Sun Founders' Push For Open Source Education

theodp writes "Unfortunately for textbook publishers, Scott McNealy has some extra time on his hands since Oracle acquired Sun and put him out of a job. The Sun co-founder has turned his attention to the problem of math textbooks, the price of which keeps rising while the core information inside of them stays the same. 'Ten plus 10 has been 20 for a long time,' McNealy quips. 'We are spending $8 billion to $15 billion per year on textbooks' in the US, he adds. 'It seems to me we could put that all online for free.' McNealy's Curriki is an online hub for free textbooks and other course material. Others hoping to bring elements of the Open Source model to the school textbook world include Vinod Khosla (who co-founded Sun with McNealy), whose wife Neeru heads up the CK-12 Foundation, which has already developed nine of the core textbooks for high school."

K-12 level...

[starseeker]

Does anyone know of any pre-1923 (i.e. out of copyright) series of educational books for early education that could serve as the foundation for some "open source" textbooks?

Perhaps Google's book scanning project will be digitizing some relevant books, or is there some other on-line resource? Ideally it would be the original books that would be scanned, to preclude any argument of copyright being held by re-publishers via minor changes.

Surely for basic education technology won't have made much of a significant difference in content (I'm a big fan of old-school education at basic levels - calculators are to be used AFTER you learn the basics, not instead of)

Build the new and they will come

[jDeepbeep]

The reception to this effort will be especially positive after the Higher Education Opportunity Act [uwire.com] goes into effect (requiring a list of changes for a new edition of a textbook showing how it differs from the older edition). As it currently stands, the author could change a few equations, and add a couple graphs, and call it a new edition.

Re:CK12.org - Probability and Stastics - nice book

[kroyd]

Another quite good book on statistics is Edward Tufte's "Data Analysis for Politics and Policy", which is posted at http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/dapp/ [edwardtufte.com]

(All the examples are real life examples, often quite important ones as well.)

Re:It's not just math books

[Anonymous Coward]

At the university I attend, the physics department require a £60~ textbook for the course. Normally students would try to get a second hand copy, but this is not posisble seeing as how the book is needed for its "online content" - a system providing a very simmilar functionallity to that offered by software already deployed university wide. If we didn't buy the book first hand we couldnt access the weekly tests and would be penalised. One of my 10 lecture courses this year used it, and the book itself isn't the greatest imho. (I do think the online access was available to purchase seperately for ~£25 and then add in most second hand books would be around £45...)

Re:Not a New Idea

[king neckbeard]

To me, it seems Sun's problem was that they didn't really 'get' how to foster a FOSS project and build a community (it takes more than just hiring Ian Murdock). Sun had other problems, but being smarter and more proactive about FOSS could have helped, although I'm not sure how much of an impact it would have had.

Re:It's not just math books

[tyrione]

Agreed. I'm trying to see how they've managed to take a Calculus book I bought in 1987 and by 2000 the same book with some Calculator additions, change in color examples, a pointless DVD/CD to some crappy Windows Only Software program and extra problem sets managed to go from $50 to $150. I'm sorry, but the technology to make books has actually decreased in cost, yet the cost for the actual product has tripled, in just over a decade? Now I see Physics for Scientists and Engineers using worse materials [thinner paper weight/cheaper pulp, weaker spines] and have managed to add a crap load of useless filler [not relevant historical information around the theories and how they came to it [a secondary softcover book companion being the perfect solution for such material]] while spreading it out over 3 books. So I can either buy an all-in-one for around $200 or three books for more than $200 that will fall apart much sooner than the same material covered in Physics books back in the late 80s/early 90s or back in the 60s/70s when two volumes for Physics by Resnick/Halliday came out in high quality print materials, superior examples and at around 1800 pages put you back around $35 for both. I just picked up Volume 1 for $2 and Volume 2 is going to cost me [in mint condition] around $7 from Amazon. I'd expect to pay $40 for each hardbound today, as reasonable, totaling $80 plus tax, not > $200. I'll even concede $100 if they add the companions book of all the historical background information on the theories discussed with current research fields and their application. That would be worth it.

wikibooks.org

[Anonymous Coward]

hasn't he heard of wikibooks.org?

Re:USSR science texbooks.

[nbauman]

One of the most popular science books ever printed was Physics for Entertainment, http://www.archive.org/details/physicsforentert035428mbp [archive.org] by Yakov Perelman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakov_Perelman [wikipedia.org]

During the great days of the Soviet Union, the Russian Foreign Languages Printing House translated it into every major language, and sold copies at third-world prices. Those devious Communists -- promoting socialism by distributing cheap science books! Many scientists, engineers and mathematicians working today were inspired to go into their careers by this book.

The most notable was Grigory Perelman (no relation) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Perelman [wikipedia.org] who solved the last step of the Poincaré conjecture and was eccentric even by Slashdot standards. Grigory's father gave him Physics for Entertainment.

It used to sell for $3.99. Then it went out of print, and I tried to buy it, but it was going for $200. Now somebody reprinted it in a (probably) unauthorized edition, and it's also in the Internet Archive.

The Soviet publishing house had an army of editors translating Russian books into all the world's languages, and they probably did Fichtenholz if it's that good.

Dover Publications got started reprinting out-of-print and out-of-copyright science books, and as I recall, a lot of their trade list was Soviet books translated into English. At that time, the Soviet Union didn't believe in copyright, and they were happy to see their work reprinted. One thing the Soviets did well was science education. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Brin)

You might check out the old Dover catalog to see if there are any out-of-copyright English translations. Scan them and put them on the Internet.

Re:Information...

[Belial6]

Interesting reading. Hardly surprising. Watching a friends 9 year old daughter fail at adding 13 + 0 recently, is the kind of thing that reinforces my decision to home-school.

Re:Maybe they could add

[bcrowell]

Rather than re-invent the wheel, he could also have a look at South Africa's free science and math textbooks: http://www.fhsst.org/ [fhsst.org]

My books predate theirs by several years, and mine are college-level, while theirs are for high school. I think what FHSST is doing is great, and since the two books are under compatible copyleft licenses, we're both contributing to the same free-information ecosystem. Even if the books had been at the same level, I don't think that having more than one textbook on the same subject constitutes reinventing the wheel. Different books treat the same subject differently, and individual professors will have their own criteria for picking books. If commercial publishers have dozens of non-free options to offer on a particular subject, I think it's healthy for there to be more than one free book as well; otherwise a professor who doesn't like the one free book will have no choice but to use a non-free book.

New laws same as the old laws...

[VortexCortex]

Which high-quality public domain books are those?

All of the math books for which copyright has expired.

The book makers don't just make books. They screen them, and educate the school boards, so the schools don't waste students' time with crappy, outmoded texts.

New math books simply have "updated", or as I see it "dumbed down", terminology.
If I'm not mistaken the English course (esp. vocabulary) is required as well as math, so why dumb down the math books?

I tried helping out my little brother, a high-school sophomore, with his math homework,
but I couldn't stand wading through the stupefied terminology soup.

Solving an equation has been the same process since Algebra was invented,
yet the textbook referred to combining like terms via adding the coefficients (or multipliers) of like variables as:

Move same lettered variables next to each other then add or subtract the counter numbers of each type of variable.

I also found several typos and mathematical errors in the brand spanking "new and improved" math schoolbook.

There's no reason not to standardize on (reprint) a time tested (proofread) 70 year old Algebra book rather than release
new books with different terminology and poor quality control except to make more money for publishers.

A change in curriculum isn't an excuse since you could just provide the appropriate book containing the desired
info instead of reprint a new collection of the same old info with new terminology.

Oh, wait, you can't get a copyright on a book made by reprinting the same old info unless you change the info somehow...