
California State Senator Proposes Funding Open-Source Textbooks - llambda
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/01/05/1615210/california-state-senator-proposes-funding-open-source-textbooks?utm_source=slashdot&utm_medium=twitter
======
breckinloggins
I think the whole CONCEPT of a "textbook" needs to change:

1\. It should be open-source or available on your nearest "App Store" for a
REASONABLE price

2\. It should be interactive. If I have a history textbook describing a
battle, I want to be able to watch the battle unfold (even if it's just a
diagram). If I am reading a chemistry textbook, let me play with the molecule.
When I need to learn about the D3 group in Abstract Algebra, show me a
triangle rotating and flipping as the group operations fade in and then drop
to the bottom in a chain illustrating a composition. Let me swipe over to the
Cayley table and touch a composition cell and watch the triangle dance.
Whatever.

3\. Textbooks should share a common ontology that can be extended for each
book. But if I have two textbooks on my device and each has registered its
ontology, I should then be able to cross reference concepts from one book to
the other, or to appropriate entries in Wikipedia, for example.

4\. All Chapters, headings, subheadings, and definitions should link to
global, school, and class-level discussion forums about the topic where
everyone can ask questions and have good answers upvoted in a stackexchange-
like manner. These discussion nodes should be linked to the ontology, rather
than the brand of book. That way ANY textbook with a section on "Limit Points
in Rn" or "The Three Branches of US Government" would link to the same
discussion node.

5\. When appropriate, texts should be constantly updated, classes should
always use the "latest stable version", and that update should be free after
initial purchase (like an App).

~~~
equark
I think you're missing the fact that textbooks are written by people. They
don't magically appear. Writing a good textbook requires the passion of a
single expert author, who must dedicate years of his or her life to write it.
There are very few shortcuts. And crowd-sourcing is definitely not one of
them.

A more innovative approach, I think, would be for the government to buy out
leading textbooks at a premium and after holding an auction to determine the
fair price. This gives you the best of both worlds -- rewards for individuals'
efforts but the ability to use the published material in an unrestricted way
in the future. Plus you avoid the loss associated with monopoly rights granted
via copyright and wasted duplicative textbook efforts.

This ideas has been proposed more broadly for patents by Prof. Michael Kremer
of Harvard. Its logic is pretty compelling:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/2000/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/2000/01/the_motherinlaw_of_invention.html)

~~~
niels_olson
My kids are in California. I assure you, the textbooks are reference standard
awful. People magazine is more compelling.

I am entirely certain the average parent of a kid in our school would be able
to turn out better material, to say nothing of all the professors and leading
experts in California who would love to contribute directly to their kids'
education.

The question in my mind is how to construct this. The law seems like a last
resort. Maybe some YCers can work on this cracking this nut.

~~~
motters
WikiTextbook. Adopt the Scholarpedia model where there is curation of
particular topics. Put it under a Creative Commons license and make it easy to
download.

------
heydenberk
In some Philadelphia schools, students share textbooks -- 2, 3, or even 4 kids
to a book -- and homework can't be assigned out of the book because there
aren't enough books for kids to take home -- god forbid they lose another! It
creates a lot of extra work for teachers, who have to make extra photocopies
of readings and assignments. And it kills me, because it's an artificial
scarcity. Instead of $5 to $10 per book, the cost of its materials and
manufacturing, schools pay upwards of $100 a book, because of the enormous
premiums paid to the content creators and publishers. For the cash-strapped
Philadelphia schools that is an excessive burden. You can replace
"Philadelphia" here with another rust belt city or even, say, a city in
California or Nevada, but the story remains the same. And it kills me even
more, because there are academics, experts and writers the world over who'd
love nothing more than to freely provide high-quality educational content to
students. There is no better evidence of this than the hard work done by
Wikipedians, but there is plenty evidence besides. Sorry for the rant, but I
think it's important to recognize what an utterly simple and necessary step
the open-sourcing of textbooks and curriculum is. Good for State Senator
Steinberg, and although I'm sorry it's just for colleges and that the K-12
initiative failed, I hope that this program passes, it is successful, and its
success forces districts all over the country -- cash-strapped or otherwise --
to consider open-source textbooks. They'll switch because they're cheaper and
stay because they're better.

~~~
rflrob
This seems like a failure on the part of the publishers to collect all the
money they could. There are large fixed costs to produce the first textbook,
but relatively low marginal costs to produce the next million. If the
publishers had some sort of "budget-impacted schools" program, under which
schools that would otherwise share textbooks among students could buy
textbooks at a relatively small markup over marginal cost (as opposed to the
full amortized total cost), then they'd still be making more, and the schools
would get the benefit of the use of the textbooks.

~~~
robrenaud
Price discrimination is hard. I've heard of Americans picking up crappily
bound but reasonable priced big name texts, like Norvig's AI book, or CLRS's
algo book produced for India.

276 RS < $6 US [http://www.dealsandcoupons.in/resources/3986-discount-
book-I...](http://www.dealsandcoupons.in/resources/3986-discount-book-
Introduction.aspx)

The publishers don't want to risk shaking up big profits to sell near cost to
the low end. If you sell cheaply to the poor schools, what prevents the poor
schools from reselling the books to the rich schools 20 miles away?

~~~
DanBC
A big green stamp on the side (closed pages) of the book saying "BUDGET BOOK
PROGRAMME"?

------
jonhohle
This seems so obvious that it's painful to think that it hasn't already been
done.

It would be awesome to see a non-profit started which provided a repository
for textbook content, a platform for mixing and matching content to meet the
curriculum of a particular district, and a toolchain to produce digital copies
of the books in the format used by the district - all open source and released
under broadly permissive licenses.

If even a handful of school districts funded a project like this instead of
purchasing moore textbooks, I would imagine this could be sustainable.

~~~
ivan_ah
> repository for textbook content, > a platform for mixing and matching >
> content to meet the curriculum

This would be awesome indeed, but there are some problems. From the things
that i have seen so far, (ex: cnx.org), the content is predominantly of low
quality. Simply put, ask the average person to explain something to you and
he/she won't do a very good job. The other thing is that modularization
completely brakes the flow of narration, and narration is a big thing to keep
the reader engaged (story telling instinct).

In my work, I try to have two kinds of "nodes" -- one is generic lesson node
where the explanation of some concept happens and the other are linker nodes
where narration happens. Despite being a single author, and using space-age
tools (dokuwiki with the include plugin;), I still find it hard to make things
modular and easily composable.

I would venture to say that a small number of authors would be better at
writing a book rather than a whole collective.

For corrections/feedback/exercises... BRING ON THE CROWD!

~~~
jonhohle
Agreed. I think it would even make sense to hire accomplished authors,
editors, and academics for the narrative portions of chapters/lessons. It
would likely make sense to have fairly coarse units which would be the
responsibility of a particular author.

I skimmed through some of the CK12 content. While some of it might be good (I
am not qualified to determine whether or not the content is high quality or
affective) - the presentation is really poor. In addition to authors, I think
you need designers who will present the information in an attractive and
engaging way.

~~~
tlow
Hi there. My name is Doug, I work at ck12.

If you're interested in learning more, contributing, or giving feedback please
email me at doug@ck12.org I'd love to hear from you (or anyone else). Thanks.

------
ivan_ah
I missed the "Funding" details.... How will the textbook writers get paid?

One-up contract? Write me a book for $100k (one year's worth of work) and keep
it updated every year for $20k with typo fixes and new exercises?

This would create the right incentives, since 100k is probably more than any
textbook publisher will give you -- even if you make it big, and your book is
used in many universities.

------
sschronk
I started working on a Computer Science textbook about a year ago.

I found out that people were not interested in using it.

This is what I had made so far:

<http://opentextbook.info/>

Interestingly enough, I posted this info on Slashdot and it was removed almost
right away.

~~~
NinetyNine
The domain is non-descriptive, and .info is typically associated with spam. It
also looks like you're in a flux state of completion, with not a lot of
detail. I'd suggest limited your scope and making a smaller, but more polished
product, before trying to attract more contributors.

~~~
sschronk
I picked this domain because I had hoped that when this book was complete, we
could work on another. At the time I thought that it would be better if it was
generic.

I started working on it but realized that I might put in hundreds of hours of
work only to have nobody use it at all.

------
dreamdu5t
The solution is stop enforcing this dogma of requiring a specific book for
subjects which clearly do not require the latest annual edition of a specific
textbook. Teachers would instead recommend books they feel are good to use to
pass their course. Without the exclusive book contracts, publishers couldn't
easily and blatantly maintain a cartel on textbooks.

The basic economics of why school textbooks are so expensive is dead simple:
The teachers and the schools grant publishers a cartel by forcing kids to
purchase their specific new editions every year. _Why_ anybody is suprised
that prices are so high is beyond me.

~~~
ams6110
_Teachers would instead recommend books they feel are good to use to pass
their course_

They do this now. They recommend (require in fact) their OWN books.

~~~
dreamdu5t
Teachers do not do this now. They have a specific book or set of books that
almost all of the time is required to take the class.

The problem is it's a requirement and they often test directly from the book
because it removes effort from teaching to the test.

------
lukejduncan
Wait, What? Anyone know what this might mean?

FTA: "In some ways these guys are looking outdated. File-sharing as a means to
pirate content is becoming yesterday's technology,"

~~~
Raphael
Obviously, the sophisticated pirates of today use telepathy now and thus have
no need for files.

------
nyellin
Israeli universities don't usually use textbooks, partly because Israelis go
to university after their mandatory army service. Some students are already
married with kids and can't afford to buy textbooks. Every course has an
official textbook, which the school has copies of.

The system works because (at least at my university) all lectures and
recitations videos are available online. Good luck doing that in K-12.

------
maratd
New Jersey resident proposes California State Senator stay out of education
and focus on reducing his state's budget deficit.

Open-Source Textbooks ARE a good idea. However, just like Wikipedia didn't
need the government to get started ... this gem doesn't require the government
either. It'll happen once eBooks become more prevalent and there is nothing
the government should do to help or stop it from happening.

~~~
learc83
Normally I'd agree with you, but since the government is by far the largest
purchaser of text books...

The state of California spends millions on buying text books, think of all the
money they'd save if they paid to develop open source text books instead.

~~~
wmf
This can probably be fixed with a little spin, like "California schools band
together to save taxpayers money by writing their own textbooks".

------
justindocanto
Wouldn't this essentially just be WikiPedia? Granted, text Books have more of
a narrative.

------
j45
Standardized textbooks for standardized curriculum. What a novel idea. :)

------
gringomorcego
The state of textbooks is so fucking sad. I still don't get how Bill Gates or
another richy-rich hasn't realized how fucking great it would be to pay 100k
to an awesome professor for writing a textbook and publishing it under a CC
license. If you did that with all subjects, and paid for translations, and
made it all digital, it would cost next to nothing in the large scheme and be
more beneficial to humanity than the cure to polio or malaria or heck even
cancer. It would have an exponentially awesome effect.

Accelerating the rate at which humanity is educated is fundamentally more
important than anything going on today, and it's always pushed back because
the generation that's currently being educated doesn't have a fucking say in
the matter.

Someone should take some of their money out of their hedge fund and drop it on
this shit pronto.

~~~
Lagged2Death
I've felt the same way, but it's worth pointing out that this would be
possible with low-tech, uncomplicated paper books.

A large school district could surely save a bundle, and improve the quality of
its education besides, by paying a qualified individual to write a textbook
just for them, then having it printed just for them. And they could give away
the text to other interested districts if they wanted, saving the other
districts even more money.

This has been true for decades. No internet, no computers or e-readers, and no
fancy newfangled CC licenses would be required for such a plan.

Yet it mostly has not happened.

So there must be a reason. This infamous story by Richard Feynman suggests
that it's a matter of an entrenched culture of laziness, lobbying, bribery,
and in effect regulatory capture:

<http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm>

