Techucation

Unbound!

I have made a few posts over the past 9 months that are critical of the traditional textbook. In January I made the case for no textbooks at all in the post Textbooks: Are They Still Relevant. I also directed traffic to a friends blog post “e-Textbooks vs. Traditional Textbooks that discussed the transition to a digital version of a textbook.

I have been involved in quite a few online discussions where I support the movement from the traditional textbook to an e-textbook with an ultimate goal of no textbooks at all. I wholeheartedly believe that an environment where students gather information, evaluate the merit of the content, learn to understand the concepts included and ultimately create and present new cognitive content is the optimal learning experience. I feel that textbooks in general are a form of “spoon feeding” knowledge to learners. I understand that students in their early years have a greater need for a traditional textbook but I think high school students should have the capacity to learn without textbooks.

Having said all of the above, why would we continue to pay astronomical fees to provide a product to a student that provides a less-than-optimal environment for learning? If we must continue to use textbooks, isn’t there a less expensive source?

Yes! There are multiple sources. These sources provide not only cost-effective, high-quality, standards-aligned textbooks but in a manner that can be customized to fit the needs of the instructor or course. The ability to customize can also support the concept of differentiated learning by providing a different text for different learning styles or even for those who have learning challenges.

Here is a list of some resources for finding these low cost or even free textbooks and also some resources for understanding the movement to free, collaborative content delivery.

• CK-12 Flexbooks - A great source for textbooks with the ability to create customized textbooks. CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization with a mission to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U.S. and worldwide. Using an open-content, web-based collaborative model termed the “FlexBook,” CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality educational content that will serve both as core text as well as provide an adaptive environment for learning. The content generated by CK-12 and the CK-12 community will serve both as source material for a student’s learning and provide an adaptive environment that scaffolds the learner’s journey as he or she masters a standards-based body of knowledge, while allowing for passion-based learning.

Here is a video demonstration on creating a Flexbook. In this video clips Murugan Pal, co-founder and CTO of CK-12 walks us through a demo of how a flexbook is created.

• Wikibooks - a Wikimedia community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit. Wikibooks began on July 10, 2003; since then Wikibooks has grown to include over 38,002 pages in a multitude of textbooks created by volunteers that not only provide content but also revisions for accuracy.
• Textbook Revolution - a student-run site dedicated to increasing the use of free educational materials by teachers and professors. You’ll find links to textbooks and select educational resources that are either PDF files or online e-books. Most books are aimed at undergraduates, but there are at least a few resources at every level, from kindergarten to post-doc. All of the books are offered for no-cost (gratis) by their respective copyright holders.
• Free Textbooks Internet Library - a collection of free textbooks, courses and information
• FreeScience.info - Just what it says, a resource for free science textbooks.
• Complete Curriculum - LAUNCHING JANUARY 2010 - Complete Curriculum provides digital textbook solutions for K 12 instruction, as stand-alone comprehensive texts or customized textbooks that you create and store on your personal online bookshelf – both of which you provide to your students – and their parents – for free!
• Curriki - a community of educators, learners and committed education experts who are working together to create quality materials that will benefit teachers and students around the world. Curriki is an online environment created to support the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them. Our name is a play on the combination of ‘curriculum’ and ‘wiki’ which is the technology we’re using to make education universally accessible.
• Connexions - a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute:

http://www.ted.com Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind Connexions, his open-source, online education system. It cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share and modify course materials freely, anywhere in the world.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes — including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10

• FreeReading - a free, high-quality, open-source reading program addressing literacy development for grades K-3. Leveraging the collective wisdom of researchers, teachers, reading coaches, and other education and industry professionals, FreeReading provides a high-quality, cost-effective alternative to static materials. By establishing a foundation of hundreds of research-based lessons and materials that users can download and use for free, FreeReading has created the framework for intervention programs supporting K-6 literacy. The collective wisdom within FreeReading is invaluable and can be more beneficial than any one reading program.
• HippoCampus - HippoCampus is a project of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE). The goal of HippoCampus is to provide high-quality, multimedia content on general education subjects to high school and college students free of charge.
• K12 Open Ed - A blog for reflecting on the opportunities and challenges in open education with great resources to provide further understanding of open source, creative commons and free content. Be sure to read through the blog.
• Openeducation.net - OpenEducation.net is a site dedicated to tracking the changes occurring in education today. In an era where it is possible to Photoshop images, Facebook people, and access to an endless stream of knowledge by “Googling”, the Internet Age offers both great promise and enormous challenges for educators. At OpenEducation.net, readers will be exposed to both an objective and subjective look at the many issues facing the profession today.
• OER Commons - ISKME created OER Commons, publicly launched in February 2007, to provide support for and build a knowledge base around the use and reuse of open educational resources (OER). As a network for teaching and learning materials, the web site offers engagement with resources in the form of social bookmarking, tagging, rating, and reviewing. OER Commons has forged alliances with over 120 major content partners to provide a single point of access through which educators and learners can search across collections to access over 24,000 items, find and provide descriptive information about each resource, and retrieve the ones they need. By being “open,” these resources are publicly available for all to use, and principally through Creative Commons licensing, many thousands are legally available for repurposing, modifying and improving.

RESOURCES USED IN THIS POST (Not linked above)

• FreeSaurus iPhone App
• Dictionary.com iPhone App
• In a Digital Future, Textbooks are History from The New York Times
• Gov. Schwarzenegger Releases Free Digital Textbook Initiative Phase 1 Report
• CK-12 Foundation
• Beyond Textbooks
• Center for Digital Education
• Back to School: It’s Raining Textbooks from Creative Commons
• Wikipedia
• Google
• Free online materials could save schools billions from the USA Today

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