California State Senator Proposes Funding Open-Source Textbooks 193
bcrowell writes "Although former Governor Schwarzenegger's free digital textbook initiative for K-12 education was a failure,
state senator Darrell Steinberg has a
new idea for the state-subsidized
publication of college textbooks (details in the PDF links at the bottom). Newspaper editorials seem positive. It will be interesting to see if this works any better at the college level than it did for K-12, where textbook selection has traditionally been very bureaucratic. This is also different from Schwarzenegger's FDTI because Steinberg proposes spending state money to help create the books. The K-12 version suffered from legal uncertainty about the Williams case,
which requires equal access to books for all students — many of whom might not have computers at home.
At the symposium where the results of
the FDTI's first round were announced, it became apparent that the only businesses interested in
participating actively were not the publishers but computer manufacturers like Dell and Apple, who wanted to sell
lots of hardware to schools."
Fixed since last time? (Score:4, Interesting)
A while back slashdot had a story about Open Source text books. I scanned through the books they had available and they were absolute junk. It appeared to be written in word with formulas printed out then scanned in as images and inserted inline. Needless to say they looked horrible.
Has the opensource Calculus book moved on to LaTeX since then or does it still look the same?
Greed (here) is good (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not just a good idea, it's inevitable. The immediate drive, always a convincing one in politics, is money. the interesting Q is HOW to do it, but whether to start, and to do it with public money is a no-brainer. You might otherwise as well question whether public-financed education is relevant. That ship has sailed, and this is just one part of that critical project. Feynman's essay on textbook adoption is timeless: http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm [textbookleague.org]
Current textbooks are overweight, expensive, and boring. Many schools including ours have been reduced into getting students two copies because they were to heavy to take to school and back (really). Now the kids rarely even open the things.
Re:Tuition (Score:5, Interesting)