Topology Without Tears by [[Sidney A. Morris]]

https://boffosocko.com/2015/04/03/machiavelli-in-hollywood-gavin-polones-textbook-on-the-entertainment-industry/

continuing from https://hypothes.is/a/ddn4qs8mEe2gkq_1T7i3_Q

Potential assignments:

Students could be tasked with finding new material or working off of a pre-existing list.

They could individually be responsible for indexing each individual sub-text within a corpus by: - providing a full bibliography; - identifying free areas of access for various versions (websites, Archive.org, Gutenberg, other OER corpora, etc.); Which is best, why? If not already digitized, then find a copy and create a digital version for inclusion into an appropriate repository. - summarizing the source in general and providing links to how it fits into the broader potential corpus for the class. - tagging it with relevant taxonomies to make it more easily searchable/selectable within its area of study - editing a definitive version of the text or providing better (digital/sharable) versions for archiving into OER repositories, Project Gutenberg, Archive.org, https://standardebooks.org/, etc. - identifying interesting/appropriate tangential texts which either support/refute their current text - annotating their specific text and providing links and cross references to other related texts either within their classes' choices or exterior to them for potential future uses by both students and teachers.

Some of this is already with DeRosa's framework, but emphasis could be on building additional runway and framing for helping professors and students to do this sort of work in the future. How might we create repositories that allow one a smörgåsbord of indexed data to relatively easily/quickly allow a classroom to pick and choose texts to make up their textbook in a first meeting and be able to modify it as they go? Or perhaps a teacher could create an outline of topics to cover along with a handful of required ones and then allow students to pick and choose from options in between along the way. This might also help students have options within a course to make the class more interesting and relevant to their own interests, lives, and futures.

Don't allow students to just "build their own major", but allow them to build their own textbooks and syllabi with some appropriate and reasonable scaffolding.

How I would prompt ChatGPT to help me write an Introduction to Psychology Textbook<br /> by Mark Grabe

Contemplating writing an introductory psychology textbook (OER) using ChatGPT.

https://ditchthattextbook.com/

https://www.amazon.com/s?i=digital-text&rh=n%3A133140011%2Cn%3A133141011%2Cn%3A154606011%2Cp_36%3A0-0%2Cp_30%3ARoutledge&s=date-desc-rank&qid=1676881333&ref=sr_pg_1

US History and Primary Source Anthology, volume 1<br /> https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/ushistory1/

Émile: or On Education was so popular that it was rented out by the hour for additional profit instead of being sold outright. [summary]

When did book rental in education spaces become a business model? What has it looked like historically?

https://algorithmsbook.com/

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/09/28/publisher-blocks-access-ebooks-students-faculty-scramble

I still say that students should do their own work on researching and identifying textbooks and not their professors. They should all be optional and never required. This would fix the textbook issue rapidly.

Langlois, Charles Victor, and Charles Seignobos. Introduction to the Study of History. Translated by George Godfrey Berry. First. New York: Henry Holt and company, 1898. http://archive.org/details/cu31924027810286.

Suggested by footnote in Beatrice Webb's My Apprenticeship.

http://www.americanyawp.com/

Apparently this is one of the most annotated texts within Hypothes.is. Interestingly, almost none of the annotations on it are public.

https://intensecrypto.org/public/index.html

https://introtcs.org/public/index.html

Repository: https://github.com/boazbk/tcs

1. Marshall, C.C. Collection-level analysis tools for books online. Proc. of the 2008 ACM Workshop on Research Advances in Large Digital Book Repositories. (Napa Valley, CA, Oct. 26–30) ACM, New York, 2008.

Cathy Marshall has found that students evaluated their textbooks prior to purchasing based on the annotations within them.

Copies of The American Instructor:

• 1770, Philadelphia : Printed and sold by John Dunlap, at the newest printing-office, in Market-Street https://archive.org/details/americaninstruct00fish/page/n11/mode/2up
• 1770, New-York : Printed and sold by H. Gaine, at the Bible and Crown, in Hanover-Square, 14th Edition https://archive.org/details/2554018R.nlm.nih.gov/page/n9/mode/2up
• 1806, London : J. Johnson [etc.], 29th Edition https://archive.org/details/b28741109/page/n7/mode/2up

---Paul Lockhart

Forget the click-bait headline about Musk. Some of these books look fairly interesting/common for an MBA in a box. Perhaps worth circling back to at a later time.

This would seem to be the sort of ancestor of the bestiary that might be used as a mnemonic tool, but given it's 1658 publication date, it's likely the case that this would have been too late for it to have served this purpose for most (without prior knowledge).

Apparently the Encyclopaedia Britannica labeled it as “the first children’s picture book.”

While it's probably true overall, there must be some variability across disciplines. For instance, even though I've mostly been teaching in English (since last century), I've rarely been approached by publishers. When reps did approach me, incentives were either vague or almost laughable.

In fact... one case has been a key turning point in my life. A publisher offered me a gift certificate for Tim Horton (sic) if I adopted a textbook chapter (?) in my class. I notified the textbook author, who happened to be bestknown for his critical approach to something very similar. While my sending that email was a relatively insignificant gesture, a friend remarked that it was what I could do in my “sphere of agency”. That comment was important to me and the notion of a “sphere of agency” has remained relevant.

With equipment being a more significant cost than books, UK students pay much less for textbooks than North American ones.

Mean: 167/97/79/118/118/122/93

Mean: 127/101/84 vs 90/68/70

This was an interesting session. Somehow I missed a few of these projects in the discussion (or they were added after the fact?)

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>hyperlink.academy</span> in The Future of Textbooks (<time class='dt-published'>03/18/2021 23:54:19</time>)</cite></small>

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Dan Allosso</span> in From Print to OER Ebook to Obsidian - History4Today - Note-taking, Research, Writing (<time class='dt-published'>03/15/2021 10:56:56</time>)</cite></small>

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Dan Allosso</span> in From Print to OER Ebook to Obsidian - History4Today - Note-taking, Research, Writing (<time class='dt-published'>03/15/2021 10:56:56</time>)</cite></small>

This! This is the piece of the puzzle that so very few teachers even bother to think about. Perhaps they're stuck with so much other work they either go with what they know, have used before, or are simply sold to them by textbook sales representatives.

This pattern has concerned me for a long time.

More:

• On Choosing Your Own Textbooks
• To Purchase, Rent, or Pirate? The Broken Economics of Textbooks in the Digital Age

I'd be curious to see Miller take his high school textbook and point to specific phrasing to back this up. Even now most US History textbooks are espousing American exceptionalism.

The most prominent example of this type of online curation, in my personal experience as a teacher, is curating reading lists for my university courses.

In some cases (more "traditional"), this list is part of the syllabus and coursepack that I distribute ahead of the semester so it's something that I would do in the Summer or during a Winter break. Having taught several courses on a short notice (getting the contract a couple of weeks before the semester starts), I've fine-tuned my technique to be as efficient as possible. Some of my reading lists were better than others and a few were really solid. Teaching with such a reading list is quite a joy. Much more so than teaching from a textbook. At one point, I stopped having printed coursepacks. I simply give links to the fulltext articles available through #OpenAccess or through the databases to which the university's library is subscribed. A few students complained early on but it does mean that they don't have to purchase text material for the course. The reason it's important to me does have to do with the cost of higher education. It's also about shifting the role of text resources. We use these texts to do some work together. It's not like these texts are "transmitting the knowledge" to learners' brains.

So, that's my more traditional pattern: a syllabus with a list of links to articles (typically PDFs) that I distributed before the semester starts.

In other cases (my "enhanced" practice), it's something I do every week, based on what has happened in the course. And I do mean a full reading list each week. Class members choose the text on which they want to focus. Though several of them expect me to be "the sage on the stage" who will lead them to that one nugget of wisdom they will have to "retain", a shift happens once they take ownership of those reading choices. That practice is quite timeconsuming and it doesn't necessarily improves my teaching in obvious ways. It's rewarding in other ways. (I sometimes ask learners to find resources on their own, which really deepens the learning process. It requires a significant level of autonomy that they might not reveal during a given semester, even if they have significant experience as university students).

My routine of building weekly reading lists also means that I got quite a bit of practice at this.

Typically, I start the collecting with a "forward citation search" in Web of Knowledge, Scopus, or Google Scholar. I often know this one key article which is likely to have been cited by a number of authors more recently. I collect as many of those as possible and some patterns emerge. Quite frequently, there would be subtopics that I rearrange. It might send me in a "rabbithole". Which is ok. I'm in a discovery mode. And some of the texts which fall under my radar at that point become relevant at a further point.

In other words, I often cast a wide net during the collection phase.

The selection process is mostly a matter or rearranging the reading list so that the first few items cover enough of the range of subtopics. Sometimes, my lists remain quite long, which means that learners have more choice (which is uncomfortable enough to help them learn). It also involves an organization phase.

Summarizing the significance of the collection is the basis for my presentation of the list to the class. My description of the collection is the moment in a class meeting during which I switch to lecture mode. If I do it at the end of the class meeting (or just before the break), students are likely to pay less attention, even though it's typically short. If I do If I do it before discussing the items for the current week, it gets a bit confusing. So it often works best if I present this list after we've worked through the previous ones but before some kind of activity which links the two topics.

As for sharing in the cloud, I typically do this through the LMS I'm using in that institutions. I've tried more public methods but they weren't that effective.

All this to say... I could probably optimize my method.

Robin DeRosa did something like this that serves as a good example: https://robinderosa.net/uncategorized/my-open-textbook-pedagogy-and-practice/

An interesting pedagogical point, but then the question becomes: "Should we necessarily do it within your company's specific siloed domain?"

They're also touting the most up-to-date content here, when it's an open secret that for the majority of textbooks don't really change that much from edition to edition.

So now we need to revisit the calculation above and put this new piece of data into the model.

Seriously?! It's now a "rental price"?

$ 2million compared to what? To everyone having purchased the textbooks at going rates before? This is a false comparison because not everyone bought new in the first place. Many bought used, and many more still probably either pirated, borrowed from a friend, from the library, or simply went without.

It almost sounds to me like they know they're not getting a cut of the money from poorer students who are finding the material for free online anyway, so they're trying to up the stakes of the piece of pie that they're getting from a different angle.

This other model of subscription at the level of the college or university is also one that they're well aware of based on involvement with subscription fees for journal access.

This is an abominable process for history textbooks to be produced, particularly at mass scale. I get the need for broad standards, but for textbook companies to revise their books without the original authors is atrocious. Here again, individual teachers and schools should be able to pick their own texts if they're not going to--ideally--allow their students to pick their own books.

Here's where OER textbooks might help to make some change. If free materials with less input from politicians and more input from educators were available. But then this pushes the onus down to a different level with different political aspirations. I have to think that taking the politicization of these decisions at a state level would have to help.

The basic economics of this system would indicate (especially as classes become larger and larger) that more careful consideration of choice, economics, accessibility, availability, etc. on a larger institutional level creates larger marginal gains for those in the class. If a staff librarian, teacher, or someone else within the system does the leg-work up front and does it well, then the dozens or even hundreds of students in the course don't need to spend (read: waste) their own time re-inventing the proverbial textbook wheel once they're in the class.

Portions of the situation here make me wonder if we might pull a page from Dr. Peter Pronovost's playbook in the health care space and create a simple checklist of what to do when planning for textbooks and readings. Checklists that include things like:

• will the texts actually be used?
• will they be primary to the subject or are they supplementary?
• What are their prices?
• Are alternate materials available?
• Are older editions available?
• are public domain or open web versions available?
• are there copies in the library? reserves? pirated versions? pre/post prints?
• etc.

Once such a checklist is available, institutions should require that it be available along with syllabi and other course listings.

cross references:

• https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist
• https://laparoscopy.blogs.com/outcome/ItsTheOutcomeDocs/Peter%20Pronovost%20Protocol.pdf

Given the economics of the textbook market and the fact that it's not the students who are choosing their textbooks, (but instead are assigned their textbooks) there is a massive mismatch in the market. The person choosing the text doesn't necessarily care about the price since it's not something they're directly paying for.

The better surveys we should be seeing are surveys of professors on what materials they choose, why they choose them, what thought--if any--goes towards the price of such materials. These surveys of students are generally useless because they don't get to the point of the economic inequity in the textbook market.

I wonder what role satisficing plays in the current textbook market?

but this only occurs with the tacit approval of professors who are assigning those new textbooks without any thought about whether the new edition is really worth that much more. Since the professor generally doesn't care (or even use the updated material in a new edition), they could easily stick with a 7th edition for several decades. The real question is why don't they?

As I read both this post and this comment from Alan, I can't help but think again about scholars in the 14th century who taught students. It was more typical of the time that students were "forced" to chose their own textbooks--typically there were fewer, and at the advent of the printing press they were significantly higher in price. As a result students had to spend more time and attention, as Robin indicates here, to come up with useful things.

Even in this period students often annotated their books, which often got passed on to other students and even professors which helped future generations. So really, we're not reinventing the wheel here, we're just doing it anew with new technology that makes doing it all the easier.

As a reference, I'll suggest folks interested in this area read Owen Gingerich's The Book Nobody Read.

This is a nearly perfect question and something to watch in the coming years.

Repackaging public domain texts and charging a steep markup too much above and beyond the cost of the paper is just highway robbery. Unless a publisher is adding some actual annotative or analytical value, they shouldn't be charging outrageous prices for textbooks of this nature.

I can't help but see this definition and think it needs to be applied to economics immediately. In particular I can think of a few quick examples of economic anomie which are artificially covering up a free market and causing issues within individual communities.

College Textbooks: Here publishers are marketing to professors who assign particular textbooks and subverting students which are the actual market and consumers of those textbooks. This causes an inflated market and has allowed textbook prices to spiral out of control.

The American Health Care Market In this example, the health care providers (doctors, hospitals, etc.) have been segmented away from their consumers (patients) by intermediary insurance companies which are driving the market to their own good rather than a free-er set of smaller (and importantly local) markets that would be composed of just the sellers and the buyers. As a result, the consumer of health care has no ability to put a particular price on what they're receiving (and typically they rarely ever ask, even more so when they have insurance). This type of economic anomie is causing terrific havoc within the area.

(Aside: while the majority of health care markets is very small in size (by distance), I will submit that the advent of medical tourism does a bit to widen potential markets, but this segment of the market is tiny and very privileged in comparison.)

This also reminds me of the market disconnect between students and their textbooks. Professors are the ones targeted for the "sale" or adoption when the actual purchasers are the students. This causes all kinds of problems in the way the textbook market works and tends to drive prices up--compared to a market in which the student directly chooses their textbook. (And the set up is not too dissimilar to how the healthcare industry works in which the patient (customer) is making a purchase of health care coverage and not actually the health care itself.

Baraga makes a set of four small works, both in English and Ojibwe, to be used for teaching

Seems to hint to me that on-campus students may be receiving (or perceiving) a superior level of instructor support (thereby making the textbook less relevant). Interesting responsibility for F2F faculty and interesting possible criticism of the level of instructor support provided to online students.

Students who have been primed with the knowledge that this course uses a lower-cost OER text are more critical of textbook price vs use in other courses?

The locking the students into full boat retail and the bookstore is the really sinister bit.

Good baseline

How many bookstores are jumping onto this bandwagon as a way to once again become relevant?

Consistent with BSU

Replacing text books with open resources does push teachers out of their comfort zones!

Sometimes this may be a fabrication because they don't want to buy the books/materials at all. In other cases, some vendors may charge more money for quicker shipping, which can be a factor for those who are more price sensitive and feel they can wait to save a few dollars. In other cases, they may have purchased international editions for a fraction of the US domestic price and shipping from foreign countries may take several weeks.

To me the vast part of the problem is that students assume a "required" textbook is actually required. It doesn't take much work or thought after even the first semester of Freshman year to realize this fallacy. Students need to learn the fine art of choosing their own textbooks. More on this: https://boffosocko.com/2011/07/30/on-choosing-your-own-textbooks/

AND, it's usually not an apples to apples comparison -- the ebook is often newer, better, more directly related to course goals, esp. if a specially-remixed OER.

Results might be different if we tested their price sensitivity: "Would you pay $50 for a print textbook if an online one was available free?"

Should we distinguish between publishers that still believe in the value of their content and others who seem to be saying the content is worthless but they want to capture the homework and assessment revenue?

Role of bookstores and their long-term interest in reducing student costs is often overlooked.

Analogous to the difference between fixed and variable costs in business. Many firms fail because, in spite of impressive infrastructure, they fail to meet payrolls or pay for the next shipment of raw materials.

This is obscene

This is good additional info above and beyond the question of whether students buy the assigned textbook.

I just looked at a few sections of it that apply to what I'm doing currently in my US I course. It's basically the Openstax textbook.

Yeah, and people regularly compile copyrighted material inside a course shell and cite "fair use" but that doesn't mean this is the desired outcome. It's what we have to do when free remixing isn't an option. So it's less something to celebrate as something to evolve beyond.

Two questions re: that: How much more is the authoritative expert's professional curation supposed by the publisher to be worth? Eminent historians writing textbooks. Second, how much of that activity aggregates the work of instructors -- or in other words, replaces that work? Should we have minimum wage instructors in the future using super-value-added digital texts? Why not just eliminate instructors and engage students directly with textbook companies?

Who is eating whose lunch, actually?

This is the transition from print to digital being reproduced in a more expensive print book. How long can that last?

This is not entirely two sides of same coin. But it does emphasize the question about what additional value is the new version of the textbook bringing.

And at the same time, OER’s lack of such ancillary materials is often blamed for its slow adoption.

Point taken. Maybe the lesson is not about the price of books, but who should pay for them. A lot of course materials are produced in factory-like conditions by underpaid creators who have no intellectual property rights in the works they produce.

I love the word for these types of anachronisms: skeumorph.

My heart goes out to anyone trying to write an introductory psychology textbook. It's impossible to be an expert on every area of psychology, so some weaknesses are inevitable. These authors are trying their best.

Consider how changes in publishing impact faculty. Moving from textbooks to courseware and systems changes the customer from faculty to administration.

I think contextualizing Creative Commons material as a component in global justice and thinking of fair distribution of resources and knowledge as an antidote to imperialism is a provocative concept.This blog, infojusticeorg offers perspectives on social justice and Creative Commons by many authors.

If you hold down the CMD or CTRL key while clicking the video links, the video will open up in a new tab. Otherwise, when you go "back" to the book from the video, you'll be sent back to the beginning of the book. Not great.

Textbook alternatives

Research regarding OER

As Good or Better than Commercial Textbooks: Students’ Perceptions and Outcomes from Using Open Digital and Open Print Textbooks

open textbook list

Want to explore what this might look like in an engineering course. Need to identify examples.

Open Pedagogy Notebook

OER creation

Therein lies the rub. Especially if this is to be “easy”.

In fact, Rory McGreal adamantly argues that CC-BY-NC material is too restrictive to be called “OER”. We had a short exchange about this. In Quebec’s Cégep system, NC was the rule for reasons which are probably easy to understand. So the focus is on licenses, in this scene, not on practices. Hence the whole thing about Open Textbooks. Often made me wonder if any of these people had compared textbook-based teaching to any of the other modalities. In my teaching, textbooks are a problem, even when they’re open. Sure, some of those problems can be solved when you have access to the code and can produce your own textbook from that. That’s the typical solution offered in the GitHub sphere:

Just Fork It!

But the core problem remains: if you’re teaching with a textbook, you may not really be building knowledge with learners.

(Should probably move this here.)

Strong words.

There was an interesting example of this during a short conference on digital textbooks, back in late 2014. Cindy Ives interim VP Academic at Athabasca (!) presented the etext pilot project in partnership with publishers. Ives’s approach was quite pragmatic and there’s nothing wrong with doing a pilot project on something like this. By that time, Ives was already involved in OER projects. It still struck a chord with those of us who care about OER, including Éric Francoeur who took an active part in the event and did work to create a free textbook through international and interlinguistic collaboration.

To me, a key notion from the ‘r’ in “OER” is the distinction with those content bundles we still call “textbooks”. Sure, it’s already in the 5-R model. But the “Remix” idea in music is to a large extent about unbundling.

Precisely. To me, this comment also applies to the focus on replacing existing solutions, especially textbooks, but also any kind of content. OER is convenient as a label for a specific thing, related to licenses, but associated with cost (just like “free software” interpreted as no-cost instead of «libre»).

Faculty aren't aware or don't care about textbook expenses. I think this is slowly changing for the better, but 58% is pretty bad.

These are all important aspects of open pedagogy, imo. Transparent, network practices that connect, but also create space and opportunities for particiaption by those on the edges. Working in the open is an invitation to particiaption to others.

We've seen sociologists writing for sociology; educationalist writing for education journals; historians writing for history... Each with their own focus and core questions. This leads to very little interaction with one another... (and a little bit of re-inventing the wheel)

Thomas Edison. Love his quotes!

Interesting...