Pirates, Textbooks, and Drugs

Hi,

Bloom's Taxonomy according to Pirates of the Caribbean : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjhKmhKjzsQ .

I've been told that, in order to progress in learning a new programming language, I have to memorize an exact sequence of commands even though I don't understand it. My brain hurts, so it started to wander around on its own and found some more stuff. Now I know what my students in Chem12 must feel like.

This series has a bit of a theme going. First is a New York Times article : http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/technology/01ping.html?_r=1&th&emc=th. The article is on textbooks, and comparing purchasing textbooks, or using readily available Internet resources and essentially make your own free textbooks. The 'Curriki' (free website) is here: http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome. The article makes the point that "2+2=4" for quite awhile, and writing and re-writing textbooks for the sake of purchasing new ones doesn't make much sense. In Chemistry (11 & 12) we have two textbooks - one's essentially a workbook, and another for background material in case the lecture doesn't quite cut it for explanations. I could easily see online materials taking up the roles of the latter - reaction kinetics is unlikely to change, and if it does I rather suspect online resources will change faster than the textbooks. The workbook on the other hand isn't possible to duplicate, but only as it's full of practice problems + answers that just isn't available anywhere else. Someday that might change, or perhaps I just haven't found it.

Continuing that theme is a blog from "Cool Cat Teacher" on comparing textbooks to buggy whips and railroads:  http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/2010/07/buggy-whips-railroads-and-paper.html .

Other sources for digital textbooks are http://about.ck12.org/ , an initiative to create "Flexbooks", which are freely available. When I last looked at Flexbooks the offerings were poor, but glancing at the chemistry text available it has improved substantially. Bookboon (http://bookboon.com/int) creates its own free textbooks, although they do put ads in them as well. WikiEducator has a link to these and a lot more ( http://wikieducator.org/Free_textbooks ).

Lastly, and completely unrelated, change.org has an article on the latest study from the U.S. Dept of Education : http://education.change.org/blog/view/why_peeing_in_a_cup_wont_win_the_drug_war. Apparently the last U.S. administration instituted funding for randomized drug testing in schools, and somebody decided to study it to see if it work. Science ruins everything.

Regards,

Ron Neufeld

Canada's Best Boarding School