Schwarzenegger pushes for open source, online math and science textbooks. | Hacker News Reader

Schwarzenegger pushes for open source, online math and science textbooks.

abcnews.go.com

37 pointsvaksel42 comments

I really like the idea. However, there's a brief note in the article which isn't really addressed in detail: students need computer access to use an on-line text. Although computer access is increasing, poorer students wouldn't have the same amount of access (if any) as students from better-off families.

I can think of a few ways to lessen this problem. One would be to ensure that public libraries are freely accessible to students, and offer Internet access for students who don't have it at home. Another option would be to allow students to print out, at school, relevant materials from on-line texts. The second solution would be very expensive in the long run, so I'd say that some form of the first solution needs to be put into effect for the Governator's proposal to succeed.

Or just give every student an eReader ie: Kindle in 1st grade and they can use it through every grade. You break you kindle you are SOL.

Yeah, until their parents pawn it to put food on the table. What a horrible idea.

I don't know about that.

My kindle seems pretty sturdy (okay, no it doesn't)...but have you ever seen how destructive a 3rd grader can be?

I predict that, if this was tried, not a single kindle would make it through elementary school.

Not to mention that many would be stolen.

OLPC has a solution to that, IIRC each unit needs to be regularly in contact with a base station at the school or it disables itself. Or you could just have remote disabling on-demand like BlackBerry.

I'm tempted to mention "that is hardware DRM". Why am I tempted? Because some of the audience will realize "Uh oh, doomed to failure" and some of the audience will say "NO, NO, IT ISN'T DRM. That is to prevent bad people from stealing stuff. DRM prevents me from ... That isn't DRM!"

I thought that at first too. Then it struck me that if every student has one there's not much incentive to steal. Cellphones were desirable objects for many thieves a few years back, but between location tracking and the sheer ubiquity of the things, a cellphone is no longer an obvious grab.

Then it struck me that if every student has one there's not much incentive to steal.

High-end electronics are worth money, money is still worth stuff even if you have your own high-end electronics. I got graphing calculators stolen off of me at a school where my current income would put me substantially below what my classmates considered poor, and I'm a professional engineer.

So then you fall back to the location beacon in the device. you go to schoolbook.google.com/patio11 and there a worm trail of where it's been for the last 24-48 hours. Oh look, it is at Sidney's house.

As odd as it sounds schools that service poorer students have more computers in general (at least in California where I live). This is because schools are granted what's called Title 1 funds based on the amount of lower income students who attend. Beyond that the state and federal governments subsidize high speed Internet connections like T3 lines through the E-Rate program

It still might be a problem but less because of lower income students and more because there's no way to put a computer on every student's desktop

Computers are more or less a commodity now...I mean you can get one for a few hundred dollars, or a used one off craigslist for 20 bucks, pretty much every household has one nowadays.

Sadly that's not true. The first study I could find (don't have much time to research right now) shows that only 73% of U.S. households have Internet access: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2006/Internet-Penetration...

Here is a more recent report from December 2008.

http://www.pewinternet.org/Data-Tools/Download-Data/~/media/...

The younger demographics are much more likely to be online. 18-29 has close to 90% penetration, while the 65+ has only 41%.

+ the major people who aren't online, are those who don't see the need for it. Needing it for their children, would change the situation.

+ you also also have geography to consider, Californians are much more likely to have internet access, than some farmers in Ohio.

"Use the Internet" is different from "have the Internet in their home." Many if not most people do the bulk of their Internet usage in the office. Plus that study doesn't count kids what so ever.

Oh, and it's a small issue that's probably not statistically relevant (due to the city populations) but for the record California consists of more farm land than it does cities. Primarily in Central and Northern regions.

> only 73% of U.S. households have Internet access

We have no reason to believe that cost is a factor here. I strongly suspect that many of the computer-less households contain an expensive TV set and a cable feed.

Again this is an example of people who have no idea what is actually going on in schools trying to make policy without consulting those who do know what goes on in schools.

The problem with e-books in schools below the College level is the readers get broken. High School age and below kids tend to be careless. They throw their back packs down, play keep away with them, etc... So traditional e-book readers don't work.

That said, as someone responsible for the IT needs of a school, I've been experimenting with one of these: http://www.peeweepc.com/store/pc/viewPrd.asp?idproduct=70...

The Ruggedized nature and tablet mode seem to make it possible (again I'm still experimenting and am a little nervous about the hinge at this point). So don't get me wrong, I think a solution exists. But the Governor just wants an immediate cheap solution and that's not the way e-books are going to happen.

I don't think he wants traditional E-books. What I imagine when I hear the phrase "open-source online textbooks", I think of websites where you can navigate through chapters, appendices, etc -- similar to how some texts are already available online (i.e. Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp, available not as an e-book but as a website, at http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ )

Well the problem with that is you still need textbooks in the classroom. If he wants to replace actual textbooks he needs to find a way to put them in the classrom. That's going to require a reader

(There are actual studies, lots of them in fact, that show students learn more when they can follow along in a textbook so you couldn't solve the problem with a projector for example)

You could have computers for each student in the classroom, but I imagine that would be quite expensive.

I don't see the problem with a projector. The teacher can control what material is displayed, and can thus choose to display relevant material for the current lesson. Yes, this relies on the teacher knowing what they're doing, but the entire school system does anyways. If a student wants to have their own reference in class, it would be cheaper and more educational for the student to take notes on whatever topics they found interesting or wanted to have on paper.

I'd be interested to look at those studies, though.

I'll try to find a few online and post them here when I have more time. But the gist is that there's a cognitive advantage to reading which in turn means reading along causes the material to be absorbed better.

I've tried to think back to my own experience to verify the findings but I can't think of any definitive examples for or against

I don't know about those studies, but as a student I hated having to lug textbooks around but was lucky enough that my high school rarely if ever made it a requirement. The school and its students are doing well regardless. Maybe they could be doing even better, but at least they have light backpacks :)

With regards to the Governor's plan, this seems like a really good idea in general, and at least a sign that our Governor is willing to reform education in a meaningful (i.e. not by commissioning book committees of the type that Feynman derided) way.

Again this is an example of people who have no idea what is actually going on in schools trying to make policy without consulting those who do know what goes on in schools

I hear this argument all the time from people who want to silence debate on education but the fact is: we all went to school. We are all as qualified as anyone else to comment on it.

That's like saying "We've all been to the doctor's office, therefore we are all qualified to discuss how diagnose and treat Guillain-Barré syndrome."

I think the important part of the plan is not to put books on computers; it's the open-source part. Whether schools eventually opt for a print version of the text is a matter of preference.

It is not the printing that makes textbooks too expensive, it is the lack of competition in the market. With open-sourced texts, everybody can offer a print version.

Textbooks aren't invincible either. A rugged education oriented e-book reader may end up costing less than replacing textbooks on a regular basis as they become damaged and outdated.

My biggest disappointment, when I got my kindle, was how flimsy the thing feels...

I was dreaming about a device that was going to travel with me everywhere I went (the way my old palm pilots, which are what I used to use for ebooks, did)...

hang on - I just realised something? Are the textbooks purchased/owned by the school? As-in - they can be handed down to next years class?

That's fantastic.

seems like a good opportunity to teach kids to be responsible.

Good in theory, bad in practice. The kids need to have text books by law. The School can't really do anything to punish them (except maybe detention). So in the end you spend a lot of money trying to get kids to stop acting the way kids naturally act.

s/kids/users/.

This is basically telling users that they have to alter their existing behavior to work around flaws in your implementation. You end up with users who are grumpy and/or uncompliant.

"Be responsible" is easy to throw out there when the users happen to be children, but it won't magically make them stop acting like kids.

Sadly, I'm so cynical about anything that has to do with public education and state politics that whenever I read a story like this, the first thing I think of is how much money the vendor mentioned in the article is going to get paid for their shitty enterprise e-textbook software.

Textbook publishing is a juggernaut, and California is one of its big movers. Here's a great article that appeared on HN a month ago explaining the industry's inner workings:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=598523

Some of the comments here are about the excessive cost of ebook readers, or the fragility of the devices. But typical college textbooks cost US$100 or more. At that rate, a new EeePC costs 2.5 textbooks, and an OLPC XO would costs even less if they were available for sale. Even if elementary and high school textbooks cost less (down to US$50 maybe? They're still all-glossy four-color-printed quarto-sized hardcovers sewn in signatures, aren't they?) you could afford to buy a new netbook per year per student — assuming you can't make do with a used two-year-old smartphone.

That's assuming, of course, that the textbook costs are related to printing the things, not writing them or extracting rents from schools.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=648717

At first, I thought this was a great idea. Then I realized that not everyone has easy access to computers. Poorer kids might be left behind. One can print e-books, but that sometimes ends up costing quite a bit, too.

This might sound crazy, but didn't the Soviets solve this problem decades ago? The commies believed that education should be for all, and they had amazing math and physics books which were also really cheap!! And this were GREAT books. Stuff written by Landau & Lifschitz, Arnol'd, Gelfand, etc. These books were translated to Spanish so that the Cubans and other Latin-Americans could read them. They were translated to Portuguese so people in Brazil had access to good books at affordable prices. Why is it that only in the U.S. can't people have access to good books at affordable prices? Is the textbook cartel's lobbying that powerful???

I'm starting to think that America is by the Cartels, for the Cartels.

Pretty much yeah. I am advocate of the so-called "Great Books" or canon curriculum. I think it is pedagogically sound and undoubtedly very cheap. The source material for many mathematics and physics work can be had for a few dollars a book. Although, I admit, it is still very debatable if Great Books is really pedagogically sound; I'm just a fan!

You must be referring to the MIR series of textbooks. Demidovich's Calculus was another classic.

And each book had three chapters about Marxist-Leninist theory at the beginning!

Actually, the amount of propaganda in Soviet hard-core science books was very small, in fact, math books didn't have any, that I can remember.

Not the ones I read.

There are a few famous physicists these days whose interest in physics was sparked by the availability of good & cheap Soviet physics books. American books are over-designed. Too many colors and visual noise. Textbooks should go back to basics and provide condensed knowledge at affordable prices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com