Free/Libre Open Source Science Education: Thinking about textbooks

I teach physics and an electronics with Arduino class. I've never used a textbook in my electronics class, unless you consider my webpage to be a textbook, and have been relying less and less on the textbook for my physics class. Our book simply became a source of problems and really very little more than that. Consequently, this year I didn't require a textbook.?I teach at a private school and students are responsible for buying their own textbooks, so if I don't require one they won't buy one.I have since come to realize that some students do rely on the text. This is particularly true for students who don't "get it" the first or second time through in class as well as those students who might be out of class for an extended period of time (chronic illness, mono, family vacation). So I decided to kick the tires on iBooks Author to see if I could create a series of Study Guides to supplement my curriculum.

It wasn't until I read a blog post by Dan Meyer that I finally realized why it's so hard writing a book to teach. dy/dan summed it up pretty well. Textbooks try to be both instructional guides and comprehensive reference texts at the same time, "...the goals of a reference text and the goals of instructional materials ? cut across each other."

So I might ask a student, "How does horizontal velocity affect time in the air?" At that point I have two choices. I can hope they get it and then move on, or I have to give them the answer. If they don't have the answer they can't make meaning from the subsequent material.

At some level I'll have to give them the answers. But as Dan points out, adding extra pages to an iBook does not affect it's cost or weight. This will allow me to move the answers to the next page, an appendix, put answers in white text that only appears when highlighted, or maybe I could co-opt the glossary. In the end I think I'll play with multiple ways of occluding the answers until the students get a chance to think. I know, of course, that there will always be students who dive straight into looking, but this version of the material would be support and not the primary way my students will learn.

Ideally I'd have a resource that would allow me to multiply myself so I could have a Socratic dialog with each of my students individually or in small gourds, at any hour of the day or night. I think this would lead to much greater learning, however it is not likely to ever happen and I enjoy my sanity.

Since I can't create a Socratic Dialog app, I'll try instead to create a study guide that I believe my students can learn from. So far all I have is one section of one chapter and it's in pretty rough form. This is partly because I'm still playing with what is possible and partly because I'm creating all my content as I go. Which means I often change my train of thought and have to redo the whole layout and flow. My book also has some extra white space. This happens because I want students to consider what's on the page in front of them before I give them the answer. I may try to fill in some of the white space with pictures later, I haven't decided yet.

If you have an iPad you can see what I've been working on. I put the current draft in my public folder on DropBox. If you're on your iPad simply click the link and wait. It's a 20 MB file so might take a little while to download. The screen will be white and it will look like nothing is happening, but eventually you'll be presented with the option to "Open In iBooks". Projectile Motion iBook

Source: http://www.flosscience.com/2012/02/thinking-about-textbooks.html

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