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

[invisibor.livejournal.com]

The University of Washington Math 120 Precalculus textbook is released under the GNU Free Documentation License. http://www.math.washington.edu/~m120/
It was used for many years at the high school I teach, until the district decided to standardize on a different $100 book. The students paid $5 for a physical copy (for the printing) or just used it online. It is quite a good book, I think.
The calculator problem I don't have an answer for...from a cheating aspect, from a familiarity of use aspect (for adoption), and from a cost perspective. all difficult.

[steuard.livejournal.com]

Oooh, cool. I wonder if we should look into that here...

[(Anonymous)]

The MAA has new on-line calculs text which is supposed to be pretty nice. It's not free, but it is something like $20/student, so it's pretty cheap.

As for calculators: one of the reasons the Wolfram Alpha iPhone App was originally $50 was that it made the iPhone into a very powerful graphing calculator for half the price. Now that it's $1.99, there's really no reason not to get it...