer labs for doing things on a computer - these are not computers, they are media desks.
Savings would include the Textbooks, all test taking materials and any costs related to Scantron type machines, any multi-media devices, a whole host of games and other learning materials that could be applications rather than physical items.
Re:Mod parent up (Score:3, Insightful)
What's relevant is getting the answer right. I'm not a farmer, but I can calculate the most efficient use of a barbed wire fence to cover multiple grazing areas.
Nobody thinks math is going to be relevant later on, and most of the time it's because it's not directly relevant. Trying to convince kids otherwise is a fool's game, because (like your example showed,) you end up looking more ridiculous than if you just made them memorize the damn multiplication tables.
What's important is that people understand enough of the procedure that they can apply the concept to new problems.
Re:OLPC? (Score:3, Insightful)
But, I think this is at the grade school level, not the college level. Which means, a new copy will be printed, at minimum, once a year. At that point, it becomes a question of how many years the books are expected to last, at somewhere between 5 and 10 years average life expectancy of the books, it'll be cheaper to print than buy (I'm taking that $150 estimate as WAY too high for a grade school book - college text books, except in a few 'high end' fields - specialties in some of the harder sciences and medicines, don't even cost that much.
http://www.nyla.org/index.php?page_id=1520 [nyla.org]
If that is accurate, and we assume 1/3 ream of paper ($15 ream / $5 book?) per book, no ink costs, no printer maintenance, no licensing fees, then we get the same cost in 4-5 years from printing as we do from standard text books over their lifetimes. Given a standard textbook as 4-5 times that in lifetime from the article... This will SIGNIFICANTLY increase costs.
Open Source the curriculum (Arnold is doing that) (Score:3, Insightful)
Furthermore, the entire curriculum could be on a CD (for those without internet) and distributed every year.
The biggest issue here is changing the infrastructure of the delivery of the information. Let's look closely at the lessons of the City of Munich and apply them at the state and school board level. Get rid of proprietary software for most users. Stabilize to a Linux-based platform (LTSP/OLPC?) and be done with huge hardware upgrade costs. Reduce (mostly eliminate) viruses. Give out older machines with OpenOffice and Linux to disadvantaged students. Level the playing field.
That's how you effect real change, but the reality is that it takes a huge will to do it. Long-term, the savings are permanent and irrefutable.
Knowledge is good.
Re:OLPC? (Score:4, Insightful)
It will only increase costs if people print the entire text book every year.
I can see some students occasionally printing some pages, but why on earth would anyone, let alone everyone, print the whole thing?
Kids these days are pretty much perfectly happy reading content online. Sure, you get the occasional freak who prefers paper books, but that's hardly the majority. Get an e-reader that allows markup, and you can even take notes directly in the "book". To say nothing of the increased search power in an electronic copy.
Who's going to write the books? (Score:3, Insightful)
From what i've seen, eBooks aren't significantly cheaper than paperbacks and usually not much less than hardbacks.
Hopefully the californian system is big enough that they can recruit teachers within their own ranks to create their own open set of books, then they can drop the licensing costs which will otherwise surely cripple the system.
Re:OLPC (Score:2, Insightful)
The economics of this proposal is compelling. If the books can be put on a netbook, I can save money day one by buying each student a cheap netbook (say $300)... My district already spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on textbooks each year. They go for something like $100 a pop. Granted, you can use them for more than one year - we generally get about 7 years of real useful life out of them. Then again, I can buy a netbook for a student, let them use it for the 4 years they are in high school, and GIVE it to them at the end and it still doesn't cost me a dime.
As a tech person you have to concede that these statements are incredibly optomistic.
...the kids don't destroy the equipment in a matter of weeks or months rather than years. ...you can get Microsoft/McAfee/Apple/Symantec/etc to provide free licensing for the required products. ...you can come up with a method of securing the OS against "unintended uses". ...you lo-jack every unit to mitigate theft. ...you assume the kids will fix their own machines and you won't need to hire additional IT staff for every school. ...you assume that there are not incidental and normal hardware failures requiring repair/replacement. ...you increase the infrastructure in every school to handle the thousands of connections rather than the few hundred previous connections. ...you disregard the cost for the build-out of all the hard LAN connections, or the purchase/deployment of WiFi in the schools on a scale that can handle thousands of students. ...you obtain contractural agreement with every school districts internet provider to compound the network bandwidth many fold at little or no additional ongoing cost. ...you have a fall-back for the inevitable network failures during school hours.
The optomism is proven realistic IF:
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And that's just the top 10 off the top of my head. And it doesn't really begin to address the administrative burdens, the accounting and inventory tracking burdens, the patching and updating burdens.....
In the end the residual costs associated with the deployment of MILLIONS of machines to inherently irresponsible and destructive kids would be unparalelled. Suggesting that any of it is a 'one-time cost' is wholly false. It's an adoption of dozens of on-going costs even if you get every software vendor, hardware manufacturer, and service provider to cough up the initial investments for free. Anyone that has worked in IT in any kind of an enterprise environment could go on forever telling you of the nightmares they've faced from non-tech managers mandating tech solutions that will 'save money', without understanding of the realities in the task.
It's an age-old scenario. The manager says, "Look, it's all just three simple steps. We make a rocket, fly it to the moon, and get it and the astronauts back. How hard is that? "
Re:OLPC? (Score:5, Insightful)
And honestly, is there any reason to replace most school textbooks if they haven't been ripped to shreds?
History - at least in my school, we almost never covered anything more current than world war II. I don't think what happened in the American Revolution has changed significantly in five years. And really current events should be using current journalism rather than a textbook anyway.
Math - Primary and secondary school math was pretty completely defined hundreds of years ago. All new textbooks add is different methods of teaching it, none of which have been proven to actually be better in a long-term sense.
Literature - Again, in school you're reading classics, not keeping up with the New York Times bestsellers. Heck, most literature books are just for convenience anyway - the vast majority of it is all public domain and available on Project Gutenberg or something similar. Similarly, most classes read the same novels every year or allow the students to go find a book on their own to read.
Science - There have been no scientific advances in the last twenty years that will actually be covered in secondary school. The old scientific literature, combined with a few periodicals for some of the "wow" factor of modern science, should be fine.
The only field where I can see an advantage to updating textbooks is in the computer science classes - and all computer science classes by definition already have a computer in them to access the vast quantity of web-available information.
I know this idea is anathema to the textbook industry, but seriously, what have they changed in the actual core textbooks aside from graphics and layout styles?
I'm all for adding new online worksheets or test generators or that sort of thing to make teachers lives easier, but that should have nothing to do with having to spend $100 on a new book.
Re:Mod parent up (Score:4, Insightful)
Take the problem sets out of the textbook and put them in a cheap disposable plain paper packet where they belong.
Math concepts are timeless and belong in a textbook! Problems are cheap and do need frequent updating. Publish them separate. Problem solved!
Re:No its not... (Score:5, Insightful)
You think the publisher is going to charge significantly less for the material if it's delivered online?
No, but not for the same reasons you seem to think.
The cost of textbooks is high largely because they take a lot of time to write, you need a certain number of skills to get a complex subject across effectively and you don't have anything like the economies of scale
Yet for grade school and even high school, we don't need totally rewritten textbooks every year. Or even every 10 years. None of the basics have changed that much. High school science may vall into that category if you have advanced topics classes. Current events classes probably don't need a textbook.
How come the 29th ed of a math book costs as much as the 28th ed? Surely you aren't suggesting that the cost is high because they took "a lot of time" to rewrite it? Why does the 29th ed still have the same wrong answers to problems in the back?
I believe that you are papering over the real reason: oligopic profit margins.
High quality CC texts are the future, and I find it funny that Arnie is still shoveling money to the distribution companies while attempting to be seen as forward thinking and somehow saving money through the magic of technology, when the problem at root is not technological.
Regards.
Re:OLPC? (Score:3, Insightful)
The only reason to BUY new textbooks is to update learning styles and integration of classes that varies (i.e. making math and physics books "match" topics)
but that's the very same thing you can do MORE easily with e-textbooks. In fact you could pay the state-funded universities to keep the facts straight and let teachers reformat the actual books as needed.. after all, it's all just pages in a database pushed to a "book", right, just like Wikipedia.
Prop 13 limits increases (Score:3, Insightful)
Tax set to 1% of assessed value.
Assessed Value may only increase 2% per year.
When ownership changes, then the assessed value is reset to the market value.
Goto step 1.
This is a sensible and fair system that keeps people from being taxed out of their homes.
CA's problem is not lack of revenue, it is spending too much.
Re:Textbooks (Score:4, Insightful)
If there is another system that hasn't had to raise spending in 30 years, I'd like to see it.
I don't have a problem with spending going up. Obviously that's going to happen. Inflation if nothing else.
I have a problem when spending goes up by several times the inflation rate. NYS just passed a budget that increased spending four times over the inflation rate, using BHO's stimulus money. Before the stimulus money the state was flat broke and looking at cuts. Once they got it they decided to have a massive spending increase, thus kicking the eventual insolvency further down the road.
California has been doing the same for years.
Wow, all these ignorant comments... (Score:3, Insightful)
Have any of you even read TFA? Of course not this is slashdot... The second link contains more interesting information, so I suggest everyone checks it out. But for the lazy...
Across the state and around the world, well-respected educators have designed customizable texts to meet the unique needs of their students. Federal grants have funded research that is free for public use. And now California has put out an initial call to content developers, asking that they submit high school math and science digital texts for our review. We hope the floodgates are open. We'll ensure the digital texts meet and exceed California's rigorous academic standards, and we'll post the results of our review online as a reference for high school districts to use in time for fall 2009.
First of all, this is for math(s) and science textbooks only. So don't worry about cuddling up with your English lit stuff on the couch, you can still do that. Second, this is an open call for submissions which will be up for approval. This most likely means that if there are honestly no satisfying submissions, this idea may get scrapped/postponed.
I think if these were down to earth, non-drm, popular/flexible format based ebooks that are not stuck in online-only mode and are downloadable, then there shouldn't be too many problems. Yeah, I'm curious about many of the infrastructure issues, such as delivery, storage, etc... as well as the business model that will be behind the acquirement of these textbooks. But many of the comments I've read here seemed to be really ignorant of the above paragraph which I think negates half of the concerns I've read about so far.
Last year, the state earmarked $350 million for school books and other instructional materials. Imagine the savings schools could realize by using these high-quality, free resources.
So reading further, and seeing the above statement sheds some more light on my first quote. It sounds like the state is expecting the submitted learning material to be "donated" for the cause of education. Meaning no publishers and no money involved in acquiring it. So all that's left is storage/delivery/viewing infrastructure. This is looking more promising now (just hinging on the availability of quality free educational content).
However, there are those who ardently defend the status quo, claiming our vision of providing learning materials to students for free would risk a high-quality education. ... That's nonsense. 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.
Again, more mention of FREE.
I don't live in California, but I recognize that the education system in the entire country is in shambles. I'm personally glad to see ideas like these being pushed around, and not only that but actually looking like they'll get implemented and not just talked about. While it's not mentioned explicitly, this sounds to me like it's talking about k-12 education. So all of you who only remember the university environment, please realize that k-12 is different. The textbooks were never yours to begin with. Hell, I'm from Florida and sometimes my school didn't have enough textbooks to give one to each student to take home. So yes, we only used them in class. Homework was improvised... photocopy, worksheets, etc...
Re:Bait and Switch (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course, the professor took me aside and said that I needed to "quit interrupting the class and undermining his authority."
Translation: "I'm getting a bigger kickback with the electronic version--don't louse it up for me"
Re:OLPC? (Score:3, Insightful)
We're talking about California here. It has nothing to do with being able to afford it. It has to do with a feel-good state law which requires schools to buy new textbooks if the existing ones don't meet the standards of the local review boards. Combine that with the most over-sensitive local review boards in the country rejecting every existing textbook the moment something in them is no longer politically correct....
Last night I heard a BBC reporter ask a California Board of Education official how this could possibly save any money, and the answer was that local review boards require changes so often that textbooks cost 3x more in California than in the rest of the country.
I'm at a loss as to why it's remotely acceptable to re-write history, science, and math books so often. It's pretty clear that this is a case of politics over accuracy.
Re:OLPC? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not particularly. Mathematics at the high school level has not changed much in the last 100 years. New books serve basically two purposes: they include new pedagogical ideas (sometimes good, sometimes bad), and they contain new problem sets. In terms of pedagogy, I can get the same information by attending in-service and university classes. That is cheaper for the school, and has the added benefit of making me a better teacher. In terms of problem sets, I can always write my own, or get problems from one of several problem banks on the internet.
High school texts don't go out of date in 2 years. As I said above, mathematics at the high school level hasn't really changed much in the last century. English is still English, and there is little call to update texts every year. History is still moving on, and one might claim that yearly updates could be useful, but a ten year cycle isn't that bad, either. It is going to take something like a decade for historical ideas to pass through enough peer review to become consensus, and make it into textbooks, anyway, and more recent events will be within the memories of the students themselves, and my need less teaching and/or analysis. Civics are pretty much unchanged over the past 50 years, if not more (there are still two houses in congress, 50 states, and presidential elections every four years). Even the sciences don't change that much at a high school level. Newton's approach is still good for physics, and there is not really any cutting edge biology or chemistry going on at the high school level.
On top of that, it takes time for an instructor to get used to a new text. I would hate to be teaching out of a new text every year. I don't know if you have ever had to prepare a class, but there is a lot of work involved. If one is familiar with the text that one is teaching out of, it is much easier to prepare.
So, in short, no. No, I would not like to be teaching out of a new text every year. It might not be that bad to teach out of new editions of the same text every year, but even that seems unnecessary