Comment by breckinloggins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by breckinloggins | Hacker News Reader

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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).

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...

"Instead of mass-produced textbooks, the more than 3,100 sophomores in the state's largest district are learning from an online curriculum developed by their teachers over the summer with free software distributed over the web.

Engelhaupt, 31, was one of three district math teachers who spent about 100 hours each developing the lessons, which cost the district about $175,000 less than buying new textbooks."

http://www.nola.com/newsflash/index.ssf/story/anoka-hennepin...

here's the link to the book: http://www.ck12.org/flexbook/book/8561

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.

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.

High school textbooks are written by editors, dozens of content writers, and some "name" author who puts their name on it. University level textbooks are much better, of course.

Got a citation? If that's the case then it isn't the case world wide. My mother is the author of two reasonably successful high school textbooks and did all the writing, image selection, etc long before an editor gets their hands on it to polish.

> * And crowd-sourcing is definitely not one of them.*

I agree, but crowdsourcing would be handy for fixing errors or improving clarity. If a bunch of people highlight a passage that they think is confusing, and give reasons, that gives the author (or others) an opportunity to clarify.

Yes, that is something that teachers could be doing, but why not make the books as good as they could be?

This has been done. Real World Haskell [1] comes to mind.

[1] http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/types-and-functions.ht...

That's a good article, thank you for the link. Is there any precedent for a law that involves coin flips (randomness)? My hunch is that while they sound great in an economy paper, they're too easy to shoot down politically.

>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.

Yep, subsidies never go wrong.

These kinds of ideas are clear to everyone who has thought about the topic. But if I can interject some personal experience ..

I've had an open source text up for more than a decade http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra . It is easy to find; if you google "linear algebra" today then it is the third item. But although I have said on the page that I welcome contributions, I have had very few, and those few mostly bug reports-- which I am glad to get but they are not what I imagined I would get when I first put it up. (I will be putting it up soon in a public version control repository but let me note before I get emails that for most of the life of this project the best option really was to offer a .zip of the LaTeX source.)

The text if fine but I could in a minute list many shortcomings. For instance, it could use with a graphic designer, it could use with the skills of a person who can do illustrations, I would be delighted to get ways to interact with Sage, I would be glad to get tests from people who have taught the course, I would be glad to get help with e-readers (I don't own one myself). Etc.

I am currently doing an update that has taken my between-semesters break, and that threatens to spread into next semester. So offering such a thing is a lot of work. Some of it I am qualified to do but some of it I really am not. However, to this point, I have seen very little evidence that others will help so if it is to be done then I have to do it.

In short, more productive than listing the failings of others may be to pick a promising project of interest to you, and contribute a solution.

http://wiki.bssd.org/index.php/Main_Page looks like a good start.

I hope that open source curriculum takes off - IMO there are fact-based topics that translate easily to software learning, where a child's mastery can be measured accurately to provide a useful custom teaching plan.

I like the home-grown approach (ie: bottom-up instead of top-down) they've developed. The section "Five Easy Steps to a Balanced Math Program" gives a good overview of what the general goals of their math program area. It would be interesting to compare this to the guidelines in different states and countries. For example in California, the STAR guidelines are termed "blueprints" and available here: http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/blueprints.asp Once we have a large table of the goals each district sets for their students it would be easy to tailor each math level.

I can envision a situation where the content is free but you can purchase premium versions with enhanced lesson plans and interactivity. Kind of like free and paid apps.

To make this a reality, I'd consider building a platform that serves as a centralized repository for open information/knowledge and gives the information some structure (Ontology). With that in place, people can build applications on top of the open information (interactive apps/charts, etc)

To encourage qualified people to contribute, edit, and update the repositories, consider layering in a Quora/StackOverflow type voting/reputation system with a Kickstarter crowd funding component to fund qualified folks and allow them to dedicate significant time to the project.

I could see this working well. I think these new types of textbooks would gain a foothold not by some epic battle between the entrenched publishers and open content revolutionaries, but simply by being affordable and valuable enough that students start using them in ADDITION to the textbooks they are currently forced to buy. Similar to Khan Academy's current position.

Then, if the ecosystem hits critical mass, it won't be too long before some professors and teachers start saying "wait... why are we making students use this crappy book again?"

I'm aware that the last part is a bit naive, but I think it's REALLY naive to think that we will see a massive legislature-driven transition to "the right thing" anytime before the sun goes dark.

Is there any software to seamless convert XML to Latex (to PDF) to HTML and vice/versa? That would go a long way to helping with the relatively poor formatting of the current efforts.

There's pandoc, http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ but it doesn't magically give you great page layouts in any format, if that's what you meant.

Drop by http://tex.stackexchange.com/

1. It should be open-source or

Flexbook is a project working on this, the few books I've looked at are cc-by-nc-sa. www.ck12.org/flexbook/

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