Professor Woodie Flowers on Educational Reform

[Mr. Freeman]

Interesting video. I agree that the system needs to change. I don't agree with a lot of what Woodie said though.

The whole bit about textbooks being as outdated as records is, I believe, complete nonsense. I like my textbooks and I will never consider replacing them with an electronic version.

I can take them with me, I can mark multiple pages, I can hold 4 pages open with one hand and flip between them easily (eg. the concept of something, an example, and a table of enthalpy values). My books don't run out of battery power if I forget my charger, my books don't blue screen on me, I don't have to boot them up, I don't have to shut them down, they don't get hot if I leave them on my lap.
I can write notes into my books (don't even start with the tablet PC talk, writing on one of those is marginally easier than writing on glass with a crayon), I can put bookmarks in them, etc.

Books also don't flicker or cause eye strain like computer monitors do (and this isn't something you can "just deal with", ever try studying for a test with a migraine due to insane eye strain? Neither have I, but I don't want to try.)

The kindle and Sony readers use an e-ink display which solves the eye strain problems. They have their own problems. They're more than $200 on their own, then there's the textbooks that you have to buy to put on them anyway. Then there's the fact that amazon can lock you out of your kindle account at any time for any reason and leave you with no ability to purchase more books on the kindle. THIS IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR A BOOK. A product that you can be locked out of at any time is only as useful for serious work as it is in its most worthless state.

I do agree with Woodie's open-source textbook idea though. (He never used that term, but I'm pretty sure that's what he's talking about). Getting more people to work on textbooks and finally getting rid of these publishers that make more "revisions" of their textbooks that are really just rearranging material and changing the problem sets. (eg. How much has calculus changed in the last 100 years? Compare that with the number of new calculus textbook versions in the last 5 years)