[TOS] Another few steps along the textbook path

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

On Thu, 18 Jun 2009, David Humphrey wrote:

> I thought Seth's blog post on textbooks was interesting - 
> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/textbook-rant.html.  How do 
> we avoid these same snares?

1. "They are expensive."

If we're giving it away for free on the internet, that kind of caps how 
much we can charge for the dead tree edition.  Pearson recommends not 
making the whole thing CC licensed for that very reason, which is why I 
lean away from going with Pearson, as much as I like my contact there.

Which means that we may have to write an entire textbook without making 
much/any money for it.  I, personally, am willing to accept that.

2. "They don't make change... they don't take you from a place of 
ignorance to a place of insight."  My hope is that our little text is so 
practical, and focuses so much on the Doing, that you can't help but learn 
from it.

3. "They're out of date and don't match the course."  Not being beholden 
to a major manufacturer is a big win here.  I'm perfectly happy to push 
the idea of selling these things on Lulu or some other print-on-demand 
shop -- and we're constructing it from day one to a be a modular text, and 
a community effort. If we've got a community that is committed to 
reviewing this text every year, and we can easily print the results of our 
work -- or perhaps even better, we make it easy for a prof to print their 
own remixed version of the work to match their course -- I think we lick 
this problem.

4. "They don't sell the topic. Textbooks today are a lot more colorful and 
breezy than they used to be, but they are far from engaging or 
inspirational. No one puts down a textbook and says, yes, this is what I 
want to do!"  I think we can handle this.  Some pretty inspirational 
stories come out of open source land.

5. "They are incredibly impractical.  Not just in terms of the lessons 
taught, but in terms of being a reference book for years down the road." 
Who knows if we fall into this trap or not?  It's my hope that the 
structure of the book is sufficient to lead any novice developer into open 
source development in a step-by-step way.  But we won't know until we try 
it.

And, of course, here's Seth's punchline:

"The solution seems simple to me. Professors should be spending their time 
devising pages or chapterettes or even entire chapters on topics that 
matter to them, then publishing them for free online. (it's part of their 
job, remember?)  When you have a class to teach, assemble 100 of the best 
pieces, put them in a pdf or on a kindle or a website (or even in a 
looseleaf notebook) and there, you're done. You just saved your intro 
marketing class about $15,000. Every semester. Any professor of intro 
marketing who is assigning a basic old-school textbook is guilty of theft 
or laziness."

Exactly.  :)

--g

> Dave
>
> Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
>> Hello folks.  After a great few days at the Softhum workshop in Drexel, 
>> I've made revisions to the textbook outline.  Find them here:
>> 
>> http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/User:Gregdek/Textbook
>> 
>> I've got more revisions to go through, but I move forward a bit at a time. 
>> The things I'm thinking right now:
>> 
>> 1. I think back to one of my favorite computing books ever: Unix Power 
>> Tools.  One of the reasons it's so great, I think, is because it's written 
>> by many authors, in relatively small chunks, all of whom share their 
>> experience, and the style is engaging because of it.  I believe that 
>> between Chris Tyler, David Humphrey, Clif Kussmaul, Will Cohen, Heidi 
>> Ellis, Tridge and others, we've got a lot of experience and could do very 
>> well with that style.  My question: is that an appropriate style for a 
>> textbook?  If not, why not?
>> 
>> 2. Case studies.  Should they be their own chapters, or should they be 
>> snippets that are connected directly to the material in question?  i.e. do 
>> we have a separate "moodle" chapter, or do we have an example of "how this 
>> lesson can be applied to the moodle project"?
>> 
>> As always, patches and comments welcome.  Another week will yield another 
>> revision.  :)
>> 
>> --g
>> 
>> --
>> Computer Science professors should be teaching open source.
>> Help make it happen.   Visit http://teachingopensource.org.
>> _______________________________________________
>> tos mailing list
>> tos at teachingopensource.org
>> http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
>

--
Computer Science professors should be teaching open source.
Help make it happen.   Visit http://teachingopensource.org.