What are the flaws with this common sense proposal re school textbooks

In My Humble Opinion
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[QUOTE=Cardinal]
I like the idea generally of making kids pay for lockers, but you know that when one kid got the money for a locker, he’d tell 5 friends the combination. I don’t know that it’s a real problem, though.
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I don’t think it is. If they’re each willing to live with one-fifth of a locker, why shouldn’t they share one locker between the five of them? The goal is to save locker space, not to provide income for the school, right?

I think it’s a bad idea in general to make students pay for their lockers, though. What are they supposed to do if they don’t pay: carry all of their books, their lunches, and their winter coats/boots around to every class? If so, they should get a gym credit just for coming to school. :wink:

Solution: increase the downtime between classes. At my high school, the 5 minute breaks between classes only gave us enough time to stop at our lockers if they were along the way. The halls looked just like this, and it took almost the whole break just to get from one room to the other.

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[QUOTE=Mr2001]
Solution: increase the downtime between classes.
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Oh, I know that’s a possible solution, but there will be people who then will complain that their work day has been increased by 12 minutes.

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[QUOTE=tashabot]
And I can’t see why it would be such a hard thing for the printing companies, because a lot of the time (not all of the time) they have to convert the pages to PDF anyway for printing - it’s ready made!
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It isn’t hard – just unprofitable. Nothing in this idea leads to bigger profits for the textbook companies. So why would they consider doing it?

In fact, it would probably cut into their profits. No doubt some schools would buy fewer paper copies of the books, and use the e-versions instead. Just putting a display projector in the classroom, and using the ebook instead of buying a classroom copy would probably pay for itself in a few years.

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[QUOTE=t-bonham@scc.net]
It isn’t hard – just unprofitable. Nothing in this idea leads to bigger profits for the textbook companies. So why would they consider doing it?

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I’ve been involved in technology in education for a long time. I was part of the movement in Australia where every kid from year 5 to 12 in a school had their own laptop which they took to every class. OK, wealthy private schools. We talked to lots of publishers about the possibility of getting all textbooks on CD. As an author, their answer made a lot of sense. It is too easy to copy them. A large prooprtion would not buy a text book, they’d just copy. Who would police it? That was ten years ago, but I doubt it has changed.

The comment about longevity is also true. One of my first ‘books’ was the first CD textbook in Australia, on chaos theory and fractal geometry. I can’t read my own CD any more! Paper can be read by everyone. Until there are long term standards in ebooks, it is not an attractive proposition.

I also write online material in my speciality - extension units for gifted kids. These are in HTML only, no fancy intereaction, so the schools can put them on the network and every page can be printed. All the schools which use them beg me to stick to that very simple mode. They can’t go wrong. Even the schools in Silicon Valley print out the material for the kids to use!

Most schools are just getting to the stage where the teachers are all confident enough with the technology to use my units when they need extension for the few kids in the class who have mastered the regular material quickly. So your other issue is the skills and confidence of the teachers. That is not a criticism of teachers - anything but - software people seem to love adding their own little ‘features’ which means you have a class of 20 or 30 kids and suddenly you find a new ‘feature’ which holds up the lesson. Teachers don’t have the time to spend hours ensuring they can handle all possibilities.

I have no doubt e-textbooks will be the future - it is starting in universities now. But there are a few hurdles yet.

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Another current student weighing in:

Currently, it’s not feasible. As others have said, there is a sizeable minority of school-age kids without Internet access – and even if you have a connection, it’s not necessarily always working, and it’s also not necessarily going to be DSL (downloading a textbook would take days with dial-up). I had dial-up until about the middle of my junior year, and if I had had to get online and download a textbook to do the assigned reading, I would have gotten even worse grades. And even with those two things, the computer may not be available long enough every night for homework.

At my school, most of the time there are two sets of books, classroom and personal, and students are warned ahead of time if textbooks will be necessary. That’s for the big books, though; for AP US History, the review book was fairly small, and we were required to bring it every time. AP Government and Geosystems both have large (but not thick) hardback textbooks, and I think we have to bring them.

As far as I have been able to tell, there are two major ideas here. One is that students would download their textbooks instead of carrying them around, and in that case, you also have the problem of not having access to them on the bus (which I would say many, if not most, students use). The other is to have portable PDF readers for each student, and even if they were sufficiently durable to be carried around in backpacks and so on, I seriously doubt they would be cheap enough for most families to buy.

Basically what I’m saying is that the problem exists, but it can be mitigated, and this plan won’t work with the resources available today.

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[QUOTE=Captain Carrot]
Another current student weighing in:

Currently, it’s not feasible. As others have said, there is a sizeable minority of school-age kids without Internet access – and even if you have a connection, it’s not necessarily always working, and it’s also not necessarily going to be DSL (downloading a textbook would take days with dial-up). I had dial-up until about the middle of my junior year, and if I had had to get online and download a textbook to do the assigned reading, I would have gotten even worse grades. And even with those two things, the computer may not be available long enough every night for homework.

At my school, most of the time there are two sets of books, classroom and personal, and students are warned ahead of time if textbooks will be necessary. That’s for the big books, though; for AP US History, the review book was fairly small, and we were required to bring it every time. AP Government and Geosystems both have large (but not thick) hardback textbooks, and I think we have to bring them.

As far as I have been able to tell, there are two major ideas here. One is that students would download their textbooks instead of carrying them around, and in that case, you also have the problem of not having access to them on the bus (which I would say many, if not most, students use). The other is to have portable PDF readers for each student, and even if they were sufficiently durable to be carried around in backpacks and so on, I seriously doubt they would be cheap enough for most families to buy.

Basically what I’m saying is that the problem exists, but it can be mitigated, and this plan won’t work with the resources available today.
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1: Again this is a supplemental notion, kids would still have paper books, the ebook pages are mainly backup for homework done at home and are only provided by the publisher along with the purchase of paper textbooks.

2: People keep referring to the Internet have nots as some “sizeable” proportion fo the school age population. It’s currently somewhere between 10 to 20 percent of the school age population, and even if it were larger it hardly provides a rationale for why the supplemental ebook versions shouldn’t be made available.

3: Regarding speed the books would also be downloadable as complete books and as individual pages which would typically be 100K to 300K each. Even with POTS land-line cheapo winmodem it’s not going to take more than 5 to 30 minutes to download the necessary 1 to 10 pages of the textbook assignment.

4: Regarding technology you can currently buy new, complete PCs for around $ 300 which are powerful enough to read any pdf.

To reiterate:

1: It is trivial in cost and technology to generate these pages.

2: Assuming the publishers refuse to host this data the vast majority of schools already have websites on which data like this can be uploaded and hosted.

3: For the 80- to 90 percent of kids that do have net access it would save a great deal of lugging over sized textbooks back and forth. I not talking about needing portable ebook readers. I’m talking about the basic notion of pdf pages being available for downloading by kids, which are currently readable by the vast majority of home PCs.

4: From a cost/benefit and “doability” perspective this would seem to a be slam dunk. The main issue is convincing publishers to provide the ebook version as well as the paper version, and this can easily be dealt with through market negotiation, IE “You want the book contract Mr. Publisher? Provide the pdf pages and a license to use them along with the paper books.”

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My college currently has a subscription to a service that puts textbooks online - they deal with getting the publishers to put the stuff online, we just get the service from them. It works pretty well, and everything is in HTML format.

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In 11th grade, our physics text books came with CDs with the book in PDF format. I hated it. It was difficult to read, and especially was a problem because you couldn’t just flip around in the book at will.

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Think back on all the times you’ve had to call tech support. Now imagine hundreds of thousends of students having the same problems–given that they even care enough to call (the dog eating homework becomes quaint when tech support is involved). It’s hard enough to give out laptops to teachers. Giving them to students? That’ll just be chaos. Unless they’re cheaper than the text books themselves, which is a future possibility.

The problem is not the medium. It’s the way in which the current medium is used.

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[QUOTE=guizot]
It’s hard enough to give out laptops to teachers. Giving them to students? That’ll just be chaos. Unless they’re cheaper than the text books themselves, which is a future possibility.

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Laptops for all students is possible. We have been doing it on some schools here in Australia for well over 10 years. They are ‘on the booklist’. I ran the laptop scheme for a school with about 1500 laptops in student hands. I had a technical staff of 8 and worked closely with the suppliers and their technical staff. That also covered supporting teaching and admin staff with development of curriculum materials to go on them, and approriate use of the technology in their curriculum area. It was a challenge!

The cost is the main reason this has not spread beyond the wealthier private schools. But we still used textbooks for most subjects.

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[QUOTE=guizot]
Think back on all the times you’ve had to call tech support. Now imagine hundreds of thousends of students having the same problems–given that they even care enough to call (the dog eating homework becomes quaint when tech support is involved). It’s hard enough to give out laptops to teachers. Giving them to students? That’ll just be chaos. Unless they’re cheaper than the text books themselves, which is a future possibility.

The problem is not the medium. It’s the way in which the current medium is used.
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Or think of how rough kids tend to be on textbooks! Giving every kid a PDF reader or what have you would get to be DAMNED expensive over time.

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One of the things parents are advised to do to discourage their child from searching out porn & whatnot on the family computer, is to place that computer in a fairly highly trafficked location such as the family room. One of the things schools advise is having a quiet calm place for kids to study so that they can concentrate on their homework.

I think both of these bits of advice are great. We follow both of them. However, if it were to become “normal”* in her school to download the textbook as needed then I’d have to put an internet accessible pc in her bedroom or have her try and study in the family room.

This would necessitate the purchase of another pc and paying for another hookup in her room. Download and print the text in the family room so she could take in her room to study? Who’s going to pay for the expensive ink cartridges? Make her study in the family room? Great way to keep grades up.

It’s one thing for a family to afford one pc & internet connection with a printer that’s used minimally (currently our ink lasts almost 6 months). It’s quite different to print lots of pages everyday (imagine 5-10 pages per subject). Ink is not cheap & it’s a pain to keep reams of paper lying around.

Can you picture the first day of class? The teacher asking, “who needs a paper textbook to take home”? Kids raising their hand and admitting they’re too poor to have internet access?

Plus, then you’re turning internet access from a luxury item to a necessity. I can just hear comcast jumping with glee. Times hard? Can’t let the internet connection go, little susy needs to study and there aren’t any more textbooks available at school." Rates would go up even more.