[FM Discuss] Webcast on changing the use of books in education

[Janet Swisher]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 12:17 PM, Andy Oram <andyo at oreilly.com> wrote:
> Give our recent discussion on education, I thought this might interest people on this list:
>
> http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/5048
>
> A lot of us will be traveling or in Amsterdam for Winter Camp at the time of the webcast, but I'm sure Harvard will keep it online for download later.
>

I used to know a guy whose hobby horse was trying to get the Texas
Board of Education (one of the top three textbook purchasers in the
US) to switch to cheap paperback versions of math and science
textbooks so that students could keep their own copies from year to
year. "Digital alternatives" is another way for students to have
access to previous years' textbooks, but it requires that they have a
means of accessing them. Maybe if we gave every child their own
laptop...

I also just ran across this list of open source textbooks:
http://linear.ups.edu/opentexts.html (by way of Seth Godin's blog post
on the Kindle: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/02/reinventing-the-kindle-part-ii.html)

--Janet