University of Minnesota Launches Review Project For Open Textbooks 133
New submitter Durinia writes "Minnesota Public Radio is running a story about the University of Minnesota's Open Textbooks project. The goal of the project is to solicit reviews of college-level open source textbooks and collect those that pass muster onto their website.
The project will focus first on high-volume introductory classes such as those for Math and Biology, because as David Ernst, director of the project, states in the interview: 'You know the world doesn't need another $150 Algebra One book. Algebra One hasn't changed for centuries, probably.'"
Requirements for inclusion include: Open licensing (Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike), complete content (no glorified collections of lecture notes), applicability outside of the author's institution, and print availability.
Well, good. (Score:5, Interesting)
I was talking with a history professor (rljensen) the other day, and he said that free textbook ebooks would never catch on because, quote, "They're all terrible. And if they weren't terrible, they'd be selling them."
Hopefully sites like this will not only prove him wrong, but bring education, world-wide, to the next level.
Re:Well, good. (Score:0)
Wow, what a non-sequitur. "If 1 + 1 isn't equal to 3, then why do schools say otherwise!?"
Re:Well, good. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Well, good. (Score:5, Interesting)
There's historical works, and then there are works meant to be studied and absorbed by students of this century. Yes, you and I would have no trouble at all with an Algebra book written in 1975, laugh at some of the rather dated soviet russia cartoons explaining parabolic arcs, and probably pass the state standardized test as a result, but how well can you comprehend the Harvard 1899 Entrance Exam [nytimes.com] at a glance?
It takes considerable skill and effort to write a text for the appropriate age group, make it engaging, easy to read, yet cover all the material required without losing the 50th percentile students who are struggling to pass so they can stay on the football team (or insert stereotype here).
Tools that modern students can relate to aren't simply slapped together in an afternoon, and require a serious editorial staff.
Re:Well, good. (Score:3)
Re:Well, good. (Score:2)
Not only that, but I would like to add that I do not think personally that the few books I have read from project Gutenberg are suitable for educational use... I don't want to slap the project Gutenberg, I like what they do, but the few books I got from their website (mostly French literature) were shock full of spelling mistakes, probably caused by faults in OCR recognition. Maybe schools could run classes where students would have to fix a few chapters during their semester and give back the output of their work to the project (after revision by the teacher, of course).
Re:Well, good. (Score:2)
Machiavelli still sells quite well even though it is public domain (or were you talking of another prince?)
Re:Well, good. (Score:2)
A lot of supposedly intelligent people who should really know better conflate high price with high quality.
Re:Well, good. (Score:2)
Re:Well, good. (Score:2)
We're seeing groups of instructors come together to create more and more textbooks. They're the people most qualified, a subset of them anyhow.
Re:Well, good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Everybody should read this [textbookleague.org] before commenting on whether school text books are any good...
Re:Well, good. (Score:2)
excellent, now I'm absolutely convinced that I must read Feynman's book.
Re:Well, good. (Score:2)
That particular story is from: "What do you care what other people think?"
But yeah, read ANYTHING by Feynman. You'll be a better person afterwards.
Re:Well, good. (Score:2)
It's a short-sighted response, certainly.
They won't catch on because there are still THOUSANDS of universities across the world and each one serves the end-products of hundreds of other, smaller schools. And yet, every school you go into has a different set of books, every teacher uses different books to teach from, and every one has a different idea about which is the best book.
So collating that into a single resource that, what? You expect everyone in the world (or a significant majority of people ANYWHERE) to just pick up and use as the sole source for everything on that particular subject? That totally destroys the value of teachers (whether really or just perceived) and provides a monoculture that cannot possibly suit everyone.
There's a thousand Algebra books because there are a thousand times that number of teachers and all have their own preferences. Throughout school and university, I never viewed a book as anything more than a recommendation and I was forced to buy precisely ONE book (and that because the teacher set exercises by page number, which is nothing to do with the book itself - but it does make you wonder who got the back-hander). Most teachers would take things from multiple books all the time because they would all do different things "better" and even then some children understood one more than the other.
Modern teaching is not only firmly embedded into society, but has ideas about teaching children as "individually" as possible because of things like learning styles, learning disabilities, different entry requirements, etc. It doesn't happen, but blanket-teaching from the same book everywhere would effectively cut out a lot of students that need something extra. And if you have to buy something else to fill that gap, well you have two competing books, or more, and they all have their own way of doing things and we're back to square one where they compete (even in free vs paid).
I can learn just about any skill or mathematic I like by googling for it and finding a tutorial. Almost certainly the best one won't be the first one, or the most popular one, or the simplest one, or any other descriptor you could differentiate them on. You can quite literally "learn C in a month", to the same standard it would be taught in a school, from free resources on the Internet if you put the work in and its written in a way you find interesting. But you can't say that what worked for you works for everyone, or that the particular resource you used is somehow "definitive".
Open textbooks are great things to have but, like all things, and especially all things open, the best driver is competition. One "definitive" resource is worthless. Schools are not going to throw everything away and only use that one document, even if algebra hasn't changed in decades (and it has, and the children have, and the teachers have, and the facilities available have, but that's besides the point). It's not even stubbornness, it's just good sense.
Let every university put up their resources and immediately the global value is increased, the possibility of locating errors is enhanced, reputations and competition mean that the quality will only improve over time. Yes, it's a duplication of effort. But so is every junior programmer who writes their own "memset" routine or whatever. The duplication of effort results in 1.01 versions of the final document, on average. That 0.01 is the crucial bit that makes one document "better" than the other and they will BOTH have that and in a way that you can't combine in one document/explanation/analogy without repeating yourself. And for every extra version, you'll get more value that CANNOT be combined into a single, concise document.
Open textbooks were around when I was in university - there were websites written in HTML1 that linked to various free online courses from major universities. My university lecturers distributed their own material and provided textbook recommendations. With the exception of blatant cashing-in by not
Re:Well, good. (Score:3)
> you expect everyone in the world to just pick up and use as the sole source for everything on a particular topic
You want to tell that to the thiests? :)
It is absolutely *idiotic* to waste human effort duplicating the same thing. *HOW* many fricken textbooks do you _really_ need on any one subject?? More then 10 is just pure greed.
The biggest flaw of capitalism is that it encourages people to waste their lives duplicating goods and promotes the mindless archaic concept of competition instead of rewarding people who cooperate.
Go watch the TED video on choice if you still mistakenly believe more choice is a good thing. SOME choice is the optimal amount.
Re:Well, good. (Score:2)
There's a thousand Algebra books because there are a thousand times that number of teachers and all have their own preferences. Throughout school and university, I never viewed a book as anything more than a recommendation and I was forced to buy precisely ONE book (and that because the teacher set exercises by page number, which is nothing to do with the book itself - but it does make you wonder who got the back-hander).
You were forced to buy one book? That means you were given the responsibility for buying books -- lucky you. I think you'll find that a great many teachers go their entire careers without ever getting a say on the books they use in class.
I think the biggest advantage of this project will turn out to be not the price, as everyone would expect, but the academic rigour in the review process. Given the horror stories floating around about the poor standards of review boards for high school textbooks, I can only imagine the delight of teachers seeing a textbook with a university's seal of approval on it.
Re:Well, good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe you should have talked to a future professor. :)
People might have said the same thing about software. Plenty still do, but free software does quite well these days. Some of it is terrible. Some of it is spectacularly good. The bottom line is enough of it is good enough.
This also ties in with a story last week or so about Florida (I think) not wanting to be bothered with correcting their tests where students were directed to pick the right answer out of four, but in some cases three of them were technically correct. The stuff we pay good money for isn't very good, either.
Re:Well, good. (Score:2)
And was he by chance an author of a history text that was required for the course? I took a chemistry class once where the $200 text was written by six professors, one of whom was teaching the course. On the other end, I also had a math professor who confessed that our 400 page calculus text was a rip-off. He stated that nothing about calculus had changed for decades and a 100 pages would have been more than enough to cover the topic. Unfortunately the choice of text was not up to him.
Re:Well, good. (Score:2)
Yes, he's written a number of books.
Re:Well, good. (Score:2)
What's funny/sad is the inanity of that professor's statement. Is that representative of educators at-large?
I mean, I don't have ANY problem paying for textbooks. People that write and edit those things need to live.
But paying several times the market price for a comparably-sized book, especially when the bulk of that book is regurgitated content functionally identical to what's been produced in the previous 12 editions?
Re:Well, good. (Score:2)
I was talking with a history professor (rljensen) the other day, and he said that free textbook ebooks would never catch on because, quote, "They're all terrible. And if they weren't terrible, they'd be selling them."
Hopefully sites like this will not only prove him wrong, but bring education, world-wide, to the next level.
you should have pointed out that there are plenty of people willing to sell those free books to people who are stupid enough to buy them! (appstores are full of such stuff!!)
Re:Well, good. (Score:1)
When I was in university, I used books written by the professor teaching the course itself. That happened with 3 different professors.
One of them would let us have the .PS file of his book and print it out ourselves (actually, many of us had access to his LaTeX files). A second required us to buy his book or check it out of the library. The third guy was a very senior man, who had already been legally retired but couldn't care less and still taught all sorts of Analysis courses (mostly functional analysis). Many of his books were not in print anymore, but regardless of being in print or not (he still owned the copyright to all of them) and had clear instructions on the university copy shop that anyone at anytime could make a copy of them.
Not all scientific authors are like (Oxford's?) Atkins ("Physical Chemistry") who made a small fortune selling textbooks.
Lost revenue (Score:1)
Here we go again, the pirates are at it again!
Do you know the enormity of the lost revenue for publishing/printing companies when all ancient knowledge would go open source?
With a lot of struggle, the publishers managed to make wikipedia sound untrustworthy, but now a real university is going to review textbooks. It's the end of the industry.
Old News (Score:1)
Comment removed (Score:3)
Re:Who does this really help or benefit? (Score:2)
It helps the people who currently have to pay $150 for an Algebra book. How is this even in question?
Let's look at this for a moment: Say there's 100 people in an Intro Algebra class. That's $15,000. Knock off $1000 for paper and ink. That's enough money to write a decent first draft. Let's say the book is used twice. That's enough to edit it. Everything after that is waste.
Comment removed (Score:2)
Re:Who does this really help or benefit? (Score:2)
150 bucks buys a lot of potatos, if you don't know it you never were shoe stringing it as a student and what about those shitty schools? it's not like they wouldn't need good books on the cheap.
here's some ascii art:
+3 +3 +3 +3 +3 +3 +3 +3 +3 +3
that's 5 years, 4500$. a good chunk of money regardless if you spent 38k in 4 years or not.
the biggest racket is when the professor makes a separate business from his position by hocking books - either for straight up cash, booze or goodwill from someone who arranged him some weed and a bj. remember that when paying 50 bucks for some photocopies or hundred bucks for a book which cost a fiver to print and nobody would be using unless it was the professor who co-wrote it and pushed it to his students - and which consists of poorly translated 20 year old ideas unfit for the modern world.
wtf do we even need books for in an age when the professor could(if he could be bothered to take time from boozing and scheming for grants) just write down the material electronically as the course advances, because he uh, knows the material he is teaching... right?
Comment removed (Score:2)
Re:Who does this really help or benefit? (Score:2)
> Maybe a 3% savings on your total school bill? Who cares.
Creating value equal to 3% of the general education outlay, scaled to the English speaking world, would be kind of a big deal. Particularly when it also creates open courseware that can be freely used by non-enrolled students as a happy externality.
Re:Who does this really help or benefit? (Score:2)
Astroturfing of a book publisher. Obviously.
The missing piece (Score:1)
Re:The missing piece (Score:2)
Because no one could ever review an open textbook.
Re:The missing piece (Score:2)
Re:The missing piece (Score:2)
Again, how much harder is it to peer review an open textbook than a traditional textbook?
Re:The missing piece (Score:2)
It's not -- it just needs to be paid for. Peer review is effectively part of the creative process, so people aren't going to do it for free for a commercial publisher. And people will be particularly unlikely to do it for free if it's going to be rewritten every three years, resulting in the need for re-reviewing.
Of course, money corrupts, and there will be pressure on paid reviewers to make sure they don't sink a project. Free reviewers can be much more forthright.
I don't see the open textbook model replacing truly specialised texts, but for the fundaments of any fields of study, it shows great promise.
Re:The missing piece (Score:2)
And people will be particularly unlikely to do it for free if it's going to be rewritten every three years, resulting in the need for re-reviewing.
While specialized texts may need to be rewritten every three years, I'm not sure that would apply to other works.
Re:The missing piece (Score:2)
While specialized texts may need to be rewritten every three years, I'm not sure that would apply to other works.
That's my point -- non-specialist texts don't need to be rewritten every three years, but at present they are. It seems to be specifically designed to stifle the trade in second-hand texts. This wasn't a problem when I studied in Edinburgh, because the lecturers set their own exercises, and were therefore happy to list both old and new edition section numbers in further reading, but I hear a lot of people complaining that under the US system, you need the correct edition of a textbook to follow a course.
New Submitter?!? (Score:2)
Man, your records don't back far enough for me, it seems. ;-)
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:0)
... not to mention Mayans or Incas ...
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:5, Funny)
I'm reserving judgement of Mayan mathematical prowess until late December.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:4, Informative)
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
They did use base 20, but the way most people count with their hands and feet is in base 1, regardless of whether you use 10 fingers or 20 fingers + toes. You can somewhat reasonably count in binary on your fingers, but only up to 10^10 - 1 = 1023. Adding more states to each finger gets really difficult, and who needs to count so high on their fingers anyway?
According to this page [michielb.nl] each digit was written as some bars, each with value 5, plus some dots, each with value 1. You could imitate this system on your hands--eg. right hand for bars, left for dots. If you were good enough you could do the same with your feet for a total of two base-20 digits, though counting in binary nets you a larger maximum with hands only.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
You can somewhat reasonably count in binary on your fingers, but only up to 2^10 - 1 = 1023.
FTFY
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
The problem with counting on your fingers is that things get messy when you start using fractions.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:3)
Forget mathematical prowess, learn their marketing. Tip #1, if you're going to predict the apocalypse, predict it so far in the future that everyone you're talking to will be dead. Some will still be awed by your power to know such things, but never see you for the fraud you are. Today's crackpots always get that wrong, going around rounding up gullible souls for their commune or whatever because the world is going to end in May. Then June comes and they're revealed to be charlatans.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:1)
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:5, Insightful)
Math textbooks are basically just a listing of basic proofs.
It sounds like you were educated in the 60s - 70s, because that is what textbooks were at the time. No decent math textbook today just lists basic proofs. That would be a reference book, intended for someone who already knew the math and needed to look-up the steps. A good textbook is more explanatory, breaks out the steps, includes historical anecdotes, footnotes, examples of applications, etc. Since the 60s we have learned that drilling proofs into people's mind is not the optimal way to teach math.
Not that education or textbooks today are perfect, but there have been advances.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
> Not that education or textbooks today are perfect, but there have been advances.
An interesting question is whether the rate of advancement would be faster or slower using an open source approach. Personally, I wouldn't bet on the gatekeepers.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:1)
Can't really imagine how that is possible. Math textbooks are basically just a listing of basic proofs. Maybe they found simpler solutions in the meantime, but most of the proofs for basic algebra have been done hundreds of years ago. The only difference is probably the text markup.
You clearly never studied math at university level. Proofs can be written in different ways, some easier some harder to read. The choice of which theorems to include and which to leave out also means a lot. Having good exercises lists is also part of being a good book. Sometimes, some math techniques lose relative importance, because their applications lose relative importance.
Also, in older books it was prohibitively expensive to include many figures or graphs. Equations were also expensive to typeset, so older books have less equations. Even the choice of how to write equations was different (as typesetting a large fraction of many variables was much more expensive than just doing "alpha^2 beta bla bla * / ( \int_{x=0}^{1000} gamma bla bla bla)" on a single line of text.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:4, Interesting)
Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus Phillips Thompson was probably the best of my early calculus books, it is off copyright due to its age, and is on amazon for less than $10 and can be found for free online. $150 a quarter just was not a reasonable expense for the other books.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:3)
This is also in Project Gutenberg. I know. I had it scanned and submitted (though, as usual, lots of other people did the work of getting it proofed and assembled).
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33283 [gutenberg.org]
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:0)
Teaching methodology has changed, thats why students go to lessons. The teacher is reponsable for conveying the content in a modern manner. But the exercices, the theorems, etc... ? Gimme a break. A Calculus book from 1920 is as good as a modern one. It won't have flashy pictures or color photographs but who cares.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
Infinitesimals never really went away -- they may not be formally used in calculus any more, but the practice of treating "dx" as though it were a real number (which works surprisingly well for many types of problems) is a powerful holdover from their era.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:5, Interesting)
It's an absolutely silly statement. Teaching methodology has changed enormously just in the last fifty years. I've had the luxury of comparing 19th century textbooks to present onesâ"it's not something you'd want to be stuck with; they're more like reference texts with a few questions (or even a separate question book) if you're lucky. The didactic power has, quite simply, vastly improved.
That is indeed the kind of book I'd like to be stuck with. The signal to noise ratio is way higher, and it's the job of the teacher to teach. Today's teachers are much like typical mid-level management armed with Powerpoint in that they read a pre-digested presentation for a captive audience, without doing much teaching.
If "didactic power [...] has vastly improved", you'd think that kids today would know maths "vastly" better than old people. Really, now.
That's not what I see - I see tests that have been dumbed down to fit a smaller curriculum, and kids have been dumbed down with them.
It's time for the pendulum to swing back; that we start to demand something from our teachers and children. Like being able to absorb book knowledge even when not presented according to the latest pedagogic fad or directly targeting upcoming tests. Enabling the kids to do so is the teachers' job.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:1)
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
There are, also, some very good reasons for not knowing as much: some material simply isn't relevant to the students' vocation, and the reduction in mental clutter for people in many mentally-intensive professions has made it easier for them to focus on that field itself. (I don't have a citation for this, but I hope it's apparent.)
It is not. It is likely false, and there are good reasons to believe that the more you learn, the greater your ability becomes to learn even more. See "Renaissance man" and "polymath".
The only good reason I can see for removing the study of less relevant fields is if that time is used to study more relevant fields.
Thus the removal of Greek and Latin from the standard curriculum, as you said, not because it would "clutter up" the students' heads, but because that time could be better spent learning other studies.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
Being the sort of compulsive student of many fields in question, I would honestly argue that there are mixed benefits. Learning ability is improved because you've been exposed to more fundamental concepts (and are better at seeing new angles, because that's a skill you've developed), but actually turning around and applying that knowledge takes more practice. The associative nature of human memory means that when you're trying to recall something under pressure, you have a higher tendency to stumble onto spurious knowledge—you remember a lot of things from other fields and areas that get in the way. In addition, having a breadth of knowledge can actually be a source of frustration when studying depth in a very narrow area, as the lack of variety in the topics being discussed becomes frustrating; behold, the misery of the student with the general degree who can't decide what he or she wants to do with his or her life.
(And to any who would make cynical remarks along the lines of "maybe you're just stupid," I don't think you're doing cognitive psychology any benefits by implying that there is some group of superhuman with infinite retentive ability that deserves exclusive consideration.)
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:3)
The difference is that kids today are expected to know more in general than back then.
This is obviously not true. The books get less and less content (see GGP). Things that were taught before are now dropped, because (in part) of "no child left behind" and the focus on passing tests, not passing knowledge.
When did Charlemagne live? What's the capital of New Zealand? What's a cantilever bridge?
Tell me with a straight face that today's children know these things.
You're begging the question here. Kids today _do_ know more math than they did when you were a kid and when your parents were a kids. It's much more likely that they've taken calculus and even passed a third year of math in high school.
Calculus was mandatory and started in junior high back when I went to school. By ninth grade elective maths or first year high school, you were into derivates and integrals.
What's more just compare what they're using it on compared with what was used 50 years ago.
Yes, let's. They rely on expert systems to do the maths for them, served in task-specific packages.
They wouldn't even be able to do a simple trig calculation to figure out how long a ramp must be to not exceed a certain grade, or how much grain or how long a fence they need or for a non-rectangular lot. They rely on Home Depot to figure it out for them. And the clerks there depend on specialized calculating tools which were written by your mom and dad.
Hell, I can't even get the correct change back when a cash register is broken. And they run to Google when faced with horrible problems like "cook at 250 C" on a stove with F temperatures, because doing 1.8 x + 32 is beyond them.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
Hell, I can't even get the correct change back when a cash register is broken. And they run to Google when faced with horrible problems like "cook at 250 C" on a stove with F temperatures, because doing 1.8 x + 32 is beyond them.
While I'll admit, the inability for people to do the quick mental arithmetic required to give correct change quickly is astonishing to me, honestly, your second gripe seems a little ridiculous. Is that scenario truly something that happens often enough in a person's life that it should be committed to memory?
I mean, I'm all for knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but I'm not going to start shitting on people because they don't remember something that they were taught who knows how many years ago if they basically never use it in their daily lives. Most people only use basic algebra and geometry from day to day. Knowledge of higher mathematics (and unnecessary conversions) to them is about as useful as a shepherd having an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the Roman Empire. If I've been on a boat 3 times in my entire life, do I need to remember the difference between a nautical mile and a terrestrial one? Or how to convert knots to mph/kph?
Would we have committed as much to memory ourselves in our scholastic careers if there had been an omnipresent internet with which to go looking for the answer at a moment's notice? I doubt it. It's just personal bias on our part, and I admit, I sometimes do it, too, when something that I always considered "common knowledge" is proven not to be so common in younger people I interact with, but such is the nature of common knowledge, it's constantly evolving. I remember a late 19th-century "basic" math test someone emailed me, it was loaded with agricultural conversions and surveying calculations...shit that virtually no one uses on a regular basis anymore. If we could travel back in time, they'd probably think we were a bunch of fucking morons, too, when we couldn't just spit out the answer to something they would consider trivial.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
And they run to Google when faced with horrible problems like "cook at 250 C" on a stove with F temperatures, because doing 1.8 x + 32 is beyond them.
Hey, I resent that remark. I can handle the arithmetic, but I just don't have any reason to remember the conversion, because it's Not That Important. I spend far more time converting between different bases than different measurement systems.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:1)
"You're begging the question here.
No, he's not. You should have had a better English textbook in your youth.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:1)
they're more like reference texts with a few questions (or even a separate question book) if you're lucky. The didactic power has, quite simply, vastly improved.
But that is excellent for a book that accompanies a lecture! And all books I have actually *used* during my academic career were composed in this way - the "pedagogical" texts (Tipler's "physics"...) waste countless pages on introductions, examples, essays and whatnot, while I can actually find what I am looking for in the, e.g., Bergmann-Schäger or Landau-Lifshitz class of textbooks.
Sadly, this type of book has become rather rare. Now everything tries to be completely self-contained, as if you could learn physics out of a book. In my opinion, this is very much misguided, and counterproductive.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
Teaching methodology has changed enormously just in the last fifty years.
No doubt. But has the actual education of average students in these subjects gotten better, or worse? (I say "average" students because the best students will always find a way to learn almost no matter what, and the worst students will find a way NOT to learn no matter what.)
I've had the luxury of comparing 19th century textbooks to present onesâ"it's not something you'd want to be stuck with; they're more like reference texts with a few questions (or even a separate question book) if you're lucky.
Why is that a bad thing? Sounds to me like this would mostly be a problem for the laziest teachers who basically delegate their entire job to the textbook. The textbook is supposed to be a reference, not the entire class.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:4, Insightful)
Fair enough, so we get a new edition of a textbook every 50 years. Let's be generous, and say every 10. Is that what happens now? No, it isn't. When I was in college not THAT long ago, using last year's edition was generally frowned upon but not quite forbidden. Not because the meat of the course was different, but because things like page numbers might be different, problems might be different, et cetera. Now, does that speak to a massive increase in didactic power, or precisely what you, the publisher, would do if you wanted to force students to buy new books instead of used ones?
A college education is getting very expensive. This is okay, because a college education is enormously valuable. Nevertheless, we are entirely right to want to crush waste out of a very expensive system. I learned from my expensive econ textbooks that this is going to happen whether you like it or not because rich profits attract competition, and competition drives prices down. Switching around the pages, updating the examples in ways that doesn't change the content meaningfully, and changing the practice problems around is simply an artificial price support. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:3)
Switching around the pages, updating the examples in ways that doesn't change the content meaningfully, and changing the practice problems around is simply an artificial price support. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Hence why some colleges are just building the cost of the eTextbooks into the tuition from the outset...you don't even get a choice anymore. Someone's palms are getting greased for that arrangement, I'm sure; like any other arm of the MAFIAA, they're not going to let an antiquated business model get in their way of increasing profits.
At least, that's how things are here in the U.S., based on the comments of extended family members currently in college. Textbooks were always a fucking racket, we all know that, but it's getting more and more ridiculous year after year. eTextbooks are great for the publisher...no more used market to compete with, no more kids scraping by using a library copy of their text, and since they're starting to add it in to tuition, they have a guaranteed sale with every admission.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
A real racket is when your prof requires you to buy his textbook, which is not published and is 135 pages of (double sided) photocopied paper for $280 in 1996 dollars. I imagine now he'd charge $100 more now and e-publish it. I couldn't sell it back, either. At least that was the worst case - I had about 3 other self-published classes, but most were in the $30-40 range.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
I'd be OK with electronic texts as long as I get to keep a copy forever and it's in a format that guarantees it's not just an encrypted useless blob at some point in the future. Obviously, that's not how the publishers want to do it. One of the reasons I'm where I am today is because my aunts and uncles left old college textbooks at my grandparents' house. I read them and was inspired to go learn. For the same reason, I never sold back a single college textbook.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
Textbooks should be reference texts (Score:2)
That's exactly what a textbook should be. Now, we have about 1/2 a page of actual useful information per 10-20 pages of chapter. A student can actually carry around a reference text. Textbooks today are mostly just question books with no teaching value. I can use Infinite Math to generate questions. What students need is a book that actually helps explain things.
Instead, because the textbooks are useless, they have to rely solely on notes.
Re:Textbooks should be reference texts (Score:2)
Re:Textbooks should be reference texts (Score:2)
A reference text by definition doesn't "help" explain things; it describes them and leaves it up to the student to parse the content. My experience with my CS, math, and biology textbooks has been that they spend an absolute ton of time trying to explain the concepts in them as thoroughly as possible, using the most accessible analogies and descriptions they can. They're much easier to digest than a pure description would be—perhaps you just got the bad pick from the barrel if your books are just questions?
My most recent textbook experience was for an anatomy and physiology course I recently did. I felt it fell completely between the two stools -- it tried to be both a reference text, but attempted to teach, coursebook like.
The reason this didn't work is that if something is designed to be dipped in and out of, you're left making a lot of assumptions about existing knowledge. Most reference texts assume too much knowledge, making them thick and imprenetrable, but this one went out of it's way to explain various bits as pieces, leading it to be long and slow. Worse, there was often too much information, too much detail. Nothing was abstracted to a suitable level. For example, blood-flow through the heart was shown on an anatomically correct diagram -- but that meant that everything was too close together. In order to work out what was going on, I had to devise my own functional diagram....
Re:Textbooks should be reference texts (Score:2)
Re:The brilliance of modern teaching (Score:2)
Re:The brilliance of modern teaching (Score:2)
Re:The brilliance of modern teaching (Score:2)
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:3)
Even more interestingly the Greek were comparatively lousy at math. Good at geometry, tho. The Romans had a similar problem. Their number system did stink.
Mathematics was held back quite a bit for quite a long time by religion. When institutionalized superstition abhors the concept of void (zero), you have a serious drawback.
(This is why 1BC is followed by 1AD, by the way.)
Similar for negative numbers, and more recently, infinity and imaginary numbers. The latter two still aren't taught below adult education levels in some particularly superstitious countries.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:3)
Mathematics was held back quite a bit for quite a long time by religion.
That's not entirely true:
- Guys like Pythagoras (c 500 BCE) and Aristotle (c 400 BCE) were living in a polytheistic society where religion was not really the force that it became under Christianity. Everyone seems to have paid at least lip service to worshipping the official state gods, but it was nothing like an environment where if you didn't profess a particular faith you were killed. Roman documents were very clear that they were generally fine with people believing whatever they wanted unless that belief encouraged them to revolt against Rome (which Nero thought the Christians were doing). And the BC / AD split (now BCE / CE, of course) obviously wasn't something that happened until Christianity became fairly well established.
- The Abbasid Caliphate actively encouraged and funded the study of mathematics and science from about 750 CE to 1250 CE, in what has been termed the Islamic Golden Age. The difference between the math that was being used by the Romans and the math that was available for Isaac Newton to draw on are largely the result of Arabic mathematicians (who in turn drew from mathematicians in India) - they had codified writing of numbers including fractions and decimals, created algebra and trigonometry, and vastly improved understanding of irrational numbers.
- The aforementioned Isaac Newton was incredibly religious, writing a great deal about alchemy and metaphysics. Same with Renee Descartes: his magnum opus was a philosophical proof (in his mind at least) that God exists.
If you mean that mathematics was held back in Europe in the Middle Ages due to dogmatic Christianity, then you'd be somewhat right, but that's different from all religion holding back all mathematics.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
Mathematics was held back quite a bit for quite a long time by religion. When institutionalized superstition abhors the concept of void (zero), you have a serious drawback. (This is why 1BC is followed by 1AD, by the way.)
Oooh! Religion bashing! How unique and original.
The Greek philosophers spent a heck of a long time asking themselves whether something could be nothing. There is a fundamental difficulty, therefore, in naming something as "0". The first year of the Julian calendar existed. How can you call it nothing? Look at very young babies. Do we call them "zero-year olds"? No, we call them 4-week olds, three month olds etc, because we have to call them something. And how many brothers do I have? I have three. How many mothers? I only have one. How many dogs? I don't have any. You can't say "I have zero." You don't say "I have zero." Zero is not, and never has been, a genuine "number" to us psychologically. Of course it took a long time for people to accept it.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
How many dogs? I don't have any. You can't say "I have zero." You don't say "I have zero."
I would argue that some would say that, especially if used to filling out forms. Quite a few more would say "I have none" or just "none".
Zero is not, and never has been, a genuine "number" to us psychologically.
Most numbers aren't natural to us psychologically. You are unlikely to have a built-in psychological concept of "thirteen".
If anything, the lack of something is very fundamental to our existence. It's because we have zero meat we go hunt.
Recommended reading: "The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero" by Robert Kaplan.
And this shorter one: http://www.etymonline.com/zero.php [etymonline.com]
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
If anything, the lack of something is very fundamental to our existence. It's because we have zero meat we go hunt.
And yet you would not say that if I hadn't prompted you to.
Zero was a technology that was not properly understood, so people didn't use it. That's perfectly natural. There are plenty of examples of this. Don't drop it at the door of religion.
(And for the record, no, I don't believe in God/a god/gods/divine enlightenment/reincarnation/life after death. I just believe that most religion bashing is ignorant and unjustified.)
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
Do I have to remind you that there was legislation that said that PI = 3?
I really hate that the media gives those idiots airtime in order to provide "fair and balanced reporting".
But I do support the abolishment of 0 as a concept. It makes coding so much simpler. Also the letter "c" is not necessary. We kan do without it.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
But I do support the abolishment of 0 as a concept. It makes coding so much simpler.
Hear hear! I'm sick and tired of all these "null reference exceptions" and "segmentation faults" my programs keep throwing. Each time I debug them I find a 0. If 0 didn't exist, neither would my problems!
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
)Nowhere on that page does it mention religion as why there is no year 0. The most likely explanation is also the most logical: the year before the birth of Christ is 1BC, and the year after the birth of Christ is 1AD. There wouldn't be a year 0 because you wouldn't have an entire year in between "before the birth of Christ" and "after the birth of Christ", since the birth of Christ probably didn't take a year.
I assure you, the year he was born in took a full year.
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
Re:... join the Math Club (Score:2)
The Japanese also had geometry that exceeded their mathematics. [caltech.edu]
Re:Open textbooks = socialism (Score:1)
Re:Open textbooks = socialism (Score:2)
GPP is unintentionally correct: he's assigning the value "socialism" to "open textbooks," where no such equality previously existed.