1. Open Source Textbooks Powerful Ideas and Sharp Tools Edward Cherlin Earth Treasury SVLUG Apr 1, 2009

2. Motto The best way to predict the future is to prevent it. Alan Kay

3. Where Are We Now? ● Microsoft dominant ● The end of Reagonomics, maybe ● Children hostage to “right answers”, pressure groups, standardized tests ● States hostage to publishing process—only Texas, New York, and California can get textbooks published ● Everything under copyright ● Bureaucracy everywhere

4. Richard Feynman...the books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried...The definitions weren't accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous...They were faking it. They were teaching something... useless, at that time, for the child. Judging Books by Their CoversJudging Books by Their Covers, in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

5. Where Would YOU Like to Go? ● Free Software for all ● Creative Commons content ● Children allowed to learn anything ● Continuous improvement of learning materials— shallow bugs under review by children and teachers ● Collaborative discovery ● No learned helplessness in schools

6. The Tipping Point for Linux Domination ● One million OLPC XOs in 2008 ● More than a million other Linux laptops on order ● Target: one billion children, plus families and friends ● We must show that our children will be able to get jobs ● We must show that our children will be able to start businesses ● ROI of education extremely high everywhere

7. Dead Tree Textbooks ● Publishing, printing, warehousing, distribution ● Minimum print run for profitability ● Perverse incentives to publishers ● Bureaucratic acquisition process ● Pressure groups ● Copyright ● Impossibility of timely editing and improvement ● Weight

8. Digital Textbooks ● Not static PDFs, but fully interactive. ● The cost is only in the writing. ● Volunteers to write what they know and like. ● Contracts for the most urgent materials. ● Continuous improvement by students and teachers.

9. Powerful Ideas ● Not just “right answers” ● The most important questions in life, work, and politics don’t have right answers. ● What is that? Is it real? How do you know? ● Should you believe me? ● Now what? What is important enough so that I should do it even if I don’t want to?

10. Sharp Tools ● Free/Open Source Software ● Localize, modify ● Important applications ● The ideas behind programming, not the syntax ● Collaboration (not defined as “cheating”) ● Discovery ● Real-world problem solving

11. What Nepali Students Needed

12. Every subject, every age I ● Kindergarten Calculus ● Put a straight edge up to a curve to find the direction of a curve ● Draw curves, cut out shapes and weigh them to find area under a curve ● Direction is horizontal at maximum and minimum ● Learn properties of curves by experience ● Notation and calculation come in later ● Alan Kay, others

13. Every subject, every age II ● Civics ● Human rights ● Law ● How do governments really work? ● What can the public do about corruption and incompetence? ● What if every citizen were in the conversation? ● Larry Lessig (Change Congress), PJ (Groklaw)

14. Literacy ● Text-to-speech with karaoke coloring. ● Works like Same Language Subtitling in India. ● If parents are illiterate, computer reads stories to children.

15. Language ● The riches of the Internet ● Chat pals around the world ● Cooperative games ● Teach children while they can still learn easily and without accent

16. Integration in Curriculum ● Not Computer Literacy for an hour a week ● Every child has the same software ● The software is part of the textbooks ● The software is part of the homework ● We can teach deeper concepts, at earlier ages ● Every subject, including PhysEd

17. Textbook Project ● OLPC ● Sugar Labs ● Earth Treasury ● Creative Commons ● Alan Kay’s Squeakland ● Doug Engelbart Institute ● The Tech Museum of Innovation ● http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Creating_textbooks

18. Epictetus Only the educated are free.

19. Resources OLPC: http://laptop.org/http://laptop.org/ Sugar software: http://sugarlabs.org/http://sugarlabs.org/ Earth Treasury plan: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Earth_Treasury http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Earth_Treasury Free textbooks: http://www.librarianchick.com/http://www.librarianchick.com/ Creating new kinds of textbooks: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Creating_textbooks http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Creating_textbooks FLOSS Manuals: http://www.flossmanuals.nethttp://www.flossmanuals.net