Volunteering on time

A dilemma for the modern world is that the people who have critical knowledge and expertise have many demands on their time, and many of these same people want to help the less fortunate. Endeavors such as the Global Text Project face this fundamental problem.

Don and I have presented the idea for the Global Text Project to, I estimate, well over a thousand people, and we always receive a highly enthusiastic response. Many people want to help and agree to take on chapter writing and book editing.

We find, however, that our volunteers don't always deliver on time. Of course, this is nothing new for anyone who has been involved in academic book editing. Academics, like most people with a high level of expertise, are very busy and usually over committed. As one friend commented, "In the academic world, an opportunity of lifetime comes along every day," and we accept too many of these opportunities. The Global Text Project is the opportunity of a lifetime for students in the developing world. Free textbooks support education, which is a chance for a better life for many people.

If we can't get chapters written in a timely fashion, then it is difficult for the Global Text Project to meet its goal, in a reasonable time frame, of making textbooks freely available.

I would appreciate any ideas on how we can increase the timeliness with which chapters are completed. Are there incentives we can provide? Should we create different expectations? Should we monitor chapter editors more closely?

Your comments are most welcome.

Cheers

Rick

More on the Cost of Traditional Textbooks

"Make Textbooks Affordable" is one of several initiatives of The Student Public Interest Research Groups (PIRG). The Make Textbooks Affordable site contains a rich source of news, resources, and even possible solutions to the high cost of textbooks. Dave Rosenfeld is the campaign coordinator. Dave's analysis of a May 2007 report by the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, sponsored by US Department of Education, is worth a read. (The report's title is "Turn the Page - Making Textbooks More Affordable" and contains a total of 95 pages).

Quoting from the section of Dave's analysis most related to the Global text Project:

"There are many 21st Century Technologies that are dramatically less expensive and more flexible than traditionally licensed books. The report correctly identifies many of the alternatives to high-priced textbooks. It is our view that many of these options represent the single greatest path to real competition in the textbooks market, a view recently endorsed by the New York Times and examined in more depth in our recent report, Textbooks for the 21^st Century.

"We believe that in the Internet age, there’s little reason for the cost of a textbook to be so high. There are hundreds of thousands of professors able and willing to create learning content and the argument that royalties are needed is a myth; very few professors who publish ever see royalties; the incentive to publish is predominantly for reputation building, not financial enhancement.

"There are a few models for providing this content, we believe that the most viable have two key principles:

• The content is peer-reviewed or otherwise evaluated by faculty and housed on a university or faculty-sanctioned site. This is the model for Rice University Press, Connexions, California State University’s MERLOT program, and the Global Text Project.
• Second, that the content is Creative Commons licensed or equivalent. This is an alternative licensing system that content providers may use to allow their work to be more openly utilized by others with less restriction. This licensing program retains many of the most powerful publishing incentives (recognition and attribution among peers).

"This is not just about “online” vs. “paper” textbooks. The content that most of these repositories offer can be used in both digital and print only formats, depending on the proclivities of the faculty and students who use them. What is unique is that the offerings are much less expensive than traditional textbooks".

Please take a look when you have some time.

-Don

Textbook Costs in the US

Concern over the cost of textbooks in the US is heating up and is an issue that is not going to go away. Good evidence of this is the AP story story on AOL News "Tough Problem: High textbook Costs". Here's a couple of quotes from the article, by Brian Bakst:

"In Minnesota, legislators are considering more tightly regulating the textbook publishing industry and requiring professors to be more cost-conscious in choosing course materials. At least a dozen other statehouses, from California to Connecticut, are taking up the issue.

"This is the hidden cost to higher education," said Democratic Rep. Frank Moe, the Minnesota's bill sponsor, who also teaches at Bemidji State University. "Reasonable profit makes sense. But the margins they are making on these textbooks is just absurd." Another quote I like is:

"The textbook industry pulls in more than $6.5 billion a year at college bookstores, and college books which have tripled in price since 1986. The industry estimates four-year college students spend $644 annually on books; a 2005 government report put the figure at about $900 per year, but that figure includes supplies, too.

At one legislative hearing in Minnesota, student leaders displayed a shrink-wrapped bundle of materials for a single Spanish course. The tab: $193".

The whole article is worth a read. Initiatives like the Global Text Project can help solve this "tough problem".

A change of blogs

As you might expect of the descendants of Scots, we are quite keen to save money. We have moved the Global Text Project to Google's free Blogger. All the old posts have been moved and the original date of the posting noted.

-Don and Rick

Open Access and the Evil Empire (2007.02.03)

As readers of this blog well know, making intellectual property freely available over the Internet is what the Global Text Project is all about. When you look at the "open" movement, it has three major aspects: First came open source, (e.g. Linux); next came open content (e.g. Wikipedia) and, finally, open access. Open access, according to Wikipedia (naturally), means "free on-line access to digital scholarly material". You may not know this, but university library subscriptions to scholarly journals can cost many thousands of dollars. Thus, like textbooks, they are not accessible to all who might benefit from having access to them, particularly students and professors in developing countries. The Wikipedia article is quite well-done if you'd like to learn more.

Now we learn that the Association of American Publishers has hired a "pit-bull" PR firm to make the case to the public that open access is bad for us. Read the entire article in the January 24, 2007 on-line edition of Nature. According to the article, the PR firm's name is Denzenhall Resources. One of its previous clients was Jeff Skilling of Enron fame. We hope for similar success with their new client.

-Don

Computers for Ethiopia—and much more (2007.01.21)

Not surprisingly, the Global Text Project attracts many who are interested in helping their fellow global citizens. On Friday, I had the opportunity to meet Solomon Negash, one of the many fine people involved in the Global Text Project. After some 20 years in industry, Solomon is now an assistant professor in the Computer Science and Information Systems department at Kennesaw State University, which is 32 kms (20 miles) north of Atlanta.

Ethiopia, Solomon's home country, has 71 million people, a per capita income of USD160, and 95,000 computers according the to World Bank. In 2001, Solomon started the Bethany Negash Memorial Foundation, a non-profit, "to promote the diffusion of education that supports economic self-sufficiency in Africa, starting with Ethiopia."

The foundation has shipped three containers of computers to Ethiopia, a total of 1,200 computers. The main targets are schools and colleges. Solomon has instituted a cost recovery process to recoup all the costs associated with shipping the computers, including customs and VAT. He expects that this project will be self sustaining by the end of 2007.Solomon has volunteered to pilot the adoption of the Information Systems text in Ethiopia in the latter half of 2007, be the editor-in-chief for a Systems Analysis and Design text, and pilot a project for converting Ethiopian K-12 texts to the Global Text library.One can only be greatly impressed by Solomon's generosity of time, energy, and thought.

Rick

How About K-12? (2007.01.07)

Since Rick and I began talking about Global Text, we always found that people loved the idea, but frequently noted that an even greater need was for free textbooks for K-12 students, and not only in developing countries, but also in poor school districts in the US As just one example, when I described Global Text to the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning on my campus, she commented on the K-12 need in the Denver Public Schools. She said that many textbooks were badly out of date, and there are not even enough of them so that every student had one to take home at night to do their homework.

While noting the K-12 need, our ties are with the higher ed community, and since the community develops the content, we could see how we could engage the higher ed community in writing texts, but it would be harder for us to engage the K-12 community. We also noted that others are focused on the K-12 problem, both here and abroad.

Having said that, we have had conversations with potential partners in the K-12 community, who do have the requisite ties to the K-12 academic community and concern for the problem, world-wide. As one example, I had a long conversation last week with a K-12 academic administrator who is on the board of a foundation that focuses on helping K-12 schools in sub-Saharan Africa. He told me about a middle school in rural Ethiopia they helped build. One of the ways they continue to support this particular school is to round up surplus textbooks in the US and ship them to the school. While this is helpful, it has two downsides: 1) the texts are often out-of-date, and 2) the process is expensive. He could see how Global Text offers a better model: Current, high-quality texts that are free. This man has the necessary ties to the K-12 community and the ability to engage them. We left it that he will contact the school in Ethiopia to find a subject where the need is greatest, and then recruit a group of academics to create a text using the Global Text model. If this comes to fruition, it could serve as a model for extending Global Text to K-12, with their foundation perhaps buying Sony eReaders for the students. They like the Sony eReader as a potential repository for textbooks in the right locations (and so do I).


-Don