Author: grabe

The Case for Creative Commons Textbooks

I find the proposal for “Creative Commons” textbooks interesting because I am in the other camp – those who make money writing a book. I also do some writing for “free” – e.g., professional research publications which readers pay to read, but I write at no cost, Internet content in various formats. Perhaps “free” is not the correct word – I am also paid to be a researcher and I would not be considered successful if I did not publish (for free).

I cannot imagine a full compliment of “free” textbooks. I can imagine agencies paying for free text books to be written. I can imagine an individual here or there generating a free book. I can imagine a collection of individuals putting together a “wiki”-type book.

The proposal I link to does not actually propose “free” books. As I understand the concept, institutions would enter into a consortium that would pay individuals to author content that would be used by the instititions. I guess the idea is to eliminate the companies that now recruit authors, edit content, and print or “serve” content. Would this mean tuition would go up at these institutions to pay for the loss of teaching, research, or service time? Would it be the profs at the universities or community colleges who would generate the content? Could this consortium accomplish the various functions of a company as economically as a commercial entity? Would all participating instructors have to use the free products made available within the consortium? I do not believe there is any such thing as a free quality product, but there may be different ways to generate products.

Without arguing the cost of educational materials (which are too high, but probably for very different reasons than is commonly assumed), I wonder about the assumptions that drive this position. Perhaps educators should teach for free and write books for profit. Perhaps the profits from college athletic programs should be used to purchase books. There must be some other great ideas out there. Perhaps insitutions should purchase books directly from the commercial publisher and eliminate the profits made by campus and community book stores. Perhaps the traditional academic contract should include another category – teaching, research, service, and authoring. How about a system in which instead of spending time writing grants college faculty members write books and if a book is selected for distribution within the consortium the individual, department, and institution are compensated. 😉

If you listen to podcasts, here is another option. NASA now offers audio programs as podcasts. The link about is provided through Podcast Alley and you can locate other podcast sources at this site.

I tend to think I am aware of current trends, but sometimes I am wrong. I know that distance education has been working its way into K-12 settings and I knew there were companies and organizations promoting such opportunities and offering service, but I would have been very wrong in predicting the level of student participation.

The Center For Educational Statistics has released a study providing data on distance education participation through 2003. About 36% of school districts had students enrolled in on-line courses. The main explanation given by districts is that online courses provided opportunities not available within the district. For example, rural districts may not be able to provide AP or language courses. Two-way interactive video is the most common delivery format.

The largest provider category is higher education with other K-12 districts as the next most common.

University of Washington TV presents an interview with Google engineer Jeff Dean. The presentation provides a look behind the scenes.

I have become fascinated with the Library of Congress series on the digital future. I strongly encourage you to visit this site and view the series.

The final presentation happened to be on C-SPAN last night. The presentor was Neil Gershenfeld, the director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT. As an academic, I always wonder how other academics get these exotic jobs. Several JNDs difference in productivity I assume. The Gershenfeld Presentation rambles through many topics. If you are willing to wade through the entire thing, you will eventually encounter his description of computer-controlled fabrication as a tool for production and learning. There are implications in this description for alternative educational models – learning by doing, learning by making. See if you don’t have the same reaction.

If you are a Lawrence Lessig (fair use, copyright) fan, you may enjoy a recent argument he advances based on the concept of “remixing“. As I understand the position, certain examples of remixing are allowed and some are not. He presents this as an inconsistency.

School Matters offers a web site allowing a detailed look into the finances and performance of K-12 schools at the state and even district level. You can actually access detailed information about school performance, how much money is spend per student, how money is spend, etc. at many levels of detail. You can supposedly identify the high performance schools in your region (although these data were not available for North Dakota :)). You can even determine the average adult salary in the state. I am trying to understand the motivation behind this site, but it is fun to see how your old high school is doing.