
The Muddle Machine: Confessions of a Textbook Editor (2004) - apsec112
https://web.archive.org/web/20100107152825/https://www.edutopia.org/textbook-publishing-controversy#
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EvanAnderson
I immediately thought about Richard Feynman's account of being part of the
textbook selection committee in California:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20020617183211/http://www.textbo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20020617183211/http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm)

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ivan_ah
Yeah me too. "Judging Books by Their Covers" = story about how committees
sometimes select book that haven't even been written yet (just based on the
book cover images)!

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jimhefferon
This article, or perhaps an update of it, is still up.
[https://www.edutopia.org/textbook-publishing-
controversy](https://www.edutopia.org/textbook-publishing-controversy)

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benjaminjosephw
I love it when the problem solving approaches found in software engineering
are applied to other domains. The suggestions at the end are basically UNIX
principles applied to education.

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groovy2shoes
I've found the reverse to be similarly gratifying: when some knowledge from
another domain turns out to be applicable to some software engineering
problem.

Oftentimes when this has happened for me, it's some knowledge that I'd
absorbed in a Wikipedia rabbit hole (or some such) and thought was trivia that
would be useless to me. Then suddenly I noticed some sort of congruence with a
problem I was working on, and that knowledge proved not so useless after all.

This sort of cross-domain application has lead me to an intuitive and elegant
solution on more than one occasion. Biology and linguistics have been
especially fruitful in this regard, but perhaps that's only because those are
fields I'm better acquainted with.

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mratsim
You sparked my curiosity, do you have examples you can share?

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carapace
FWIW, you can get a copy of "Deschooling Society" by Ivan Illich here:
[http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/deschooling.htm](http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/deschooling.htm)

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dr_dshiv
Wow, it's amazing how close this article comes to describing the present day
situation of the big 3 textbook companies!

