eReader/Tablets

One of the biggest hurdles for digital textbooks has been a lack of devices that give students the same kind of usability that printed textbooks offer: the ability to highlight, the ability to annotate, and true durability.  With Apple’s recent release of the iPad, some of these issues have been addressed and hopefully as these products evolve, all of these issues surrounding digital textbooks will be solved. Listed below are some of the eReaders/Tablets that have been released as well as some new ones that are on the horizon:

Already Released

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Announced/Rumored

Interactivity

As the “digital age” has evolved, the way we consume information has changed. We now receive our information from a variety of different sources and in a variety of different formats. This evolution has had a profound impact on the way the younger generations learn and consequently, as digital textbooks achieve higher adoption rates, companies should be thinking of ways to make them more effective for students by creating new avenues in which they can learn. Listed below are some companies that have recently begun to develop innovative ways to give students more learning options in a variety of different digital formats:

Affordability

In theory, the price of digital textbooks should be lower because they do not require the overhead that printed textbooks require to produce (manufacturing plants, warehousing, shipping, etc.); however, that is currently not the case with most of digital textbooks that are available. The traditional major publishers have yet to devise a new business model to make textbooks more affordable, and instead are clinging to their old ways rather than trying to innovate. Listed below are some startup publishers who are trying to promote new business models that would create more affordable textbooks for students:

Boston Mathematician Re-Inventing Textbooks with Modern Students in Mind

Move to Digital

As the world rapidly becomes more and more digital in every aspect of life, it is only a matter of time before most textbooks move into a digital format. The publishers have been offering digital textbooks (or supplements) for years, but with the recent explosion of the tablet/eReader, this trend towards digital textbooks is only accelerating.  In fact, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT’s Media Lab and the One Laptop per Child Association, recently claimed that in the next five years the digital book will replace the printed book as the more dominant format in the publishing industry. While I do not necessarily agree with this timeline, I do believe that this movement will occur sometime within the next decade.

The issue this raises is that as textbooks do become more digital, the price of printed textbooks will only rise in coordination with the increased adoption of digital textbooks (supply and demand). Consequently, services like Chegg.com and BookRenter.com will have to raise their prices accordingly, and even if one decides to purchase a digital textbook, the price of that digital textbook will still be exorbitantly high because the publishers will want to maintain their margins. Therefore, while textbook renting might be a cost-saver at the moment, it does not create a sustainable model that will reduce costs for students in the long term.

More Effective Educational Tools

From an educational standpoint, textbook renting also does not encourage the evolution of the textbook into a more effective educational tool. It is a common complaint among high school and college staff that very few students read their textbooks any more, and the question is why? Perhaps it is because students are evolving and do not learn in the same way that their parents or grandparents learned. It should be the responsibility of the publishers to recognize this and realize there is a huge market opportunity if they were to develop affordable, multimedia, digital textbooks for students that allow them to choose whichever method best suits their learning style (video, reading, interactive, etc.). Instead of developing new textbooks in coordination with new business models that would truly help their customers learn more effectively and affordably, the publishers are trying to devise ways to combat services like textbook renting and other money-saving opportunities for students to protect their bottom line.

Where Does the Industry Go from Here?

Within the next ten years, the education industry will undergo a transformation that will fundamentally change the way it currently operates; consequently, industries that serve the education market, like textbook publishing, will need to undergo a transformation as well. While currently textbook renting is a great option for students to save money, it will not be a long term solution to making textbooks more affordable and effective for students. Startup publishers like the Worldwide Center of Mathematics and Flat World Knowledge are just the beginning of what will surely be a very competitive market to help bring down the cost of textbooks and ultimately make education more affordable for students.

Money is Not Always the Answer

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the US spends almost $600 billion on public education every year. We have access to some of the best facilities, technology, faculty etc. in the world today and yet it still does not seem to change the fact US students are not performing as well as the majority of their foreign peers. Like many other social initiatives, the problems with the US education system cannot be solved by merely increasing funding to a system that is clearly broken. In fact, according to author Jay Greene, over the course of the last 30 years, we have doubled per pupil spending (adjusting for inflation), and our schools are still no better. Consequently, while the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” program is a laudable effort and utilizes a creative, incentive-laden method for states, it does not address one of the main causes of the problem.

The Structure of Teachers’ Unions

There are many problems with US education that stem from several different areas: American culture in general, lack of parental involvement, cost of supplies/textbooks, and the teachers’ unions that dominate most of the school systems here in the US. The problem with this is that the teachers’ unions are some of the most powerful lobbyist groups in the US and consequently, they possess immense bargaining power when it comes to negotiating contracts for their members. Often times, these contracts are ultimately not what is best for the students and they are the ones who suffer as a result. Even Albert Shanker, one of the early leaders of New York’s United Federation of Teachers, admitted in the 1990’s that the unions were harming education, and he compared the unions in education to how unions were harming the automobile industry by affecting quality. The real question remains how can we improve the quality of education, while also not marginalizing many of the great teachers who currently educate our young people?

The Future of the Education System

The Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” program is a step in the right direction with regard to education reform policy, but it should not be the only piece of legislation that is designed to create change within the US education system. There needs to be more reform measures like this on that focus on accountability, effectiveness, and performance to better track how our students are doing. There also needs to be community support and involvement from students and parents, which will mean creating ways to remove the apathy and disinterest that has settled within some communities across the US. We have reached a crossroads in the US within the education system, and these types of reforms will not be easy; however, what people need to realize is that without some pain and reform now, the system will not get better and thus we will continue to get worse as a nation as a whole.

Abstract: The titular, foundational work of Beilinson not only gives a technique for gluing perverse sheaves but also implicitly contains constructions of the nearby and vanishing cycles functors of perverse sheaves. These constructions are completely elementary and show that these functors preserve perversity and respect Verdier duality on perverse sheaves. The work also defines a new, “maximal extension” functor, which is left mysterious aside from its role in the gluing theorem. In this talk, we will attempt to clarify some of these notions and results, and present details of some of the constructions and theorems.

The Worldwide Center of Mathematics (www.centerofmath.org) is located midway between Harvard and Central Squares, at 929 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, in Suite #102. Travel to the Center by public transportation is easy via the #1 bus, or by taking the subway (the T) to Central Square, and walking for 10 minutes. Suite #102 is located on floor 01.

All attendees will need to sign a release form, as the lecture will be recorded for distribution on the Web.

Abstract: Given a finite CW-complex X and a positive integer k, the Galois covers of X with group of deck transformations Z^k are parametrized by the Grassmannian of k-planes in the vector space V = H^1(X, Q). Moving about this rational Grassmannian, and recording when the Betti numbers of the corresponding covers are all finite (up to some fixed degree i) defines certain subsets Omega^i_k(X) of Gr_k(V).

These sets (first studied by Dwyer and Fried in the 1980s) record delicate information on the homological finiteness properties of spaces and groups. I will present a method for determining the sets Omega^i_k(X), using the cohomology jumping loci of X, and the classical incidence correspondence between projective varieties and subvarieties of the Grassmannian. Under favorable conditions, the Omega-invariants are controlled by suitable arrangements of special Schubert varieties. In turn, these arrangements can be computed directly from the cohomology ring of X.

The Worldwide Center of Mathematics, www.centerofmath.org , is located midway between Harvard and Central Squares, at 929 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, in Suite #102. Travel to the Center by public transportation is easy via the #1 bus, or by taking the subway (the T) to Central Square, and walking for 10 minutes. Suite #102 is located on floor 01.

All attendees will need to sign a release form, as the lecture will be recorded for distribution on the Web.

One might question why these graduates have incurred so much debt, and it is directly related to the rapidly increasing cost of college tuition. The chart below illustrates that between 1978 and 2008, the cost of college tuition at private universities increased at more than three times the rate of inflation, and in fact increased more than even the cost of healthcare in the US, which is another industry that has had widely publicized price increases.

One factor that is fast becoming one of the most expensive costs associated with college is the price of textbooks. As we have covered previously, the average student spends $900 per semester on textbooks, which translates into $7,200 over the course of that student’s college career. We want to examine how much the average college graduate would have to pay assuming they took out a Stafford loan for $7,200 for the traditional ten years for all of their textbooks.

Over the course of the ten years, a graduate would pay almost $2,750 in interest to cover the cost of the books they purchased in college; that is $2,750 that they would not be able to invest for their own future, whether it would be saving for retirement, putting towards a house, etc.  Considering the rapidly rising cost of tuition and fees, don’t you think it’s time we considered at least one way to help reduce the cost of education for students by reducing the cost of textbooks?

]]> http://www.centerofmath.org/blog/the-state-of-the-textbook-industry-facts-and-figures/feed/ 2 http://www.centerofmath.org/blog/upcoming-research-lecture-dr-pavel-etingof-to-speak-on-friday-june-11-2010/ http://www.centerofmath.org/blog/upcoming-research-lecture-dr-pavel-etingof-to-speak-on-friday-june-11-2010/#comments Fri, 28 May 2010 18:59:34 +0000 Brian L http://www.centerofmath.org/blog/?p=219 Please join us on Friday, June 11, 2010 as Dr. Pavel Etingof of MIT will be giving a lecture about D-modules on Poisson varieties and Poisson traces. We will be serving coffee, tea, and cookies starting at 3:30pm and the lecture will begin at 4:00pm.  The lecture will be held in our studio classroom at 929 Massachusetts Avenue Suite #102 in Cambridge. The abstract is listed below and we look forward to seeing you!

Abstract: Let V be an affine symplectic algebraic variety over C, and G a finite group of automorphisms of V (for example, V is a symplectic vector space, and G is a subgroup of Sp(V)). Let A be the algebra of regular functions on V/G, and E be the space of linear functionals on A which are invariant under Hamiltonian vector fields on V/G (so called Poisson traces). It turns out that E is finite dimensional.  I will explain how to prove and generalize this statement, using the theory of D-modules, and will also describe some applications to noncommutative algebra. This is joint work with Travis Schedler.

The Worldwide Center of Mathematics, www.centerofmath.org , is located midway between Harvard and Central Squares, at 929 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, in Suite #102. Travel to the Center by public transportation is easy via the #1 bus, or by taking the subway (the T) to Central Square, and walking for 10 minutes. Suite #102 is located on floor 01.

All attendees will need to sign a release form, as the lecture will be recorded for distribution on the Web.

From the article: