Poor incentives in educational aids

[steuard]

Today's xkcd comic raises point:

It seems awfully likely to me that graphing calculators have stagnated for some of the same reasons that textbook prices have skyrocketed. They're selected by people who don't have to pay for them, institutions tend to standardize on something and stick with it out of inertia, and their cost gets lumped in with the high cost of education (public or private).

I don't know what to do about graphing calculators (short of having everyone buy computers or something that they're likely to use ever again), but there are bound to be new possibilities in the works for textbooks. I'd think that some sort of free, "open source" textbook series could do quite well (especially if there were a reasonable way for college bookstores to print it on demand). Anyone out there know of such a thing in the physics world? (Intro physics especially.)

Comments

[jon-leonard.livejournal.com]

Well, if you were designing something useful that's calculator-like now, it'd probably do wireless, and maybe look more like an iPod touch with a numeric keypad, etc. That's pretty far from the tough-to-cheat-with design point. In terms of cost, yeah, they should probably be a lot cheaper now.

A possible path to an open textbook might be to do a chapter-length piece on something that isn't well-treated in whatever you're using for the main textbook(s). I often do page-length sheets for specific topics, but that's quite different from what a textbook should provide.