Univ. of Minnesota Compiles Database of Peer-Reviewed, Open-Access Textbooks 54
First time accepted submitter BigVig209 writes "Univ. of MN is cataloging open-access textbooks and enticing faculty to review the texts by offering $500 per review. From the article: 'The project is meant to address two faculty critiques of open-source texts: they are hard to locate and they are of indeterminate quality. By building up a peer-reviewed collection of textbooks, available to instructors anywhere, Minnesota officials hope to provide some of the same quality control that historically has come from publishers of traditional textbooks.'"
Re:I want some of that action. (Score:4, Informative)
You signed a form saying that you would actually review and give criticism.
Demonstrate you deserve the $500 and that you read the book or be arrested for attempted fraud.
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BMO
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"Welcome to America!"
So conspiracy to fraud and fraud are not crimes outside of America? Your sneering remark, you may want to look at it again.
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BMO
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Given what big banks and other large businesses have gotten away with in the US, it might be more accurate to say that conspiracy to fraud and fraud are not crimes /inside/ of America.
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Well, if you're going to put it that way, then yeah, I'll agree with you, with the addendum "only little people get caught"
http://bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-12/dimon-vows-fight-moynihan-lost-over-claims-from-mortgages.html [bloomberg.com]
What my reaction was:
We are arguing over mouldy bread and bad wine just before the French Revolution.
A friend's reaction was:
In short: contempt for rule of law and fair dealing is embedded like rebar in concrete with BigBanks. It's institutionalized sociopathy, starting at the very top. I
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It depends: If you defraud big businesses, rich people, or government, you're in trouble. If you defraud people with no power inside big business or government, then you can get a cabinet post [wikipedia.org].
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How is saying it sucked not both a review and a criticism?
it's $500 - fees (Score:2)
bank fee -10
tax at 6% -30
processing fee -10
admin fee -100
pay us to work fee -200
30% cut fee -150
AUX fee -20
500 - 500 = 0 have a nice day
At risk proposal (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:At risk proposal (Score:5, Insightful)
Duh, how do you think people would be employeed or government would get taxes if corporates did not have profits?
This may come as a shock to you, but there are many possible economic-political systems, of which rapacious corporatist plutocracy is only one.
Re:At risk proposal (Score:5, Insightful)
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We don't have to imagine an answer to that: Look at the early northern United States, where lots of the economic activity was based around independent farmers and craftsmen.
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I don't have mod points, but someone needs to mod this up. The overratted mod is pattently unfair.
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You do realize the University of Minnesota is a public (i.e. government funded) institution, so in answer to your post: actually, we can expect implicit government sponsorship of open source textbooks right now, since that is, you know, exactly what is happening.
And it isn't a tiny university either: it's one of the biggest in the US (fourth largest, actually) and is moderately well respected, for a public university, so this isn't some fly-by-night desperate-to-save money kind of place (not any more so th
What about schools? (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be good to have a set of peer reviewed books that covers education all the way up to 16 years old. Maths, languages, etc. This way no child will have to pay for books ever again. Children can get a Nook loaded with every book they will ever need the day they start school, so advanced students are able read ahead. A developing country could then simply localise a selection to create its own curriculum. Those deciding which modules to do can read the books they will be studying for that subject before choosing. Children moving country can download the new set in advance and familiarise themselves so they don't start their new school at a disadvantage.
So many countries are bitching about ThePirateBay which is an international repository of arts and culture, but can't be bothered to create an international repository of where people can learn basic reading, writing and math skills.
Phillip.
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And where does the money to create, update and maintain these books come from? I think that's the point, we can have free textbooks and could have had them for the cost of printing, but somebody ultimately needs to pay for their creation, evaluation and the various other costs involved.
I'd love to have free things too, but some things are way too time intensive to expect people to create for free. This isn't software, it's substantially harder to crowd source it than it is software and a lot harder to decid
Re:What about schools? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Govt, and inturn your taxes? Creating, updating, and maintaining text books does not cost as much as the publishers want you to believe. A small organization, that can be tasked to receive feedback from teachers and parents, and can update textbooks is pretty good. Hell, make it a prestigious organization, run by top teachers (not administrators, the ones that actually teach), and offer special perks to these members, and you dont even spend much on it.
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How is writing a grade school maths textbook harder than writing the linux kernel?
the latter is massively time intensive yet people have done it for free already.
people can and have written maths books and released them for free:
http://www.opensourcemath.org/books/
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I teach and there's a fair amount of material that's provided in a sort of creative commons way because we don't have a huge amount of money to spend on materials. Basically a many hands makes a light load deal. But a text book is quite a bit different from a single lesson plan or even a curriculum. It requires a lot more focused attention, which isn't something that crowd sourcing is generally good at.
Re:What about schools? (Score:4, Interesting)
From the government, which currently pays textbook publishers to make them.
Have University math departments make math texts for grade sxhools. University history departments can make history texts, etc.
The projects could be cooperative among the state governments. And since there would be no profit motive to keep obsolescing old texts you wouldn't have so much churn or so many errors.
Re:What about schools? (Score:5, Informative)
This is a great idea, but may be difficult to put into practice. Here in California, then-gov. Schwarzenegger tried to do essentially what you're describing with the Free Digital Textbook Initiative [bbc.co.uk]. I was involved in that as an author. AFAICT, the FDTI was a complete failure. State senator Darrell Steinberg is trying to do something similar, but I don't know if it will work any better this time around: [1] [ca.gov], [2] [sacbee.com]. I think there are a number of fundamental problems. One is that textbook selection in K-12 education in the US tends to be extremely bureaucratic and top-down, and it's virtually impossible to change that overnight, as Schwarzenegger tried to do. It's completely different from higher education, where the assumption is that professors can choose whatever text they like as a matter of academic freedom. My experience is with writing free physics textbooks. They're written for college students, but have also been adopted by a bunch of high schools. However, almost all of the high school adoptions have been from private schools, mainly Catholic schools.
There is also a huge financial incentive for the non-free textbook publishers to maintain their positions in the market. The really enthusiastic supporters were hardware manufacturers. For them it looked like a huge opportunity, because they thought they could sell a ton of computers to schools in order to give students access to the electronic books.
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I think there are a number of fundamental problems. One is that textbook selection in K-12 education in the US tends to be extremely bureaucratic and top-down
So there's one fundamental problem. Government corruption.
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Well, if I were running a school, text-book costs would be the last place I'd try to be reducing costs. The risk of giving kids inferior text-books to save a few thousand dollars doesn't really make sense from a high-level perspective.
The real money is empowering educators to use their time more effectively. This means increasing classroom sizes without sacrificing quality of education. An overlooked part of this problem is successfully handling disruptive kids while at the same time challenging the on
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By "corruption," I assume you mean something like kickbacks to the textbook publishers. Do you have any evidence to back up this claim? Or if you mean something much broader than that, then I think your indiscriminate use of the term "corruption" is an unfortunate example of the low
discussed last month on slashdot (Score:2)
There was a story about this posted here in April:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/04/24/0240223/university-of-minnesota-launches-review-project-for-open-textbooks [slashdot.org]
Textbooks are Buggy Whips (Score:3)
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My last English teacher was nice enough to just scan the relevant chapter and post it (securely) online, for legitimately educational purposes.
This is in contrast with the music teacher from the same school, who specifically instructed the school library to wait 2 weeks into the semester before allowing students to borrow the relevant class textbook, in order to force us to buy the book.
"same quality control"?!? (Score:5, Interesting)
I hope the open access books don't have the same quality control as from traditional publishers. My daughter's in high school and has some pretty atrocious text books. In her AP history class, the teacher dislikes the book so much (for organizational and content reasons) that she has supplied alternative materials as much as possible, mostly at her own expense. She still has to "teach the book" to meet state requirements, but that doesn't mean the text is beyond reproach (and perhaps just the opposite, given the politicized lobby-driven nature of text book selection these days; I live in Texas so it's a bit of a sore point with me).
I think the Wikipedia-style crowd-sourced approach holds tremendous promise, especially if there is an active feedback mechanism where kids and parents can be involved as well as educators. The power of many, many people each providing a little bit of the work is staggering and inspiring. As long as the publishing lobby doesn't buy any protective legislation, this is an experiment I'm looking forward to.
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" I think the Wikipedia-style crowd-sourced approach holds tremendous promise, especially if there is an active feedback mechanism where kids and parents can be involved as well as educators. The power of many, many people each providing a little bit of the work is staggering and inspiring."
Wikipedia isn't crowd-sourced like you say, with lots of people contributing a little. Instead, there are an exceedingly small number of smart people doing just about all the hard work, and the "crowd" at large does no
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... I live in Texas....
Well there's your problem.
Seriously, I don't know if the groundwater is heavily contaminated there or what the deal is, but far too much stupidity (especially concerning textbooks) seems to be centering around Texas.
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There are worse states as far as fundamentalism is concerned, but Texas has both a very large population and a very large collective ego, which combined give it the weight and the will to push its conservative views into textbook standards. I live in Austin, though, which doesn't really fit in with the rest of the state.
Open and Viable educational resources (Score:2)
Acceptance of textbooks - verification of quality and being usable in courses - is a big hurdle. It's the equalivent to the problems open access journals are currently striving to overcome - building a reputation takes time, and without it viability in education/academia is a difficult proposition. Hopefully this is a useful way to start building momentum - I think it would be an excellent way to get more educational value for the dollar.
If the idea can gain broader acceptance, there are a number of inter
Open source textbooks get lots of resistance (Score:1)
I got into academia after tinkering with open source applications as a teenagers since the early 90s. Whenever I publish content, it has always been an obvious thing for me to also publish the source code for it. I have many colleagues that publish lecture notes online in PDF and PS form for their students to download. For some reason publishing the underlying LaTeX code never crosses their mind and when asked to do it they usually refuse.
To me the lack of source code level access to written works is the bi
good resource (Score:2)
Well, at least they will produce an index. (Score:2)
From what I've seen that $500 will go to the profs, who will give a TA a $100 stipend to submit between 1 and 5 corrections and a review of the quality of the material. The TA will look for misuse of "its" and "it's", and submit one correction per week for a semester, in hopes of getting a bit more than $100, then find a generic review of the text that someone else has done (in another school possibly, or at least from another prof) and wordsmith the review to submit their own review.
Profs really don't have