Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath said older generations “screwed up” giving students access to so much technology: “I genuinely hope Gen Z quickly figures that out and gets mad.”
That is just the money to buy all the laptops and the like too, not counting the actual cost they paid for digital copies of books, which continues to be a huge racket.
Books that have new editions constantly, and students, or districts, are charged a hundred dollars per or whatever it is. But when is the last time math changed? Why are we buying new history books every two years? Or any subject. It’s just a racket, spending other peoples’ money, and kicking back money to the deciders of the contracts.
We could develop open source textbooks, that are not copyrighted, and print them off at cost, or use them at cost digitally, and save a fortune. Or at least buy a quality book once, and reuse it, perhaps printing an addendum to add anything new that needs to be taught.
Open source textbooks are an intriguing idea - basically like Wikipedia but in print.
Then you just have to figure out how to gate the nutters from editing, and a tremendous amount of cooperative oversight to ensure the record is factual.
The challenge is that so many people choose to live divorced from objective reality.
I would use LibreTexts in college as a supplementary resource when my assigned textbook was confusing or lacking. At least for math topics they are great.
That is just the money to buy all the laptops and the like too, not counting the actual cost they paid for digital copies of books, which continues to be a huge racket.
Books that have new editions constantly, and students, or districts, are charged a hundred dollars per or whatever it is. But when is the last time math changed? Why are we buying new history books every two years? Or any subject. It’s just a racket, spending other peoples’ money, and kicking back money to the deciders of the contracts.
We could develop open source textbooks, that are not copyrighted, and print them off at cost, or use them at cost digitally, and save a fortune. Or at least buy a quality book once, and reuse it, perhaps printing an addendum to add anything new that needs to be taught.
Open source textbooks are an intriguing idea - basically like Wikipedia but in print.
Then you just have to figure out how to gate the nutters from editing, and a tremendous amount of cooperative oversight to ensure the record is factual.
The challenge is that so many people choose to live divorced from objective reality.
I would use LibreTexts in college as a supplementary resource when my assigned textbook was confusing or lacking. At least for math topics they are great.