1000 Professors sign statement of intent to use open textbooks

Nicole Allen over at Make Textbooks Affordable has been doing some great work lately. The most recent example: she's enlisted the support of over 1000 faculty members at schools around the country who have signed a statement of intent to use affordable textbooks, including open textbooks, whenever they have a choice.

Read the press release here.

Read the statement and see the list of faculty members (including Prof. Marty Ross, who taught my field geology course at NU) here.

Keep an eye on this space for more news about Textbook Revolution and Make Textbooks Affordable.

House Passes Legislation to Make Textbooks Affordable

I know this blog's been a bit quiet lately, but things are about to get much busier. We've had some great news on two fronts. First, Textbook Revolution, the sibling site to the Stingy Scholar, is about to get a significant makeover in the coming weeks. Our fellow open education advocate and coder-extraordinaire Joshua Gay has been hard at work for several months building a wiki-based version of the site that will let students, professors, and anyone else come in and add to our huge list of free books. They'll also be able to add reviews and tags. I think the result will be a much better site that really encourages professors to start adopting free textbooks en masse.

The second piece of news is even more exciting. I heard today from Nicole Allen, director of the Student PIRGs' campaign for affordable textbooks at http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.com/, that the U.S. House of Representatives has just passed a very important piece of legislation to help bring transparency to the textbook market. Nicole asked me to post the following guest blog here at Stingy to help spread the word. What follows are her words on why this bill is so big. Make sure to tell your Senators that they should include this legislation in the final bill!

Nicole says:

Everyone knows that textbook prices are out of control: the average student spends about $900 a year, and prices are only going up. Making textbooks affordable is an important part of making higher education affordable. That's why new legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives today will bring down the cost of textbooks for millions of students.

The College Opportunity and Affordability Act (H.R. 4137) includes three critical provisions to help students deal with textbook prices. First, it requires publishers to tell faculty the price of textbooks when professors are choosing books for their classes. Publishers often withhold prices from professors, hoping that cost won't factor into their decisions - and students end up paying the price. If publishers put price on the table, professors can consider the cost to students when selecting textbooks.

Second, the bill makes publishers sell the parts of bundled textbooks separately. No more shrink wrapped packaging preventing you from just buying the textbook without the CDs, workbooks and online passcodes - or from buying a supplement without a whole new textbook! Eliminating unnecessary bells and whistles will ensure that students can buy what they need, not what they don't.

Third, the bill encourages colleges to give students course booklists the semester before the class starts so they can shop around and look for better deals. Students can usually track down lower prices and used textbooks online, but they need to know in advance which books to look for. Otherwise, they're locked into buying from the bookstore.

The House bill is a huge win for students. It helps ease the burden of textbook costs for students now, and it paves the way for more low-cost and open-access textbooks to enter the market. When the House meets with the Senate to combine their two education bills, the Senate should make sure to retain these critical textbook provisions to help students make college more affordable.

eduFire - A New Way to Learn Languages...and More

A while back when Wynn asked me to contribute to The Stingy Scholar I told him that I wasn't sure of what I could commit over the next year. Little did I know... In addition to running LearnOutLoud.com I became increasingly convinced over the last year and a half that there was a big opportunity to bring some massive (and healthy!) disruption to the education industry. While there is a lot of cool stuff going on in the space it seemed like there was something missing.

What we're soon launching at eduFire.com (BTW, the name comes from the Yeats quote "Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire") is the first very small step in what might prove to be a long journey. The goal is to empower hundreds of thousands of people to make a living teaching people what they are most passionate about over the web. We're starting with foreign language training which according to some estimates is a $20 billion market globally.

We'll be launching the main service in a few weeks or so but in the meantime we've put up a teaser blog at blog.edufire.com that contains hundreds of free videos, articles and podcasts to help you learn a foreign language. While we only have a few hundred resources up right now we'll be taking that to a few thousand in the next month.

Our ultimate goal is to give you access to the best teachers independent of geography. It seems really interesting that since the beginning to time people have learned from teachers who were in close physical proximity. Through technology that has changed in the last decade but that's about to change radically in the coming decade. We're hoping to be a part of that change. I'd love to hear any comments you might have about how that can best be accomplished.

Thanks to Wynn and the gang for letting me pop in from time to time and may 2008 be your most learning-filled year yet!

Top 80 Charities for Open Source and Open Access Advocates

The lovely Amy Quinn sent me a link to this AWESOME OA/OS resource. You should go right this very second and check out all the open goodness!

Happy New Year (btw)...this is our first post of the NEW YEAR!

May our lives be full of easy and free sweet tools!

Open Source Living

Many thanks to Paul Hamilton for linking me up to Open Source Living! It is a mega good site with all sorts of goodies (like Yatzee! Wee!) The beauty is that there are goodies for all y'all (PC/Mac/Linux), and the whole site is completely compliant with all the rules about open source stuff. Oh, there isn't a space designated specifically for education, but different programs are tagged as educational. So, have fun digging!!!

Check it out!

The FREE screencapturing Kwout!

I ran across this AWESOME free tool called Kwout that allows you to quote a web page. It is free and no downloads. Here it was it looks like:

Beth's Second Life via kwout

Watch This

Regrets

iTalki

A music video from Corenell vs. Lisa Marie. But you didn't really care, do you?

The whole online language learning community has been improving massively over the past year. Over at Wide Open, I pointed out a couple neat sites such as Open Mango, Live Mocha and Lingro. Check these all out if you haven't, cause they're great.

iTalki is the latest addition to the group. While not all that different from the other language learning communities, the site benefits from a nice design. An excellent addition as well is the shared resources, including language books, essays etc. from around the web.

As the old adage goes, you don't have to do something new, just something better.

Mininova's Featured Content

Mininova, the great torrent site, has rolled-out a new feature called "Featured Content". Through this option, artists can take advantage of the site's popularity to distribute or promote original materials. Many historical and educational materials are also popping-up here.

For instance, check out this biography on Coney Island, Nosferatu, The Man Who Knew Too Much, TedTalks and French Maid TV.

More Merry Christmas

Nothing says Christmas like Wham! Some more great links:

Mashable's Christmas Toolbox
Ugly Christmas Lights
DIY Photo ornaments in 15 minutes
DJ Riko Christmas Mixes

Merry Christmas!

Just when I finally got this out of my head, the internet comes around and messes things up for me. Here's a great list of dozens of other Christmas related videos.

Drooling over Web 2.0

I need to tell Wynn that I can't possibly write on this blog for at least a month. I won't have time because I fell in love with an AWESOME blog written by Larry Ferlazzo.

He posted a list about the BEST web 2.0 apps for education. What is AWESOME is that this site includes stuff that is fresh and new (read: not the same old, same old).

The blog is FULL (like 8000 links or so) of cool web applications and games and other yummy uber goodies. 99.5% of the programs are FREE, and there are wicked link backs to OTHER sites.

So, enough reading here....go THERE!

Image Source

Two Hip Tools

So, I am drooling...

TWO NEW TOOLS...okay...maybe they aren't all that new, but they are new to me.

Screencasting is just awesome for students.

Image what students can do if they can take class home with them!

First Stop: Screencast-o-matic

Second Stop (thanks to Vicki Davis for the heads up): Jing

Wicked cool stuff!!!

Grab 50 More Lives

So, you thought for first life was a pain in the arse?

Sign up for these 50.

Zap Reader

Tired of chasing your finger along the page? Try zap-reader to speed read effortlessly. Paste text of interest to zip along at the pace of your liking.

Not a new concept, but handy and well done with lots of speed and formating options. The plug-in "tools", however, are where the real power comes in. Try out the wikipedia firefox plug-in or the bloglines button. Now you're zapping along....

Drooling Over Webware

I am sure this is listed on here somewhere, but, ok, I am a nerd, and I am drooling over the site as we speak.

WebWare 100

Got Cooties?

OMG!

What a riot...

Wicked Web 2.0 Tutorials

The California School Library Association has a WICKED WICKED WICKED cool site that teaches peeps how to use a variety of Web 2.0 tools. There are 23 tutorials and you self pace right on through them.

Go here and start yer learning!

Back for Good

Bet you're all tired of the cheeky "Good Morning Campers" post. I know I am.

Don't know if any has been paying attention, but over the past two months I've been regularly posting on an OEDB as a paid writer. The site's been sold and the new owners aren't interested in continuing the "Wide Open" blog.

I wish the best to the OEDB guys and I'm glad I was a part of it, however briefly. I haven't had much time for blogging recently and being forced/incentivated helped me to get a rhythm going and to remember that I like to do it. I hope to do some more posts back here on Stingy Scholar in the future.

'Cause you know, it's not about the money...it's about the music. All those chicks and parties and blow, dude, that was just keeping us from focusing on the m-u-u-sic....

But seriously, if you want to pay me, drop me a line at wynnwilliamson at gmail dot com. I'm just a whore for the money.