When I was in high school I signed up for auto shop the spring semester of my Junior year. I really wasn't fired up about it, but I needed something in my schedule and it fit. To my absolute supprise, auto shop with Mr. Taylor turned into one of my most favorite classes of all time! I didn't know anything about cars, but I enjoyed puzzles and solving problems. Mr. Tayor was a no-nonsence, tell-it-like-it-is, practical problem solver who taught me the value of the K.I.S.S. philosophy... Keep It Simple Stupid!
Many of the puzzles and problems that we come across, if they are unfamiliar, we tend to try to over complicate. It's one of those things where, when we know the answer, it seems simple and obvious... but when we don't we develop anxiety within ourselves and thus over complicate the matter.
Take the rubics cube for example. When we first grab that thing, it seems darn near impossible to solve. However, we know that there must be a simple answer because there are people who can solve it in less that 30 seconds!
Mr. Taylor taught me to be practice and keep my solution schemes simple. Some would call this Occam's Razor (the simplest answer tends to be the correct answer), but I prefer Mr. Taylor's KISS (because it makes me smile:)
This is the basic philosophy behind the construction of an open source textbook. The basic idea is to develop content to create viable math textbooks using already existing technology. Certainly fancy graphics would be nice, but cant we just draw what we need and use a scanner to put it into a document? Can't we just use the screen capture feature of the graphing calculator to build the graphics we need? Latex equation editors are open source, very high quality and easy to use in google docs... so why not use them?
The point is that at this point developing a coherent content is more important than displaying computer wizardry... there is certainly enough of that on the internet already. As the community of Open Source grows, perhaps there will be more people to develop things like impressive graphic and interactive applets. But for now... K.I.S.S. does the job. Let the text book companies worry about "keeping up with the Jones'" and spend all their money on half hearted graphics that catch the eye of a potential buyer or endless/empty web resources that are made to impress buyers with volume, not quality.
Mr. Taylor would have encouraged me to look to the cause of the problem. Since textbook companies sell their material to a national audience, they are not really interested in meeting the all needs of local educators... rather to create a product that meets (or appears to meet) as many of the needs in as many places as they can to maximize profit.
An open source textbook may not be flashy, yet. But as the community develops it has the potential of creating an editable resource that has a vast list of contributing authors and multiple versions to choose from... absolutely free!
Imagine if every math teacher could look at their classes at the beginning of the semester and tell them, honestly, that they are the author of the textbook that will be used in class.
How cool would that be?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment